The New York City-based company develops products like flexible power plugs and kitchen gadgets that are suggested by its community and refined by contributors and in-house experts. (I have a couple at home, including a bobble toothbrush stand.) It sells the products online and in stores like Target and shares revenue with the contributors.

Quirky has made 200 products in the past three years, and it told the Wall Street Journal it expects $20 million in revenue this year, with more than a hundred contributors making tens of thousands of dollars in royalties.

Quirky fits nicely with the current boom of crowdfunded and start-up hardware, but the company puts much more structure and support around the creation process than open platforms like Kickstarter.

Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz and Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins are joining Quirky’s board of directors.

Lasting the month of September, “Wiki Loves Monuments 2012” is “expected to be the largest photo contest in the world by a wide margin,” according to the Wikimedia Foundation.

About 25,000 images have been uploaded since the contest kicked off on Saturday.

This is the third year of the competition, though the first was only in the Netherlands, and the second in Europe.

Last year, 5,000 volunteers uploaded 168,000 photos. Perhaps most excitingly for the project, 80 percent of the contestants had never contributed to Wikipedia before.

This year, 30 countries are participating, including the U.S. for the first time. Each country’s winner will compete for the international grand prize of a trip to Wikimania in Hong Kong next year.

To help inspire and solicit uploads, Wikimedia built an Android app that maps nearby monuments and accepts contest entries.

Now, a nonprofit news site is pulling back the curtain on how the campaigns use different forms of the same email to ask for juuuuust the right amount.

ProPublica’s Message Machine is an eye-opening experiment in crowdsourced journalism. Its algorithm takes in emails users have received from political campaigns and committees, and spits out answers to two interesting questions: How many versions of that same email were sent out, and why?

After all, we aren’t just voters anymore — we’re customers.

For decades, political campaigns have collected and used data about potential supporters to target their efforts toward specific areas and demographic groups. But since 2000, reliance on things like targeted emails and online voter databases has become the new normal.

As the New York Times Magazine’s Jon Gertner noted in 2004:

… someone who appears nonpartisan, someone who might even think of himself as nonpartisan, may nevertheless have a political DNA that the parties will be able to decode.

So, the Message Machine will work in the opposite direction — matching up users’ “political DNA” (i.e., demographic info, which they’ll have to provide) with the one email they’ve received. Then, it will show how that email is different from similar emails sent to people with different DNA.

Previously, ProPublica had asked readers to forward the emails they received from any and all political campaigns to emails@messagemachine.propublica.org. But the (admittedly cool) products, like “You Probably Don’t Know Janet” emerged long after the original emails had dropped off most peoples’ inboxes.

Web developer Jeff Larson calls the new Message Machine a “living news app,” since it will have answers in “semi-real time,” provided that it has received enough similar emails to figure out a trend.

In its first few months (without the real-time functionality launching today), the Message Machine’s users submitted about 9,000 emails, Larson said. But about a third of them aren’t usable, because they come from local or state elections, and the Machine doesn’t have enough examples to look at.

One of the advantages to the “living news app,” though, is that that can easily change.

“If there is a hot race, there are a lot of emails and it looks like there’s a lot of targeting going on, we’ll include that in the app,” Larson said.

His new company, Duolingo, teaches people how to speak languages by reading, writing, speaking and listening to translations of Web content. The byproduct of that activity, if all goes well, will be a fast and accurate human-powered translation engine.

By contrast, reCAPTCHA digitizes books word by word when Web users are asked to prove they are humans and not bots. Participants get value out of unlocking Web sites, but they’re not learning anything useful besides how to squint at squiggly letters really hard.

ReCAPTCHA has been incredibly successful; it was bought by Google and now digitizes 100 million words per day, and more than one billion people have used it.

Duolingo is “much more ambitious,” von Ahn said in an interview Monday. “Here we have to create a very compelling Web site for people to come back to. In the case of reCAPTCHA, people were forced to use it.”

But the opportunity for translation is much larger than book transcription, von Ahn said — something like $30 billion annually worldwide, he estimated.

And, meanwhile, online language learning is expensive and generally teaches in a textbook environment lacking real-world context.

Duolingo learns as it teaches. For language learners, it personalizes: The system tracks words that users don’t know and finds other instances of them. For translations, it sends the same sentences to multiple students until they start to agree.

