Crowdsourced Food Flavors

Source: CScout Trend Consulting

People feel strongly about their favorite snack foods. This hasn’t
escaped food manufacturers, who are tapping the power of the Internet —
more specifically, social networking sites — to crowdsource ideas for
new products. The enthusiasm of online communities helps these
participatory campaigns succeed without the need for expensive
advertising or highly paid product developers.

Schoolgirls lead the way ahead of 2012 games

Source: Telegraph Finance

Between now and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics there will be a steady flow of business ideas launched that will aim to tap into the potential interest in sports and athletics in particular.

New institute to explore how world’s poor use technology to spend, store and save money

Source: Putting People First

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries.

Invent-a-Game: Kids Design Online Game For Cash Prize

Kids ages 5 to 19 can stop playing Elf Bowling and start working on their own online game. A new contest gives kids the chance to submit their idea for the online game of the century to a major game developer-and possibly earn huge cash.

Source: Impact Lab

Threadless - the crowdsourcing company

At dinner on Monday Daniel Ek of Spotify described Threadless as the ultimate crowdsourcing business and this post has been building in the back of my mind since then.

Threadless is a t-shirt e-tailer and the cool thing is that they crowdsource both supply and demand.

Source: The Equity Kicker

Community 2.0: Juicy Campus

I missed this Juicy Campus furor (+, +, +) in recent months yet found this intriguing story on Current TV.

The predicament detailed here reminds me of what many of our clients fear - anonymous social terrorists undermining brands on the social web by unfairly calling the brand a slut - with no recourse available to the maligned brand! Is user anonymity a threat to brands on the social web?

Source: Fallon Planning

Custom-made chocolate bars

While candy bars with personalized labels are a dime a dozen, a German startup offers a tastier kind of customization, letting customers design their own chocolate.

The online ordering process at Chocri is similar to the customized muesli and coffee concepts we've covered—both of which also happen to be German.* After selecting either white, milk or dark chocolate, customers pick the ingredients they'd like to add: fruit, nuts, spices or bits of candy. Options range from the familiar (almonds, hazelnuts and raisins) to the adventurous (cumin, gummi bears and gold dust), and up to five ingredients can be selected. When they're done mixing and matching, customers pick a name for their very own 'meine schokolade', which is printed on the label. They're also given a unique product code for easy reordering. Prices range from EUR 2.50–6.50 for a 125 gram bar, depending on which ingredients are added. Chocri uses fair trade, organic chocolate only.

Source: Springwise

2008 Best Buy @15 Challenge with Youth Venture

Youth Venture, an organization that invests in teams of young people as they start their own sustainable social ventures, and Best Buy have the announced 30 finalists, ages 13 to 18, in the Best Buy @15 Challenge with Youth Venture.

Source: Derek E Baird

Now With a Real Business Model!

Venture capital is drying up, with less money flowing in fewer deals, but at least one company managed to score a tidy sum. On Tuesday uTest -- which crowdsources software testing -- announced it had secured $5 million in Series B financing.

Source: Crowdsourcing

Creative Youth

Every year, I have the honour of addressing thousands of fifteen/sixteen year old students on the topics of motivation, entrepreneurship and creativity. Part of the journey requires students to generate ideas after been presented with two different unrelated product. For example, a tractor and fake tan!

Source: Kevin Kelly's Blog

Mumbai and the Media

The coverage of the Mumbai attacks offered the bizarre and increasingly frequent spectacle: the news media reporting on its inadequacy. Within minutes of the first attacks, on-the-scene reports started appearing on Twitter, Flickr and citizen-media sites like NowPublic.com. Unencumbered by expensive cameras, skeptical editors or professional ethics, citizen journalists filled the breech during the early hours of the crisis, "while there was a vacuum of official information from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks," according to a somewhat breathless New York Times piece yesterday.

Source: Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing: Everything Old is New Again, and Again

Back in 2000, a tiny brand named Jones Soda used their website to ask their mostly teenage customers to suggest new flavors, names, and labels and let other customers vote on which should make it into stores. Since then, they've posted 676,653 user-created labels and become a nationally distributed brand with a cult following.

A PSFK post notes that crowdsourcing flavors, slogans and labels is the latest thing in Japanese beverage marketing.

Source: B.L Ochman's weblog

Nokia Build, this is going to be huge

Nokia now allows it customer to totally personalize their handsets. At present its limited to the 7310 Supernova but I expect it to spread to other models asap.

Nike id has been been an incredible success for Nike and I can guarantee that Nokia will spread this across its global sites.
At present its only accessible from France and the UK.

Source: Pat Phelan: Telecomms Disruptor