ReadWriteWeb

"We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it's illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense."

That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alum who are trying to garner support for the "Democratizing Access to Capital Act" (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund startups. Launched yesterday with the hopes of getting $100,000 from 100 pledges, the guys behind WeFunder have already seen near $3 million in promised funds from more than a 1000 supporters if the Senate passes the bill.

We have written numerous articles about crowdfunding, the soliciting of funds from the public using sites such as KickStarter. The unfortunately named Gplus community posted this infographic, created by the Garson Lehrman Group, that looks at the major crowdfunding sites and their current statistics, as well as the pros and cons of this emerging marketplace.

Google has just announced the latest class of countries to graduate from Google Map Maker and become full-fledged citizens of Google Maps. Map Maker allows "citizen cartographers" to add details like little roads, businesses and geographic features to parts of the world that Google's staff can't easily reach.

Today's announcement incorporates community contributions from a bunch of new countries, territories, and even an entire continents into the live Google map. The graduates are: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.

The most critical missing piece of Salesforce.com's emerging cloud service last year was filled with the acquisition of Jigsaw, a vast repository of crowdsourced data on companies and their employees. Keeping Microsoft's hands off of Jigsaw prevented it from possibly owning another majority stake in an emerging market - in this case, CRM.

But among the most promoted pieces of Salesforce's buildout strategy last August at its annual conference came not from the crowd at large, but from the research firm of Dun & Bradstreet. It promised to help Salesforce build Data.com into a service that fills all the little gaps that crowdsourcing leaves behind. Now, D&B is building out in a new direction, with a Web services API called D&B Direct.

Tomorrow, the State of Alaska is set to release over 24,000 of Sarah Palin's emails, "covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska." The New York Times is hoping that its readers will pitch in and help them filter this vast cache of new data on the former governor and erstwhile vice presidential candidate. Derek Willis announced the project on the Times's Caucus blog.

"We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate."

The largest telescope ever to exist (on this planet anyway) is going to be the Square Kilometre Array. The SKA will cost about $2.1 billion to construct. Australia and South Africa are bidding on the project. What may give Australia an edge is the way they intend to handle the massive computer processing and storage demands of the array. Crowdsourcing.

The crowdsourced computing initiative which those behind the Australia bid have put together will leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.

Google Map Maker opened up to U.S. users today, allowing anyone to submit updates, revisions and additional information to the company's online mapping service. The tool was originally designed for users in other countries without access to the mapping resources we have stateside. Says Google, prior to the launch of Map Maker, only 15% of the world's population had detailed access to online maps of their neighborhoods, but now, citizen cartographers in 183 countries and regions have created maps of the places they live. Today, 30% of users people worldwide have access to online maps, thanks to Map Maker.

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

Hallmark spends some $60 million a year on designs for its greeting cards, and yet - with apologies to those artists - it can still be quite a challenge to find the just the right card. Frankly, a lot of cards are ugly. They're tacky. They're sappy.

So Y Combinator alum Chirply is taking on the greeting card industry by crowdsourcing stationery designs. Chirply had its soft launch a few weeks ago, soliciting designs and voting, and the startup is now ready to open its doors to the retail business.

If you're a TV actor, you have the Emmy Awards. If you're a journalist, you have the Pulitzer Prize. But if you're a citizen reporter, what do you have? Nothing, until now.

CNN announced today that it was launching the CNN iReport Awards "to honor the best examples of participatory journalism in 2010."

The events in Egypt over the past few weeks have highlighted the important role that Twitter is taking in communicating and coordinating events of global significance. Indeed, over 70% of Twitter users come from outside the United States. And while English has been the service's dominant language, the company does offer Twitter in six other languages: French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

In order to help make Twitter more accessible to this growing global user-base, the company has just announced the Twitter Translation Center, an effort to crowdsource translations so that Twitter can quickly launch in additional languages.