The site isn’t just a random pile of text to translate. Each language has a basic curriculum, with lessons on grammatical topics and vocabulary, as well as gamification and social features to reward progress and daily participation.

In beta testing since late last year, 125,000 active Duolingo users have translated 75 million English, Spanish, French and German sentences. Von Ahn said the single most active student has spent 650 hours on the site — the equivalent of a full-time job — while many have spent more than 100 hours.

Duolingo is free, and it doesn’t have ads. That’s because language learners are von Ahn’s free translation labor. The company will sell translations, and is working on a system for content owners to input raw translation materials.

Von Ahn — who is still a teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon — said he knows that translation can be more art than science, but he’s not concerned. His goal is to pick off the best automated systems, like Google Translate.

“What we want, at the end of the day, is something that’s correct and reads well,” he said.

Von Ahn also acknowledged that true fluency is best achieved by moving to a place where people speak a language every day.

But at scale, Duolingo could help take down language and geographic barriers. “If everybody’s using this, I think it could really bring the whole world together a little better,” von Ahn said.

The company raised $3.3 million in Series A funding last fall from Union Square Ventures, Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments and Tim Ferriss. It is based in Pittsburgh and has 13 employees.

In beta testing, the most common user request was for mobile versions, von Ahn said. So expect those sometime soon, along with expansions to Portuguese, Chinese and other languages.

Tap and Go Is Ready to Go
Near Field Communications (NFC) technology is increasingly being embedded in smartphones, allowing devices to communicate by tapping. For example, tap your phone to a poster to buy a shirt; tap it to a kiosk to buy a ticket. The tap-and-go concept is intuitive, versatile and a great way to share data between mobile devices. NFC is highly versatile, standards-based, interoperable and security-ready. Its adoption in retail and supply is already starting.

Consider this: by 2016, 700 million NFC smartphones are projected to ship. Customers with digital wallets embedded in NFC-enabled phones don’t need a special app to make payments, nor do they need to carry dozens of debit, credit and loyalty cards. They simply touch their phone to the NFC-enabled payment device, sign and go.

Beyond payments, NFC has the potential to positively impact commerce in other ways, including:

• Quick and easy ticketing, much like a “Fast Pay” toll tag on a car.
• Sharing files, contact information and more by simply tapping NFC phones together.
• Tag reading via applications that enable identification, physical access, transportation, inventory, loyalty and marketing opportunities up and down the supply chain.

Who’s the Next Lady Gaga?
Big Data has the potential to unleash a new wave of innovation, responsiveness and service for companies that are able to harness its value. Many pioneering companies are already creating value and competitive differentiation by mining extremely large quantities of typically unstructured data for hidden patterns and insights. The potential impact is virtually unlimited. In retail, we’ve seen brands successfully gathering and analyzing consumer sentiment, then creating personalized recommendations for millions of customers.

Another example is music analytics leader, Next Big Sound, which is using unstructured data to figure out who the next Lady Gaga might be. It uses big data to scan all the different music and social networks (Spotify, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube), analyze likes, plays, downloads — and ultimately provide insight to music executives into how artists become stars.

A New Take on Reality
Augmented reality (AR) presents practically limitless applications. AR is used to superimpose computer-generated sensory input (sound, video, graphics, haptic feedback, etc.) to create a mediated reality overlaying and enhancing the live real-world environment. It’s already being used in navigation, manufacturing, logistics, military services, entertainment, sports, healthcare and numerous other industries.

In commerce, AR has the potential to be a significant driver of sales and conversions. Forward-thinking marketers are already taking advantage of AR to cleverly deliver useful information that adds value to the buying process.

One example of a brand cleverly using AR is Lego. In collaboration with AR technology company Metaio, Lego created an in-store AR system called the Lego Digital Box (LDB). The LDB allows customers to simply hold a Lego box up to a scanner, which recognizes exactly which Lego set it is, and then displays what the set looks like fully assembled on a video screen. You can tilt it up, down and around to see the set in 3-D interactive animation. The initial trial period of LDB in select stores was so successful in increasing customer satisfaction and product sales that Lego made the decision to roll it out in all 80 of its stores, displaying over 200 products.

