Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

Wisdom of Patrick

"Knowledge cannot replace friendship. I'd rather be an idiot than lose you."
- Patrick to Spongebob

5 Creative Uses for Crowdsourcing

When Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article his examples were mainly “labor markets for specialized talents,” like iStockphoto, iFilm, and InnoCentive. But the business model of outsourcing to the crowd has grown (as has Howe’s article — he publisheda book on the topic in 2008). As open-source software developers learned long ago, asking a pool of people to create something can be faster, cheaper, and more accurate than putting a project in the hands of individuals. These five start-ups are doing just that by using crowdsourcing in creative ways.

1. Maps and Traffic Information – Waze
2. Executive Recruiting –NotchUp
3. Web Usability Testing –UserTesting.com  & Feedback Army
4. Mutual Fund Management –Marketocracy
5. Fashion Design – Fashion Stake
source: mashable

America Speaking Out - How GOP tries to communicate via net

America deserves a Congress that respects the priorities of the people.
Unfortunately, Washington hasn't been listening. Let's change that.
America Speaking Out is your opportunity to change the way Congress
works by proposing ideas for a new policy agenda.

Link: americaspeakingout

How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media

The perception of the U.S. abroad varies widely, and is subject to
many forces, including world events, media coverage, policy changes, and
presidential administrations. In response, the U.S. State Department,
America’s public relations branch, has been charged with the difficult
task of engaging in the dialogue surrounding the controversial policies
discussed in almost every corner of the world.Social media has
proven to be a valuable tool in this regard, and the State Department
has made impressive gains in their mission to turn conflict into
conversation. Cabinet officials, foreign dignitaries, and embassies are
experimenting with ways to inject America’s voice into the global
chatter. Some of their experiments are paying dividends that few
expected. Here’s a look at some of these efforts.

Link: Mashable

Five new business ideas for urban gardening http://ping.fm/x3LvY

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously.

Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

Quirky Crowdsources Your Product Ideas into Reality

Name: Quirky

Quick
Pitch: Quirky is a social product development company founded
in June 2009 by 23-year-old entrepreneur Ben Kaufman.

Genius
Idea: At its core, Quirky builds consumer products. It sells cable
organizers, a modular spatula system, and double-sided USB sticks. It’s how they create and
develop their products that really makes them stand out, though.

Quirky
describes itself as a “social product development company.” It
essentially crowdsources product ideas and then places them at the mercy
of Quirky’s thousands of users. The community votes on which ones they
want to develop and then adds its input on things such as product
aesthetics, design, logo, and even its name. The best ideas are then
taken by Quirky’s team of engineers and designers and turned into 3D
renderings.

The next step is the most important one: the product
is then placed on pre-sale, where anyone can buy the product. However,
Quirky will only sell something if it hits a minimum number of sale
commitments (usually under a thousand). Once that number is reached,
the product is made and person who submitted the original idea gets a
piece of the revenue pie.

There are a few things to know before
you go off designing tons of products for Quirky. First, it costs $99
to submit an idea. Second, even if your product is selected by the
community, it doesn’t mean it will become a major hit. Finally, many
products on Quirky still have yet to hit their minimum purchase
requirement, and some of the products on sale on the site aren’t cheap.

Quirky
was founded by Ben Kaufman, who is the creator of Mophie,
the popular iPhone and iPod accessory company, so it has some serious
brainpower behind the company. You can learn more about the Quirky
process here.

Google Power Meter

Google PowerMeter is a free energy monitoring tool that helps you save
energy and money. Using energy information provided by utility smart
meters and energy monitoring devices, Google PowerMeter enables you to
view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online.

Augmented reality guru Bruce Sterling shared a fascinating video on his Wired.com blog Beyond the Beyond today that shows a developer building an AR application without any programming language in just shy of five minutes. Using the Mac-based visual design app Quartz Composer and few additional plugins, the developer (apparently a Russian named Vladmir, according to his YouTube account) quickly assembles the application using Quartz's visual Yahoo Pipes-like interface.

The video embedded above is pretty easy to follow despite being a screencast of a complex design application. The developer simply drags and drops a few elements onto the screen to initialize the video input device, recognize a marker, and incorporate a 3D model of a teapot. After connecting a few dots and tweaking some settings, we see the teapot appearing on an AR marker via the developer's webcam.

The experience itself is not the impressive thing - fans of AR have seen webcams place objects on black and white makers for a while now. What is interesting about this video is how quickly and easily the plugins for Quartz made what is normally a fairly complex process of programming an AR app.

