South African singer Verity Price found it hard to get a recording contract in South Africa. As featured on Carte Blanche, music producer Peter Lacey explained that the market for English speaking music in South Africa is less than 500 000 people and this includes international artists. A successful record in South Africa is considered selling 5 000 units. Besides releasing an album there is the added tasks of getting radio stations to play the music and getting retailers to sell the album.

With a mamoth task of convining record companies to give her a recording contract, Vertity took on a novel approach to getting her album funded. A website along with a blog was setup and people were asked to purchase her album before she recorded it. The online campaign included getting bloggers to write about it, MySpace and Facebook were also used to garner support with all these websites linking back to her website.

An added incentive for those who bought the album was that they got to vote which songs she recorded and their names were listed on her website. They also recieved a limited addition album. Verity managed to sell 2 000 albums before it was released and it covered all her costs. The album was released without any debt associated with it and it contributed nearly R30 000 to charity. What Verity managed to do is known as crowfunding. Crowdfunding is one of the models of crowdsourcing as described in Jeff Howe’s book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Wikipedia defines crowdfunding as:

collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.

In the case of Verity the crowd replaced the need for a record company to provide funding. Crowdfunding reduces the reliance on funding institutions to provide capital. Verity also introduced a way for the crowd to participate by voting which songs appeared on the album. The crowd were not just given the final product they had an opportunity to participate in the creation process.

The MXit Blackberry application allows users to send messages at no cost over the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) network (Vodacom users). The application can be downloaded from the Blackberry app store or just point your Blackberry’s browser to MXit’s wap site www.mxit.com/wap.

Some the features include:

• Changing of language within the app
• Mood and presence is saved and is not lost when log out
• The chat screen displays the time
• A template farewell message is can be sent to the contacts you are chatting to when you log out
• SMS referrals (Your service provider will charge you standard SMS rates)

A crowdsourcing platform allows a organization to collaborate with a community to provide solutions to a project. When organizations decide on crowdsourcing a project they can either attempt to attract the crowd themselves, creating their own platform in the process, or make use of an existing crowdsourcing platform with an established community.

The main difference is that an exisiting platorm will have an established community. Opting to create your own platform will require investment in attracting and establishing a community. Examples of crowdsourcing platforms include:

• InnoCentive

A platform with a community of over 200,000 members. InnCentive posts a wide range of problems from organizations in  areas such as engineering, computer science, chemistry, life sciences and business

• TopCoder

A platform with a community of over 247, 000 members. TopCoder posts computer programming problems from organizations in the form of competitions. The community are then asked to design, develop and test the software developed in the competitions. More information can be found here.

• Amazon Mechanical Turk

• A platform with a community of over 100, 000 members. Allows anybody to post tasks that need to be completed like writing product descriptions or finding broken links on a website.

Deciding on whether to create your own platform or use an existing platform depends on the circumstance. Although creating your own platform will require advertising in attracting people to be apart of the community it also means you will have exclusive use of the community. Pepsi did this with a campaign that allowed people to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners received a $10,000 prize with their design been featured on Pepsi cans. This was also seen as a marketing campaign by Pepsi.

Opting to make use of existing platform means that you have an established community so the chances of reaching a wide audience are likely. These platforms have experience in running successful crowdsourcing projects so there is no experimenting on trying to make the project succeed.

Below is a list of great books covering the topic of crowdsourcing. Click on the images for further info.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

We-Think

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice)

MXit Lifestyle have released a new instant messenger client for the PC. This is in addition to its existing plugin for Pidgin. MXit explains thats it has been specifically designed for the Windows environment making it faster and more efficient. Some of the features include:

• Finding contacts in a search bar
• Saving of chats (already a feature in Pidgin)
• Emoticon support
• Drag and drop file sharing
• Facebook status integration
• multiMX support
• Audible alerts

MXit for PC can be downloaded here.

Last year Facebook turned to crowdsourcing to translate Facebook into other languages with great success. Latest statistics provided by Facebook show that over 300,000 people have since participated in the translation process making Facebook available in more than 70 languages.

Facebook have now launched a system that rewards translators who will receive special icons when they reach certain milestones in the Translation application in order to highlight recognition. The awards are grouped in three categories:

• Voting Participation
• Words Published
• Translations Published

The are also various levels for the categories which are based on frequency and accuracy with regard to translating words and voting for the best translation.

A common mistake that companies make when opting for a crowdsourcing model to complete a project is that they forget to provide a rewards system. In a previous blog post “People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms” I highlighted direct and indirect benefits of crowdsourcing for the community that are essential to the model’s success. Facebook have provided a key indirect benefit which is recognition amongst peers. Facebook’s success with this crowdsourcing project will continue to evolve and with its ever expanding userbase which has now exceeded 350 million users. Could Facebook be offering rewards via financial compensation next?

Last year I blogged about the Charter for Compassion, the TED prize wish of Karen Armstrong. The aim of the Charter for Compassion was to build a peaceful and congruent world by bringing together the voices of people from all religions and highlight that all faiths share the principle of compassion. An open call was made for people from different faiths to contribute to the charter.

This open call and collaborative effort drew upon  thousands of people from over 100 countries in a six week period. Over 150 000 visitors commented on the submissions. The Council of Conscience then sorted through the contributions in order to complete the charter. The charter has been released and can viewed on the Charter for Compassion website.

The website also provides various resources to learn about other faiths and spread the word about the charter. There are various talks on compassion that can be viewed and there are various ways to participate online and offline. Now that the charter has been completed a key element is to spread the word about the charter, so participate by finding different ways to do this on the Charter for Compassion website. A video about the Charter can be viewed below.

If twitter is blocked from your work or school, there are various ways to circumnavigate the problem. However, clever system administrators always stay ahead and try and play catchup to these workarounds.

The latest method I have found makes use of iGoogle and adding a widget called TwitterGadget. It even has integration for Gmail and works perfectly.  As long as the TwitterGadget website is not blocked this method should work. If all else fails try out psiphon which is an Internet censorship solution which is a bit more difficult to implement.

Having been a long time Firefox user (and sick of it crashing) I decided to try out Safari out of curiosity.  While I was not that impressed by Safari I was by a extension called safari140. This extension allows the user to post the current article been rendered by the Safari directly to twitter to share with your followers.

After switching back to Firefox I could not find a plugin with this functionality. So I decided to write my own Firefox add-on. The add-on allows the user to post the browser URL to twitter. It includes a URL shortener. It can be downloaded here. The add-on does the following:

• Gets the URL from the browser/tab window
• Uses bit.ly to shorten the URL
• Opens up www.twitter.com in a new browser window and populates the twitter status box with the web page’s title and shortned URL

Once installed click on “Tools” and then “Post to Twitter”. This is the first version and does not mimic the exact functionality of safari140 as it allows the user to post to their twitter account without opening up www.twitter.com. This functionality will be added in a later release. Follow me on twitter: @sdhansay.

MXit users can now make use of its services on a Mac and PC. A vast majority of its users make use of the service via mobile phones. MXit Lifestyle have released Adium and Pidgin plugins and can be downloaded. Adium and Pidgin are both multi-platform instant messenger clients. This means that you can chat using other instant messenger services while using MXit at the same time. I have been using the Adium version for the past week and am happy to say it has been working great. The Adium version does have limitations including:

• Transferring files between users
• Clickable links (when talking to services)
• Registering
• MultiMX
• HTTP protocol support