Kindles on Fire?

Are Kindles on fire? Or is Amazon just blowing smoke trying to fit in?

Well, there is now a new and improved Kindle Fire.  And if one goes to the homepage of Amazon, they can read all about it.  In fact, there are several new Kindle Fires.  These new Kindle Fires include the Kindle Fire HDX and HD. This means that the graphics are even better and it can hold much more memory.  To read more about these new Kindle's and all they have to offer, click the link above.

 

 

What is really drawing people's attention, however, is the fact that Amazon is continually coming up with new ways to stay in the running with Google/Samsung and Apple for tablets.  Unfortunately, Amazon is a far cry from being close in the running's as far as tablets go, at about a five percent of the tablet share. 

 

Do you think that Amazon is trying too hard to fit in? Should they just stick to e-readers and not worry about the tablet shares?  Or do you think they are doing the smart thing to keep their business in the running, even at a small percentage? 

 

Also, would you ever buy a Kindle Fire (or a Kindle in general?) If so, for what? (To use just as an e-reader or to use as an actual tablet.)

 

 

For more information go to Business Week. 

Another Big Acquisition of a Crowdsourcing Platform - Appirio Buys TopCoder

 

Appirio today announced that it has acquired TopCoder, a crowdsource driven development and design community. By combining TopCoder's global capacity and design capability with CloudSpokes' expertise in cloud and advanced web technologies, Appirio and its customers now have access to nearly 600,000 of the world's best developers, designers and data analytics experts. 
"Appirio has embraced community development since the company's inception, and has proven that crowdsourcing is an effective way to increase innovation and more cost-effectively deliver solutions," said Chris Barbin, co-founder and CEO, Appirio. "The rise of the sharing economy is quickly rendering the traditional systems integration and offshore biased model obsolete. Together, the CloudSpokes and TopCoder communities offer more elastic development and design resources than Accenture, Deloitte and InfoSys combined."
I've been a firm believer in TopCoder's service ever since I was proven wrong when I hypothesized, "Everything can be crowdsourced except app development." In fact, app development has become a very effective use of crowdsourcing.
The acquisition will provide members of both developer communities with dramatically more opportunities to earn money while showcasing their respective skills and capabilities. As a part of the investment, CloudSpokes will add an additional track at the TopCoder Open happening November 10-14, 2013, for cloud development, as well as increases in prize money.
"The NASA Tournament Lab has partnered with TopCoder to tap into a global talent pool for algorithmic and software development," said Dr. Karim R. Lakhani, Principal Investigator of the Harvard NASA Tournament Lab. "The combination of the TopCoder community's breadth and depth of design and problem solving talent with CloudSpokes' cloud delivery model appears to create a unique offering in the technology solutions marketplace."
"TopCoder pioneered community-driven open innovation and has delivered design, development and analytics solutions for companies and governments for more than a decade," said Jack Hughes, founder, TopCoder. "We have admired Appirio for bringing together the best of cloud development and crowdsourcing. With the addition of TopCoder, Appirio will redefine what it means to deliver compelling, agile and innovative solutions to customers globally."
Narinder Singh, co-founder of Appirio, has been appointed president of the combined communities. TopCoder founder Jack Hughes will join Appirio's crowdsourcing advisory board. David Messinger, vice president of community at CloudSpokes, has been promoted to Chief Community Officer of the combined communities.


http://dailycrowdsource.com/crowdsourcing/news/1316-another-big-acquisition-of-a-crowdsourcing-platform-appirio-buys-topcoder

Advantages of Crowdsourcing

Ever since the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006 by Wired writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms have been labeled with this most buzz-generating of media buzzwords. In this accessible but authoritative account, grounded in the empirical literature, Daren Brabham explains what crowdsourcing is, what it is not, and how it works.

    

 Crowdsourcing, Brabham tells us, is an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes set forth by a crowdsourcing organization—corporate, government, or volunteer. Uniquely, it combines a bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. Crowdsourcing is not open source production, which lacks the top-down component; it is not a market research survey that offers participants a short list of choices; and it is qualitatively different from predigital open innovation and collaborative production processes, which lacked the speed, reach, rich capability, and lowered barriers to entry enabled by the Internet.

