Open Technologist

Crowdsourcing Example – People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsourcing is a topic that has gained popularity in the last few years with companies such as InnoCentive, CrowdSpring and Amazon Mechanical Turk providing platforms for companies to engage with community members to provide innovative solutions which is why I have decided that crowdsourcing will be my topic for “My half time pep talk for 2009". Crowdsourcing as defined by Jeff Howe is “the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it...

MXit Releases App for iPhone – Download

MXit Lifestyle have released an iPhone version of its popular instant messenger application. MXit had previously only been available on Java enabled phones while a PC client is also available. iPhone users who would like to download the app can click here. MXit claims to have a community of over 12 million users, about 17 million log-ons per day and over 250 million messages sent and receive per day. It was recenty revealed that MXit is teaming up with Nokia and the South African...

Innovation – My Half Time Pep Talk for 2009

The Board of Innovation are inviting bloggers to partake in the “My half time pep talk for 2009″ blog action. This will take part during the 24 hours of Innovation event. The idea is for bloggers to share their views about what has happened so far during 2009 about innovation. Bloggers that take part will be allocated a time slot to publish a blog post within a 24 hour time frame. I will be publishing a blog post sharing my views about a topic regarding innovation. For further...

5 Crowdsourcing Websites

Crowdsourcing is a business practice that has become popular in the last few years. Since the term was coined by Jeff Howe author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business a number of valuable resources have appeared on the net. Below is a list of websites that provide valuable information about crowdsourcing that I regularly scan: Crowdsourcing - Jeff Howe - Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" and published a book about the topic. The blog covers...

Grameen Foundation Statistics – Microfinance

On Blog Action Day I blogged about how the Grameen Foundation is using open source software to assist there needs to rid the world of poverty. I just finished Jeff Howe's book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business and he provides further statistics about the Grameen Bank: The concept of micro-lending started 1976 with a loan of  $27 to 42 villagers The Grameen Bank was started 7 years later The Grameen Bank became self-sustainable by 1995 67% of...

Crowdsourcing Definition by Jeff Howe

A while back I blogged about how Facebook used crowdsourcing to translate Facebook into other languages and mentioned that the term "crowdsourcing" was coined by Jeff Howe author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. I recently came accross this video from Jeff giving a brief overview of what crowdsourcing is...

Al Jazeera’s Creative Commons Repository For TV

The Al Jazeera Network has released video footage under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license as part of its creative commons repository. According to the conditions of the license you are allowed to copy, distribute and adapt the work as long as the work is attributed as specified by the licensor but does not reflect that they endorse your use of the work. The repository currently only has footage of the War in Gaza. Al Jazeera asserts that they are the first news broadcaster...

People Participation in Mass Collaboration Projects

One of the most prominent examples of mass collaboration is Wikipedia. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the 8th most visited website in the world. Playing a role in Wikipedia's high ranking is the up-to-date information provided by the community of contributors. The contributors provide the  content and ultimately what why visitors turn to Wikipedia for knowledge. Therefore, the importance of having a community of willing contributors is essential to the livelihood of any mass collaboration...

Linux History- Where it all started

In 1991, Linus Torvalds decided to share code that he had created for an operating system which would later become known as Linux, in the hope of getting feedback from others on how he could improve it. I came across the original email that Linus sent and was amazed by the modesty : Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to...

Charter For Compassion – Collaborating to Highlight What Religions Share

Since I started this blog I have focused on a few mass collaboration projects happening with the aid of technology. A new project called the Charter for Compassion is a collaboration project recently started with religion being the central theme. It is the TED prize wish of Karen Armstrong. The aim of the  Charter for Compassion is 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...