The Power of the Crowd
Thanks to the Web, brands can tap the vast possibilities of crowdsourcing to shape a product or service. Examples are plenty, with undeniable results. Take, for example, the auto brand Fiat that, in partnership with Brazilian interactive agency AgenciaClick, launched a Web site inviting Brazilian consumers to invent a concept car that Fiat would exhibit at Sao Paulo’s 2010 annual auto show — the Fiat Mio. The challenge was a hit: The site’s 17,662 registrants submitted over 10,000 ideas.

The site was organized much like a social network displaying comments, photos and a Twitter-like sidebar feed. Ideas were divided into categories such as design, materials, safety and infotainment. All designs were shared online for a completely transparent process — turning the traditionally secretive model of auto production on its ear. Dozens of users’ ideas made it into production, contributing to the Mio’s final propulsion method, shape, infotainment, body materials, biometry and driving aids. Throughout the process, Fiat’s engineers reviewed ideas submitted, consolidated the technical design and published the results via open source software in early 2010 before then turning the discussion toward a branding and marketing campaign for the October car show.

Don’t Buy, Rent
According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, the circular economy is not a new technology but rather an innovative industrial model that is restorative or regenerative by design. Its key goals include replacing the “end-of-life” industrial concept with “cradle-to-cradle” restoration, shifting toward the use of renewable energy, eradicating toxic chemicals and eliminating waste.

In the world of commerce, collaborative consumerism aligns with the principles of circular economy by allowing consumers to pay for the use of a product, rather than buying and eventually discarding it. One prime example is Netflix. With over 23 million users, the video streaming and DVD rental company focuses not on selling to customers, but on loaning DVDs/streaming videos. Similarly, car-sharing company Zipcar provides automobile reservations to members who are then billed for the time spent using the cars. Another example is Rent the Runway, which rents dresses from top designers on a four- or eight-day basis.

Dave Bruno is marketing director for RedPrairie, a supply chain and retail technology company. As part of RedPrairie’s research into Commerce in Motion, the company conducts research and analysis of the ever-changing dynamics of global supply chains and the hyper-connected consumer. None of the companies mentioned in this post are clients of RedPrairie.

With the rise of so-called “crowdfunding,” game makers are finding fans online who are willing to pledge a few bucks toward a game they’d like to see produced.

The primary site where these connections are being made is Kickstarter, a three-year old company. Since Kickstarter got off the ground, the games category has garnered $29 million in pledges, according to the New York Times. Other popular categories include film/video, music and design.

Further, it was reported that 854 game developers successfully reached their fundraising goals, raising an average of $29,409 apiece.

Most impressively, three game companies have raised more than $1.5 million each since the beginning of this year: Double Fine raised $3.3 million from 87,000 backers; Wasteland 2 raised $2.9 million; and Shadowrun Returns secured $1.8 million.

Another site, Gambitious, which will be exclusively dedicated to helping game companies raise money, is preparing to launch on June 5 in Los Angeles as part of E3, the industry’s big annual conference.

The shift to nontraditional fundraising is now even catching the eye of megapublishers like Electronic Arts. Last week, EA said developers who crowdsourced funding will be able to sell their games on Origin at no cost for three months.

Origin is the company’s online game store, which allows users to download PC games electronically and counts up to 12 million users worldwide.

“The public support for crowdfunding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,” said David DeMartini, EA’s SVP of Origin, in a release. “It’s also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game.”

EA doesn’t disclose how much it charges because it says fees can vary, but through this program, developers will now receive 100 percent of sales during the 90-day window plus any pre-sales that are generated before the title officially launches, a spokesman confirmed.

It’s unclear whether crowdfunding is a fad and consumers will tire of it quickly, and to be clear, not every company that requests money is able to get it.

But it pairs nicely with a broader trend in the industry that AllThingsD’s Eric Johnson wrote about last week. He explained that game developers are increasingly finding it advantageous to stay small, rejecting the notion that productions need big budgets in order to create blockbusters.

The evolution has been aided by the rise of three new distribution platforms, Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Valve’s Steam Store (and to a lesser extent, EA’s Origin, which is catching up). With these digital platforms, developers can reach customers without having to package up their software and sell it at retail, saving thousands of dollars.