This application is an innovative implementation of the ARToolKit, a free and open-source library for creating AR apps created in 1999. Just as SDKs for platforms like the iPhone make mobile app development much easier, these types of plugins for visual design tools will make the development of AR apps quick and easy. The easier (and cheaper) it is to develop AR applications, the faster the technology will grow and the more exposure it will receive in the public eye.

Source: readwriteweb

Code-Free Augmented Reality in Under 5 Minutes [VIDEO]

MIT researchers develop the most fabulous gesture control technique yet

When looking for a cheap, reliable way to track
gestures, Robert Wang and Jovan Popovic of MIT's Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory came upon this notion: why not
paint the operator's hands (or better yet, his Lycra gloves) in a manner
that will allow the computer to differentiate between different parts
of the hand, and differentiate between the hand and the background?
Starting with something that Howie Mandel might have worn in the 80s,
the researchers are able to use a simple webcam to track the hands'
locations and gestures -- with relatively little lag. The glove itself
is split into twenty patches made up of ten different colors, and while
there's no telling when this technology will be available for consumers,
something tells us that when it does become available it'll be very
hard not to notice.

Source: Engadget

In New York, a Tech Incubator Becomes a Hub of Collaboration

 In 2008, before most people knew what a tweet was, Iain Dodsworth, a
programmer in London, cobbled together a software tool that reorganized
his jumbled Twitter  stream into neat columns. He named it TweetDeck.

Within a few months, it gained the kind of momentum most entrepreneurs
only dream about. Tech bloggers praised it, and users flocked to it.
Ashton Kutcher posted a video online showing him and his wife, Demi Moore,
using the service.

It wasn’t long before inquiries from investors began pouring in. “It was fairly scary,” he said. “I was a one-man company being thrown offers left, right and center from people I didn’t know.”

But then Mr. Dodsworth received a message from a company he did recognize: Betaworks, a New York City technology firm known for its eye for emerging Web services.

“Money is nice, but I actually needed expertise more than anything else,” he said. “Betaworks had a track record in this field back when no one had a track record in this field.”

In the two years since then, Betaworks has become prominent in New York technology circles for helping entrepreneurs fine-tune and expand their companies. The company has guided some entrepreneurs to lucrative sales and helped others raise cash from notable New York and Silicon Valley investment firms.

Such incubators are familiar in more established tech hubs. Silicon Valley, for example, has the technology incubator Y Combinator, and Pasadena has Idealab.

Source : NYT

Trip Journal Turns Your Smartphone Into the Ultimate Trip Scrapbook

Name: Trip Journal

Quick Pitch: Real-time travel sharing through Facebook (Facebook) & Smartphone GPS – Broadcast photos and videos live from your vacation!

Genius Idea: Trip Journal is a mobile app for iPhone (iPhone) and Android (Android) that lets you capture photos, video and route marks of your vacation as it happens. You can then share your trip with your friends and family via Facebook, Flickr (Flickr) and Twitter (Twitter).

Trip Journal 5.0 has just been released for iPhone and Android, and it adds full Facebook support for you to export your trip, your photos and your route to your friends. Your friends can then comment on your trip in your Facebook stream and also make comments to items in your Trip Journal directly.

Trip Journal is a really great app for users who might be traveling abroad or covering lots of area because it uses your phone’s built-in GPS to give your photos and places a location and marker on an interactive map. That map, which can even be exported to Google Earth (Google Earth), can act as a running log of your trip. You can go back later and add tags, descriptions or notes to the images, but everything associated with your trip is kept in one easy-to-access and attractive place.

One of the things that really impresses us about Trip Journal is its design. The app looks beautiful on both iPhone and Android. In fact, this is easily one of the best-looking Android apps we’ve ever seen.

What’s also great is that when you export your trip to Facebook or Google Earth or upload videos to YouTube (YouTube), the overall look and feel of Trip Journal can become a part of those services. In other words, your friends following along on Facebook get the same sort of vintage-scrapbook feel as you do in the app.

The app is $0.99 for iPhone and $2.99 for Android. If you’re planning on a vacation this summer and want a way to chronicle and share your adventure, you might want to give Trip Journal a try.

Source: Mashable

Ray Kurzweil: A university for the coming singularity [TED]

5 Surprising Social Media Business Success Stories

Chances are on social media. Your local restaurant is blogging, your grocery store
is on Twitter — even your favorite candy is on Facebook. Companies in mainstream, consumer-facing industries are all over social media.

But how about other businesses? Manufacturers? B2B service providers? Equine dentists? Are they experimenting with social media?

You bet. Here are five examples, all at different stages of their experiments, and all indicating the breadth of business use of social media.

Source: Mashable