    

 Brabham describes the intellectual roots of the idea of crowdsourcing in such concepts as collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and distributed computing. He surveys the major issues in crowdsourcing, including crowd motivation, the misconception of the amateur participant, crowdfunding, and the danger of “crowdsploitation” of volunteer labor, citing real-world examples from Threadless, InnoCentive, and other organizations. And he considers the future of crowdsourcing in both theory and practice, describing its possible roles in journalism, governance, national security, and science and health.


http://www.globalforesightbooks.org/Methods-to-Shape-the-Future.html

Crowdsourcing the Birds

There is something fascinating about the animals that live around us. Thousands of people each year travel to different National  Parks trying to spot those animals that they may not see back home. For some, there is a unique fascination with birds. Some people even devote their entire lives to the study of birds.

Scientists have tried for years to count and map the geographical locations of different species of birds. Some of there efforts have proven successful, however, with the development of new technology, they have begun to realize their data may not be as accurate as they once thought. Through an online site called ebird, scientists and other avid bird watchers are able to share information about different species of birds in their area. This site uses a type of crowdsourcing to compile data from different entities around the world. This has allowed scientists to discover new sub-species of birds in a specific location. It has also helped scientists map out the migration patterns of certain birds because of the almost instantaneous information being uploaded via crowdsourcing.

Some scientists believe that allowing "the average joe" to contribute  to sites such as ebird can cause inaccuracies in the information. However, I believe that it gives more accuracy to the site. Qualified scientists cannot be in many places at one time. Allowing avid bird watchers to contribute provides a way for a specific amount of data to be compiled in one area by many people.

So these questions are posed, do you believe that using peoples love for birds is helpful in the composition of the data around the world? Can we take the idea of ebird and apply it to other topics regarding the environment, and find that it contributes more data then that already found by the scientists? What is the benefit to allowing more people to contribute on scientific research?

Crowdsourcing, for the Birds

A Sense of Security or Insecurity

What if there was a way for a disaster relief team to know the exact magnitude of a disaster without surveying the site? Well, the United States Navy is working on a project that will allow them to do just that. Many people are connected to some form of social media. Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you name it, people around the world are connected through these platforms. 

What the Navy and other organizations such as FEMA have found is that during natural disasters people use these social media sites to communicate the instantaneous destruction. Through a modern technology called crowdsourcing, the Navy will be able to scan the social media sites for information about the disaster. It is their hope that they can know the severity of the situation immediately and act in a timely manner to bring aid to the disaster site. 

In theory, crowdsourcing to aid in disaster relief sounds like a great idea, and could save many lives with the timeliness of the response. However, how would you feel if your Facebook was being scanned for information regarding natural disasters? What is to say that they will stop there? Maybe a tool they intended for good can be used to infiltrate the very privacy that the writers of the Constitution so dearly tried to protect. What do you think? Is this a good or a bad idea? I guess only time will tell for sure. 

News Article on Navy's Use of Crowdsourcing

The Microphone, Ishin-Denshin

Ishin-Denshin

            Ivan Poupyrev is the inventor of this new product, Ishin-Denshin.  What is it you may ask? Well it is a type of microphone, but not just your standard microphone. This microphone works through touch.

            How Ishin-Denshin works is that a person whispers into the microphone, which then transmits it into an electrical signal.  The person is now “charged” and can touch another person’s earlobe.  The vibrations of this then provide the sound of what the original person was saying, through touch, to the other person.  

                This would provide good use to places such as Disney, that do storytelling and that having an effect such as that would be useful to literally allow the people there to feel the stories being portrayed.  What other places can you think of this type of new technology being useful? Whether it be small scale, or large scale (Poupyrev is working on that.) Also, is this a product you 

personally would find useful? 

                Here is a link to the article, as well as a video showing how the microphone works.

Example of Ishin-Denshin YouTube Video

                        Also, here is a link to the article about the new microphone. 

Ishin-Denshin Article