With the crowdfunding phenomenon completely under way, Videogame Analyst and Consultant Scott Steinberg saw the opportunity to write an e-book on the subject called “Crowdfunding Your Business: A How-To Guide.” In the recently released book, he argues that crowdfunding helps developers identify projects that consumers are willing to pay for, before they’ve wasted the money and time on developing them.

He writes that by “requesting feedback or recruiting help from public donors via open calls for assistance — you can gauge demand for and create bankable products from day one.”

Crowdflower went through its own image moderation tool to find inoffensive images for this sample screenshot.

CrowdFlower traditionally charges customers at least $10,000 per month to do little tasks on a big scale — like fill out their e-commerce product listings or catalog online media content. Its customers include eBay, Microsoft and Toshiba.

Now, a new CrowdFlower self-serve photo moderation tool will screen image uploads for objectionable content, starting at $100 per month. Each image will be screened by three to 10 people (the photos that moderators disagree about get put back into the system), with results delivered in a few minutes.

The so-called “Real Time Foto Moderator” is already being used by the flirting app Skout, and existing customers will be moved to the lower pricing.

“I retook the CEO job because I had a new idea for the company,” Biewald told me. “It always bothered me that we served only the biggest customers.”

CrowdFlower already moderates photo uploads for user-generated content sites, at a rate of three million photos per month. The photo moderation tool is just the first self-serve CrowdFlower application, with others planned, Biewald said, adding that looking for objectionable images is “not our most common task — but the simplest and easiest to explain.”

Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice. Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.

– From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva

Aside from the horror at the events in Norway, the incident gave me new insight into the language chasm that still exists on the Web. For one thing, that there may have been lots of people turning to Norwegian news sites from outside that country, many of them non-Norwegian and probably non-English speakers. Why isn’t it easier, I wondered, to have text written in a language other than your own, more readily available in the language you do speak?

It turns out there’s a company right here in New York that’s doing just that. Smartling describes itself as a Translation Delivery Network, and uses the cloud to give sites the tools they need to easily serve up their pages in pretty much any language. Its customers already include foursquare, Scribd and SurveyMonkey, and it just landed a $10 million Series B funding round from IDG Ventures, with prior investors US Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital also participating. Its Series A was $4 million.

I talked earlier this week with Smartling’s CEO and founder Jack Welde. He’s a former Air Force pilot who still flies today. He came up with an interesting language problem: In one context, “going into a bank,” means walking into a financial institution; in another it means maneuvering a plane. Most translation engines use a statistical method and so assume that “bank” means the financial building, without allowing for the fact you may be reading an aviation site. Context is kind of a big deal.

Welde tells me there’s a significant opportunity for companies on the Web to reach out to speakers of other languages. Four-fifths of U.S. residents are already on the Web, but only about 30 percent of China’s population is on the Web, to say nothing of other countries like Brazil, India and elsewhere. “The growth in Web users is occurring outside the U.S., and language is a key component to taking advantage of it,” he says.

Welde compares Smartling to Akamai, the Web-caching specialist that caches content to make its delivery more efficient. Smartling serves up on-demand versions of Web content from the cloud. Site owners choose the languages they want their content translated into, and redirect their domain name servers to point to those controlled by Smartling. There are three options for translation: One is machine translation, one is crowdsourced by a network of volunteers, and there’s also an option for professional translation. There are three tiers of service, starting at free and going up to $249 a month.

One advantage over relying on static translations like those delivered by Google Translate, Bing Translator or Yahoo’s Babel Fish is that the content becomes searchable in the translated language. That’s Smartling’s cloud network dynamically serving multilanguage versions of a client’s site, and then discarding them a few hundred times a second. It’s currently serving about 500 million page views a month.

Smartling has also partnered with CloudFlare, the Web security start-up to offer Smartling’s translation service as an optional add-on for its customers.

Apparently, there is no time lag anymore when it comes to telling the stories of epic fail on the Internet.

I got an email this afternoon from an anonymous Myspace employee who wrote about an interesting group-writing effort on Google Docs called “Real Myspace Stories.”

