Mashable: Latest 6 News Updates - including “7 Captivating Works of Crowdsourced Art” |
- 7 Captivating Works of Crowdsourced Art
- Amazon to Acquire Diapers.com for $540 Million [REPORT]
- Use Social Media to Tell Interactive Stories [INVITES]
- Verizon Undercuts AT&T with $70 Unlimited Text and Data Plan
- Turn Your Inbox into a Robust Reminder System
- Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART]
- Weekend Gaming: Kinect, “Little Big Planet 2″ Beta Code Giveaway [OPEN THREAD]
| 7 Captivating Works of Crowdsourced Art Posted: 06 Nov 2010 05:25 PM PDT If enough people complete them, tiny tasks can accomplish great things. Companies like Yelp, for instance, have used the input of millions to create review databases. iStockPhoto pools images from a huge group of photographers to make a cohesive collection. Newer companies, like Waze, which leverages its user base’s smartphones to create maps, are consistently coming up with new and innovative ways to use crowdsourcing. The art world has also leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to create some stunning works. These seven projects involve many people coming together to contribute to a bigger picture. 1. SwarmSketch     Sticking to its crowdsourcing theme, SwarmSketch randomly chooses a popular search term as the topic of each week’s collective drawing (this week, for instance, you can contribute to “Black Swan Movie”). Each artist can contribute just one short line per visit, after which he or she is asked to vote on how bold other users’ lines should be. To date, the crowd has drawn about 195,000 lines in 350 sketches. 2. The One Million Masterpiece The creators of this website call it a “snapshot of our global society.” Their project is an online canvas composed of 1 million squares and they’re hoping to get people from all over the world to paint pictures that fill them. The end artwork will be printed on a giant 80-meters wide by 31-meters high canvas. “By working towards a common goal, but having the space for individual expression, we are hoping that a collaboration can evolve that communicates a single powerful message in its numbers, yet maintains the intimacy of the individual,” the website explains. There’s a long way to go before the project is complete, but so far about 28,300 artists in 174 countries have completed squares. 3. Learning to Love You More  From 2002 to 2009, Learning to Love You More posted assignments from artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Participants who accepted these assignments — such as “repair something” or “interview someone who has experienced war” — turned in photos, Word documents, videos and audio clips of their completed tasks. The collection of projects inspired a book and was presented at venues that include The Whitney Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and the Wattis Institute. In 2009, the website was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 4. The Sheep Market Back when Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was a new idea, artist Aaron Koblin used it as a way to hire workers who were instructed to paint “sheep facing left.” Each sheep earned $.02. The resulting Sheep Market allows you to choose a sheep from a selection of 10,000 and watch how it was drawn. In a paper on the project, Koblin wrote that “The inspiration for The Sheep Market project stems from the urge to cast a light on the human role of creativity expressed by workers in the system, while explicitly calling attention to the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of a whole.” The Sheep Market was the first of many pieces that Koblin has created using crowdsourcing. 5. The Johnny Cash ProjectIn order to earn a place in the credits of this tribute to Johnny Cash, all you need to do is submit one frame of a video that is being created for his last studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave.” The website provides a reference image, which you can practically draw on top of using the site’s custom tool, so there’s no need to be shy about your art skills. The project then combined those frames to make a moving video. The project is directed by directed by Chris Milk, a music video director who has worked with Kanye West, U2, and directed Arcade Fire’s recent HTML5 video experiment. Aaron Koblin, who created The Sheep Market, is one of the creative directors. 6. Explodingdog Sam Brown puts pictures to titles submitted by the crowd. Some recent pieces include “I haven’t seen land in days…” and “I’m still not convinced that I’m a robot.” 7. Collected Visions Since 1996, artist Lorie Novak has been accepting family snapshots on her Collected Visions Website. Visitors to the site can search through about 1,200 submitted photos and put them together with their own text and other photos. Their photo essays are also displayed on the site. Novak writes on the site that the project, which is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, “explores the relationship between family photographs and memory.” Which projects spoke to you? Are there any that you love and would like to share? Let us know in the comments below. More Design Resources from Mashable:
