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Free online gradebook LearnBoost has announced its plans to crowdsource translation of its app. The decision makes sense as the startup's gradebook has already been adopted by teachers in schools in over 20 countries, and many have requested native language support. "Our product's engagement levels have been through the roof," says co-founder Thianh Lu, "but we knew that this approach would work when we received countless emails from users preemptively offering to translate our product for free."

The world's largest Internet retailer Amazon.com is known for many things besides shopping - Kindle eBook readers, for example, or its cloud computing infrastructure known as Amazon Web Services - but Amazon as a movie studio? That one seemed to come out of left field, didn't it?

Well, it's true - kind of. Amazon is indeed getting into the movie-making business with the launch of a new portal called Amazon Studios, but it's not a traditional studio by any means.

When it comes to saving money at an early-stage startup, labor is one of the most difficult areas to penny pinch. If you care deeply about your product and your idea, it's hard to not want to go out and hire the very best employees and contractors, but this isn't always in the budget of a new venture.

CrowdFlower is one way startups can save some dough by leveraging labor-on-demand services for things like data entry and content moderation. As of Monday, startups using the platform can not only save cash, but can now also apply to receive as much as $10,000 of investment from Dave McClure's 500 Startups seed fund.

Back in May, we mentioned that Boulder startup Trada - a crowdsourced solution for creating keyword-based pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns - had introduced support for Microsoft's Bing search engine. Today, Trada is getting a huge leg-up from Bing's competition as Google Ventures has invested over $4 million, leading the company's latest round of funding. Joining Google in the Series C round is Foundry Group, whose $1.5M investment mark's the Bouler firms third investment with Trada.

A site called "Web Applications" (beta) is the newest addition to the Stack Exchange network, a service that powers popular tech Q&A sites including StackOverflow, ServerFault, SuperUser.com and StackApps. Like the others before it, the new site uses the same back-end framework to create a simple user interface where people can post questions and answers, this time about Web applications. For example: How do you export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?

But "Web Applications" is just the first of many new StackOverflow-like sites on the horizon, and surprisingly, the next sites to launch may not be tech-focused at all.

One of the most impressive benefits of the real-time Web is its ability to allow people to instantly collaborate on massive global projects from the comfort of their own home. Between editing articles on Wikipedia and helping rescuers locate evidence of a downed aircraft in dense woodland areas, there is no shortage of ways to collaborate on the Web. It is in this spirit of crowdsourcing that YouTube is launching a new project, "Life in a Day," which it hopes will tell the story of a single day on Earth.

Though it draws divided opinions from the design community, crowdsourced creative services market crowdSPRING has maintained a sizable user base of designers and writers. The site allows users to submit entries for sponsored competitions of creative tasks, such as logo and website design, or copywriting. Today the site announced the passing of a significant milestone in its two-year history as over one million user entries have been submitted to the site.

Since we broke the story about the Diaspora Project last week, the plans for an open source, distributed alternative to Facebook has seen widespread press. But just as importantly, funding for the undertaking has skyrocketed.

Salesforce.com is acquiring Jigsaw for $142 million in a deal that exemplifies how crowdsourcing has entered the business world.

Sugar CRM also uses Jigsaw for business directory information. The deal should cast a shadow on that relationship. Sugar CRM and Salesfore.com compete in the social CRM market. Salesforce.coms says the Jigsaw service will continue to be available on other platforms besides its own.

Well would ya look at that? It's April already! The first quarter of 2010 is in the books and we are (hopefully) through all the April fools antics. In this week's ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup, we talk about how MBAs and entrepreneurship may not mix as well as they hope, how some of the best companies using freemium models have made them work, and how to brainstorm your next big idea by letting your creative beast come out and play. We also learned about a new freelance marketplace started by TechStars' Andrew Hyde, as well as a BizSpark-like program being created by IBM.