Said the page, which was created after the fire sale of the News Corp.-owned social networking company for $35 million to Specific Media today, which also included major layoffs:

The rise and fall of Myspace will be one of the more interesting tech stories for years to come. Nobody knows more about how and why things begin going wrong than the people who worked there everyday. We need to tell our story to help make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. This is not about News Corp executives, analysts, or other armchair quarterbacks — but real stories from the employees of Myspace. The good, the bad, the ugly, let’s tell it all. Fill out the short form below if you want to help make this happen and tell your stories.

Our goal is to quickly publish a crowdsourced book from Myspace employees about Myspace. Any profits will be donated to nonprofits, entrepreneur education, and/or a new VC fund that supports Myspace alumni’s new ventures.

Nice.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site; also, I took the odd photo above at a rest stop in California.)

The one thing it doesn’t have are stories about investors clamoring to throw money its way. And the three-year-old company has never disclosed a funding round. Is it possible it has never taken in any money?

Nope. It’s not. I hear that Kickstarter, which helps artists and entrepreneurs raise money for their projects via crowd-sourced donation, has itself raised around $10 million in venture backing so far.

Its investors are high-profile, too: Union Square Ventures is the company’s best-known backer, but Kickstarter has also received money from the Betaworks incubator/seed investment fund, along with contributions from well-known entrepreneuer/angels like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Kickstarter’s public profile has been shooting up, up, up–most recently, as the company that helped fund watches made out of Apple’s iPod nanos — and its backers are a bit of an open secret in tech circles. But for whatever reason the company hasn’t wanted its investors chatting about it.

Union Square, for instance, doesn’t include the company in its public portfolio. [UPDATE: Now they do. "Recently the company has been getting a lot of attention and it has become clear to all of us that the quiet period is over," USV partner Fred Wilson writes in a blog post this morning. "So now we get to add the Kickstarter logo to our investments page and we can talk about the company publicly as much as we talk about it privately.]

That quiet period is over now, though, courtesy of a profile in the new issue of Wired magazine. The story is primarily about the company’s origins and ambitions, but casually mentions Union Square’s backing, and identifies Fake, Klein, Dorsey, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman and comedian David Cross (!) as other investors.

I asked CEO Perry Chen for more details about the company’s funding, but didn’t expect much. And via a pr agency, I ended up with a list of other angels, but nothing else. Here it is, for the record: Josh Stylman; Peter Hershberg; Joi Ito; Chris Sacca; Joshua Schacter; Matt Haughey; Josh & Jared Kushner; Chris Kaskie; “some other friends.”

The Wired issue with the Kickstarter profile is just landing in subscribers’ mailboxes now, and should be on newsstands and iPads next week. If you’re waiting for a free peek, though, you’ll have to be patient–the magazine usually waits a bit before it puts a new issue up on the Web. Meantime, here’s a look at the cover, via the magazine’s Twitter account:

[Kickstarter image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

The collection of 16 dresses, designed by Derek Lam, were unveiled this morning at New York’s Fashion Week and posted online.

For the next couple of weeks, visitors to the Derek Lam+eBay site will be able to vote for their favorite dresses. On March 1, eBay will announce the five dresses that rose to the top. The dresses will then be sold online in May, ranging from $125 to $295.

This is the first time eBay has ever used crowd-sourcing techniques to produce a collection.

The idea is part of a continuing trend by e-commerce sites to experiment with social-networking-like mechanics to make a more engaging shopping experience.

The collection of dresses vary from short and form-fitting to long and flowing, perfect for backyard picnics, or even a formal black-tie event. Colors range from denim to pink to black.

The best part of the experience is the way the dresses are presented on the site.

It’s like a scene from “Harry Potter,” where the subjects in the magical portraits come to life and the people within the image move and interact.

The models shift their weight from one foot to the other, place a hand on the hip and twirl around to show off all sides of the dresses. The fabric and the model’s hair blow in the breeze.

Derek Lam, the designer, launched his label in 2003 and sells his designs in his two retail stores, as well as online at DerekLam.com.

“The experience has to be the same,” Costolo said during an afternoon keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “I shouldn’t have to think how to use Twitter.”

About 40 percent of tweets come from a mobile device, while half of all active users are active on more than one device, he said.

Until not that long ago, Twitter built only the product for the Web and let third parties handle phones and other devices. In recent months, though, it has scooped up various app makers and now offers official apps for the major smartphones. However, given that those official apps stem from different acquisitions, they often work in different ways.