Reviews: The Johnny Cash Project More About: Aaron Koblin, art, crowdsourced, crowdsourcing, design, johnny cash, Learning To Love You More, SwarmSketch, The One Million Masterpiece For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| Amazon to Acquire Diapers.com for $540 Million [REPORT] Posted: 06 Nov 2010 03:38 PM PDT   Amazon will soon announce that it has acquired Quidsi, the owners of e-commerce websites Diapers.com and Soap.com, for a whopping $540 million in cash. According to Fortune, Quidsi’s co-founders, Marc Lore and Vinnie Bharara, have agreed to stick around and have signed multi-year contracts with Amazon. The company launched in 2005 with Diapers.com, while Soap.com launched earlier this year. The report also claims that Wal-Mart made an offer for the company as well. Quidsi specializes in quickly shipping commodity items to consumers efficiently. It utilizes scores of algorithms in order to optimize warehousing and shipping and to maximize margins. It also boasts about its customer service, which has helped the company become a top e-commerce destination. The Quidsi acquisition is Amazon’s largest since it spent $900 million to acquire Zappos. There are definitely a lot of parallels between the two acquisitions. Zappos wasn’t about the shoes, but about the culture, customer service and loyal customers. The Quidsi acquisition seems to be about its numbers-based approach and its loyal customer base. Quidsi has raised over $75 million in multiple funding rounds from Accel Partners, BEV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, MentorTech Ventures and others. More About: acquisition, amazon, Diapers.com, ecommerce, trending For more Business coverage:
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| Use Social Media to Tell Interactive Stories [INVITES] Posted: 06 Nov 2010 03:17 PM PDT   This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Storify Quick Pitch: Pull content from social networks together to create a cohesive story with tweets, posts, photos and videos that maintain their original functionality. Genius Idea: You can find information about almost any topic on social media, but it’s not necessarily easy to put that information together into a cohesive narrative. Storify looks to solve this problem by helping you curate stories from the social web. Users can search for content on social networks and create stories by dragging-and-dropping components onto a workspace without leaving Storify. When they’re finished, they can either link to the story or embed it. All of the tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images, and other bits of information in the completed story maintain their links and functionality. You can retweet someone’s tweet, for instance, the same way you would if you were viewing it on Twitter. The company launched its private beta at the end of September. During its first month since the launch, the tool has been used by bloggers, public relations professionals and media outlets. The Washington Post recently used Storify to compile political candidates’ recession and concession tweets. Public relations professionals have used Storify to tell the story of a brand or report their social media efforts to their clients. Other people have used it to blog about everything from family trips to a riot. One man used it to tell the story of a poem he composed using submissions over social media. Having defined some promising potential uses for its product, the company’s major uncertainty is the monetization factor. Storify is taking the “build a user base and monetize it later” approach, and at this point (admittedly only a month after product launch) it doesn’t have any distinct plans for actually making money. Some possibilities include selling advertising that publishers insert in stories or adding premium features. While the “monetize later” approach has worked well for companies like Twitter and Tumblr, it’s hard to maintain very long without funding — which the company is still seeking (they have raised about $30,000 from angel investors). Bootstrapped status aside, we think Storify is on to something. Co-founder Burt Herman is a 12 year veteran of the Associated Press, and the storytelling aspect of Storify may be what ultimately sets it apart from the competition. Unlike similar social media curation tools like Curated.by and Keepstream, story creators that use Storify can add their own text to the stories. This could make it especially appealing to content providers who want to add analysis and context to social media stories. 250 Mashable readers can try the private beta version of Storify by using the invite code “Mashable.” Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jallfree Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Mashable, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, iStockphoto More About: bizspark, curated.by, Keepstream, startup, startups, Storify, Web curation For more Tech coverage:
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| Verizon Undercuts AT&T with $70 Unlimited Text and Data Plan Posted: 06 Nov 2010 01:16 PM PDT   Verizon Wireless is testing a new cellular plan that offers unlimited text and data to a limited group of customers for $70. Is it just a one-time promotion by the nation’s largest wireless carrier, or is it the beginning of a new pricing plan that undercuts its main competition? The new plan offers 450 monthly minutes and unlimited Verizon mobile-to-mobile, texting and data. It’s not available on Verizon’s website, though; you have to call the number specified in the promotional e-mail to get the plan. The deal only applies to those who received the e-mail; if you call the number and didn’t get the promotion, Verizon’s computers will know. Buying the same plan on Verizon’s website will cost you $90 ($40 for the minutes + $20 for text + $30 for data). The carrier is also offering a discounted Family SharePlan for $140, which includes 1,400 minutes and unlimited data, text and Verizon mobile-to-mobile; it costs $20 per month to add an additional line. As Boy Genius Report points out, the plan looks very similar to Sprint’s “Everything Data” plan, which also offers 450 minutes and unlimited messaging, data and mobile-to-mobile minutes. You can get only get the same price on AT&T if you’re using a “basic” phone; you can’t get the same deal with a feature phone or a smartphone. Could this be the precursor to a new price war? AT&T and Verizon engaged in a price war, earlier this year, but the stakes are about to skyrocket with the impending release of the Verizon iPhone. Having a cheaper plan could be the catalyst Verizon needs to get thousands of AT&T iPhone customers to switch. Don’t think for a second that AT&T wouldn’t fire back, though. More About: att, iphone, sprint, trending, verizon, verizon wireless For more Mobile coverage:
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| Turn Your Inbox into a Robust Reminder System Posted: 06 Nov 2010 11:36 AM PDT   How often do you forget to follow-up with someone based on an e-mail sent to you a week ago? Do you get e-mails that you want to re-read a few months from now? A new service is looking to turn your inbox into a dead-simple reminder and follow-up system. NudgeMail, which launched this week, isn’t a browser extension, a program you install on your desktop, or even a web app; it operates entirely via e-mail. All you have to do to use NudgeMail is write or forward an e-mail NudgeMail, and it’ll send you that e-mail back at the time you’ve specific. No sign-up is required. Say your boss e-mails you to follow-up with a client next week. All you have to do is forward that e-mail to “nextweek@nudgemail.com” and NudgeMail will send it back to you seven days later. If you get an e-mail from a friend you don’t want to deal with until tomorrow, you can e-mail it to “tomorrow@nudgemail.com” and it’ll arrive the next day. NudgeMail comes with a variety of commands, ranging from “monday@nudgemail.com” to “EOD@nudgemail.com” (you’ll get the e-mail at 6 PM that evening) to “02122011@nudgemail.com” (you’ll get the e-mail on February 12, 2011). You can specify times (“530am@nudgemail.com”) or intervals of time (“2d3h@nudgemail.com”). There’s even a snooze option (“snooze@nudgemail.com”) that will send the e-mail back to you in exactly one hour. You can check out the full list of commands here. NudgeMail essentially turns your Gmail, Outlook or whatever e-mail service you use into a productivity tool for creating simple reminders or making sure you follow-up with people at the right time. Imagine getting an e-mail reminding you to follow-up with an important associate every six months or getting a reminder e-mail about a sale on Saturday that your boyfriend or girlfriend sent you on Wednesday. Like any other productivity system, you get out of it what you put in. We can also see people with busy inboxes missing some of these reminders in a sea of e-mails. Still, we love the simplicity of NudgeMail. It takes almost no effort at all to get started. While the service is in beta, it is free for unlimited use. Eventually NudgeMail will adopt a freemium business model, says Stage Two’s Jeremy Toeman (the company that created NudgeMail). There is also a white-label enterprise plan available for companies that want an internal version of the e-mail reminder system. What do you think of NudgeMail? Do you see yourself using it? Let us know in the comments. More About: e-mail, NudgeMail, productivity, Stage Two For more Tech coverage:
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| Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART] Posted: 06 Nov 2010 09:31 AM PDT   If you didn’t know by now that Twitter’s hip to politics, it’s probably because you’ve been spending too much time watching “television,” or reading … what are those things called … newspapers. On the night of the U.S. midterm election (and the days leading up to it), tweets were fast and furious about political races all over the country. That, combined with The Washington Post’s savvy buy of the #Election promoted hashtag, propelled the topic straight to number one this week. Halloween, of course, snatched the number two spot, and Brazilian politics, with a critical Twitter mass rivaling the U.S. elections, came in at number three as the country elected its first woman president, Dilma Rousseff. Check out which topics made the rest of the big list below. The chart is powered by data from our friends over at What The Trend. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart. You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week's trends on What The Trend. Top Twitter Trends This Week: 10/30 – 11/5
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ricardoinfante Reviews: Twitter, iStockphoto, justin bieber More About: Brazil, entertainment, football, justin bieber, List, Lists, politics, soccer, social media, sony, sports, Top Twitter Topics, trends, twitter, twitter trends For more Social Media coverage:
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| Weekend Gaming: Kinect, “Little Big Planet 2″ Beta Code Giveaway [OPEN THREAD] Posted: 06 Nov 2010 07:51 AM PDT   This week in gaming was more about the platform than the games themselves. Microsoft released its long-awaited Kinect motion controller for the Xbox 360. The device marks a complete evolution for the Xbox 360, and is the biggest move to date in motion gaming. Although the launch titles, games like Dance Central and Kinect Sports, are decidedly light, the technology behind the device promises big things. On the Wii side, this week saw the release of GoldenEye 007. The game keeps much of the elements that made it hit on the Nintendo 64. It is, however, modernized with Wii’s own motion aware controllers. We also have something for the PlayStation 3 crew: Invite codes for the LittleBigPlanet 2 beta. To win one of the codes, head over to the Mashable Tech Facebook page and comment on this post. We’ll select 25 winners from the commenters on Monday. Call of Duty: Black Ops comes out next week. What are you playing until then? Tell us about it. Comments are open to: tips, critiques, (good-natured) smack talk and basically anything else related to gaming. The weekend gaming open thread is intended to bring Mashable gamers together through conversation about games. This thread is for those of us who had the first NES and for those whose first gaming experience happened on an Xbox 360, so let’s try to keep it fun for everyone. Reviews: Mashable More About: call of duty black ops, kinect, littlebigplanet 2, playstation 3, PS3, video games, Xbox 360 For more Tech coverage:
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