Costolo said the company also wants to make sure that one doesn’t have to sign up and follow lots of people to get something out of the service.

“We want Twitter to be instantly useful,” he said.

With Twitter for Windows Phone 7, the company introduced the notion, already present on the Web, that one shouldn’t have to be an active user to have Twitter on their phone.

His talk is still ongoing and I’ll update things as it continues.

5:32 pm: Costolo said the company will begin offering crowdsourced translations of the service into Russian, Turkish and Indonesian and, later this year, will have its own translation to Portuguese.

5:33 pm: Some stats from Super Bowl, this year.

4,000 tweets per second at the end of the game and 3,000 tweets per second during the game. That was 27 tweets per second in 2008.

The overall record is New Year’s Eve in Japan (the country has a single time zone) and the prior sporting event record was from last year’s World Cup.

5:34 pm: Twitter is actually bringing things back to live TV and away from the DVR.

“That’s not just happening with live sporting events,” Costolo said. He cites game shows in the U.K.

5:36 pm: “Glee,” for example, has 30 times the number of tweets about it when the show is on.

Takeaway: the long-talked about second screen of interactive TV is here and it is Twitter.

5:38 pm: About Twitter as a business: The short answer is we are already making money, Costolo said. The really good thing, he said, is that businesses can use the service in the same way as others–building community around shared interest.

5:41 pm: A viral campaign of note. Al-Jazeera highlighting its coverage of the events in the Middle East and North Africa with the hashtag #demandaljazeera to get its programming on U.S. cable systems.

5:44 pm: Costolo, on the role of Twitter and Facebook in recent events there:

“I think that takes away from what these people have accomplished,” he said. “We are probably a very small piece of the puzzle.”

5:47 pm: On to Q&A. Battery is running low, but hoping to make it through the question period.

First question came in over Twitter and asks what is the company’s biggest fear.

“Twitter’s biggest fear is lack of execution,” Costolo said, saying he tries to convince workers not to focus on competitors. “If we execute on what we are trying to do we will be successful.”

5:48 pm: A couple of questions on local trends and translations. Costolo said that crowdsourcing offers a way to do more translations quickly, while the trends piece requires more work on Twitter’s part, some of which should be done this year.

5:53 pm: What is the biggest mistake Twitter has made?

Costolo said company’s founders would say they shot themselves in the foot, head and everywhere else not hiring or scaling fast enough.

“I think we are out of the woods on that one,” Costolo said.

Next question is on what Twitter is doing in response to its pivotal role in Arabic-speaking countries right now. Costolo noted that Twitter doesn’t yet support right-to-left languages.

On being blocked, Costolo said Twitter is only a 350-person company and doesn’t have the resources of some larger companies. “We try to just leverage our own platform to plead for help,” he said.

5:58 pm: Costolo is asked if there is a need for Twitter-branded smartphones.

“No,” Costolo said. “I believe there is a need for Twitter in the existing platforms.”

Earlier in his keynote, Costolo said he wants deep integration so that when a user takes a picture they don’t have to open a separate app to tweet out that picture.

6:03 pm: As for rumors that Google might be willing to pay $10 billion for the company.

“I don’t know where these things come from,” Costolo said. “It’s just a rumor.”

6:03 pm: End of keynote. (just as my battery was on its last sliver of red, too!

From 1998 through 2008, Harcourt was the driving force at KCRW, the super-influential public radio station broadcasting from Santa Monica, Calif.: Even if you’ve never heard of him or the station, you’ve heard music and bands he helped make famous via airplay.

I don’t know if his Wikipedia entry is technically accurate (crowdsourcing!), but the list of musicians he’s credited with breaking in the U.S. should give a sense of his vibe, regardless: Coldplay, Norah Jones, Pete Yorn, Franz Ferdinand, etc. Awesome headline of a 2005 New York Times Magazine profile: “The Star Maker of the Semipopular.”

But outside of his work picking music for TV shows and movies, Harcourt hasn’t had a forum for the past two years.

Now he does: Blog network Buzzmedia is putting him in charge of “Live Buzz,” a new site that focuses on music videos.

There are plenty of those, so what’s different? Harcourt says it’s the emphasis on live tapings recorded specifically for the site. But there are plenty of those, too (check out “From the Basement,” which does a really good job).

So what Buzzmedia is really banking on here is that Harcourt’s brand will be enough to attract surfers and keep them coming back. That’s why the site’s homepage announces that it is “Curated by Nic Harcourt” right at the top.

Certainly worth a visit. Here are a couple examples of what you’ll find there. I’m particularly fond of the acoustic Jay-Z:

The concept behind 48 Hours was relatively simple: Most magazines traditionally take weeks to produce. But with the Web and things like digital photos, editors could put out a call for photos and articles with a 24-hour deadline and then spend another 24 hours editing and laying out the magazine.

The creation of the magazine is part of a trend called “crowd sourcing”–in which tasks that have traditionally been done by a small group are instead posted to a large forum, with the best ideas and products from the overall group winning the day. It’s a technique best known for the creation of online reference site Wikipedia.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

On Thursday, the start-up plans to announce new incentives tied to Foursquare, another mobile-social app. Users of both services will be able to check in to locations through Waze, and after the third check-in, they’ll unlock a new “Road Warrior” badge.

The two apps, both of which use social games to build crowdsourced information, have similar goals, said Di-Ann Eisnor, community geographer at Waze. This is the first time Foursquare has created a badge–one of the ways that the service rewards frequent users–that’s tied to another app, said Dennis Crowley, a co-founder of the New York start-up.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, launched 10 balloons, each eight feet wide, around the country as part of its “Network Challenge.” The first person or team to locate all of them will win $40,000. Darpa says that the contest is meant to look at how “information spreads and propagates and becomes viral.”

But it’s more than a simple test of crowdsourcing, which has been used to build public databases like Wikipedia or in Wired’s recent hunt for Evan Ratliff.

Peter Lee, director of Darpa’s transformational convergence technology office, which focuses on tech and social trends, said that by giving participants an incentive, like the prize money, the contest tests how people organize themselves and how they validate information.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

This week: A lunch date with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Loren Bendele and his deal-finding social network, Savings.com, just in time for the holiday shopping wars!

Who: Loren Bendele

What: CEO of Savings.com.

Why: Savings.com combines a Web 1.0-style coupon site with social networking and crowd sourcing to create live lists of discounts offered by over 4,000 major online retailers.

And, gasp, the site is profitable.

Where: Savings.com/about (corporate bio); Santa Monica, Calif. (analog place); No Twitter profile (egads!).

Who else: couponcabin.com, retailmenot.com.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Bag boy at a Tom Thumb supermarket outside Dallas, Texas. “I was good though. I always got awards for being the fastest.”

Has a Business Crush on: Yelp.

Gadget of the Moment: iPhone from Apple (AAPL). “I love the Flight Tracker app. It’s a game–all about control.”

Wishes There Was an App for: “I know exactly what I want: A simple app where I can assign levels of importance to contacts. The app would remind me when I haven’t called them in a while. Like, some people I want to call once a week, or a month or a quarter. Just something that helps me keep up relationships.”

Fails at: Details. “I hire others who are much better at that.”

Bio in 140 Characters

Born outside of Dallas, TX. Chem Eng @Texas A&M. Dow Chemical, then to Teleflora, via consulting firms. Became CEO of Savings.com in 2007.

The Five Questions

Isn’t your model a little too “Pets.com, Web 1.0 bubble” to work?

It is sort of Web 1.0. But really, it’s a social network connecting deal fanatics. So, connecting people who are passionate and knowledgeable about getting great deals.

Some people engage at a very deep level with their own blogs and interaction. We call them our “deal pros.” You can also just come to the site and see what deals are being [rated as the best] by those deal pros. It’s based on votes of the people in the community.

What is this I hear about you being profitable? Don’t you know the start-up rules?

Well, our revenue model was important from the start. We make money because we partner with the retailers whose deals show up on our site. When someone sees a deal on our site, they click the link and go to [for instance] the Gap (GPS) Web site and buy something, we get paid.

We have relationships with 4,000 plus merchants–all of the top online merchants, and when a deal gets uploaded to our site [by a deal pro] we attach a tracking ID to that deal and report it to the merchant. I’m driving over $4 million per month to our top merchants. I’m the top sales driver for a lot of them.

We’ve been profitable since September 2007.

What is the single biggest immediate growth area for Savings.com?

International. We opened a site in England that has been growing like crazy. We had been doing it all from the U.S., with no team over there. You can do a lot remotely, but you can’t make those partner relationships, being face to face, getting the exclusive deals.

You can’t take them out to lunch and make the connections. We’ve just hired a team there full time. We actually hired the guy who was in charge of partner marketing for Amazon (AMZN) in Europe. He was so big on the opportunity that we have, that he left them for us.

What businesses would the world be better off without?

Ugh, I can’t stand predatory online businesses; cashforgold.com or those payday loan places. There are lots of those check-out services where they offer you free magazine subscriptions and it turns out that they start charging you and you don’t find out until a year later.

They tell you they are going to do it, but they do it in tiny print and it’s just dishonest. We get offers to include those sorts of things on our site all the time. It’s just not what we want to do. It’s important to keep the community pure.

When did you get the business bug?

My parents had a popcorn and yogurt shop, so they could buy things wholesale. When I was in fifth grade, I guess, I started selling Blow Pops out of my backpack. Remember those things? I could buy them for like seven cents apiece and sell them for 50 cents.

I made a lot of money doing that until the teachers shut me down.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091127/almost-famous-savings-coms-loren-bendele/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091021/what-do-you-want-to-know-about-the-nook-barnes-nobles-new-e-reader/ http://allthingsd.com/20091021/what-do-you-want-to-know-about-the-nook-barnes-nobles-new-e-reader/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:18:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12269 Not sure what Barnes & Noble has to say about the “Nook” that it didn’t discuss yesterday, when it unveiled its new e-reader. But the bookseller’s press conference this morning, scheduled for 9:30 EDT, gives us an opportunity to try a little crowd-sourcing experiment: Send me any questions you have and I’ll try to ask the company on your behalf.

You can reach me via email (peter@allthingsd.com) or by leaving a comment below. I can’t promise any results, but I’ll do my best.

For the record: From afar, the Nook appears very similar to Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, with a few additional bells and whistles–a second color screen at the bottom of the device for navigation, wireless connection from AT&T (T) instead of Sprint (S), Wi-Fi connectivity, etc. The most intriguing tweaks, from my perspective, are a “sharing” feature and the fact that the Nook runs on Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system, which might allow for interesting upgrades over time.

But all of these features seem to be aimed at tech’s earliest adopters and not the general book-buying public that Barnes & Noble (BKS), Amazon, Sony (SNE) and everyone else is hoping to court. Recall that in the early days of music players, plenty of competitors offered competitively priced gadgets with features that Apple’s (AAPL) iPod didn’t have, and today, it’s like we never heard of them. My hunch is that we might see a similar dynamic play out with e-readers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091021/what-do-you-want-to-know-about-the-nook-barnes-nobles-new-e-reader/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091012/nprs-honchos-talk-digital-at-think-in-in-san-francisco-also-scoble/ http://allthingsd.com/20091012/nprs-honchos-talk-digital-at-think-in-in-san-francisco-also-scoble/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:14:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=19340

Last Friday, National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and GM Kinsey WiIson came to San Francisco for a “Digital Think In” to pick the brains of some Silicon Valley types about where the public radio icon should go, digitally speaking.

While NPR actually has been pretty fast-forward with podcasts and a robust Web site, it still has to think about what social networking means to it and whether a day is coming when broadcasting online will be bigger than offline.

Also, what’s up with Twitter?

These and other questions were discussed at frog design Friday with a passel of Web types like investor Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, Toni Schneider of Automattic, craigslist founder Craig Newmark and LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman.

Also, ubiquitous blogger Robert Scoble, who wants NPR to open itself up like a can of beans.

The Think In participants were charged with making suggestions related to five main topics: Social media and connection to the audience, NPR’s national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms and how to diversify its revenue model.

BoomTown always likes crowdsourcing innovation, even among the digital elite.

While at the event in the morning, I talked to Schiller, who came to NPR last year after a stint as general manager of the New York Times online unit, and also to Wilson, who previously worked as executive editor for USA Today and ran its digital efforts before that.

Along with my video interview with them, below, you can check out some more detailed information from the event here.

Here’s my video:

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