Today's Startup: PinDone
Today’s internet startup PinDone is a new and innovative way of geting jobs, tasks and other things done. PinDone is a technology platform for crowdsourcing personal errands and household services on demand. It presents a win-win solution for busy individuals who look for on-demand help and for those who want flexible jobs.
For busy individuals
PinDone is a great way to get stuff done. It provides requesters real-time 24/7 access to a trusted network of local errand runners, who will complete their requests for whatever pay they are willing to offer. With PinDone everyone can crowdsource tasks from their daily to-do list anytime, anywhere they want. The service aims to be the best virtual butler for everyone. It goes beyond providing just another online directory of personal assistants and household services like Craigslist or Angie’s List. It gives users on-demand help from a trusted network of local runners anywhere they go as well as the ability to develop personalized, automated solutions to the difficult task of balancing their busy lives. PinDone provides users On-demand help from a trusted network of local errand runners anywhere they goPersonalized automated lifestyle solutions as we learn more about their needs and preferences.
Crowdsource anytime, anywhere
You can crowdsource personal errands and household tasks anytime, anywhere. By using this service you will not get stuck with an expensive personal assistant who only works from 9 to 5, and 5 days a week. Instead, you can find a runner to dash across town to pick up burgers from your favorite diner in the the middle of the night. Or you can ask a runner to bring you an iPhone charger.
Pay as you go, at your own price
You to set your own price for each task posted. There’s no subscription fee or retainer payment required for you to get help from runners. In fact, you can even get your stuff done as a guest. The more you use PinDone for your daily tasks, the faster it can help you automate your lifestyle. You can set automated requests for such tasks as picking up dry cleaning, buying groceries and more.
An experiment in opening up the Guardian's news coverage
guardian.co.ukGuardian announces ‘open newsdesk’ — paper will publish (not all) of the stories it is working on, and hope to get early guidance from readers. Definitely trying to swim upstream ahead of curation into creation.
It's Like an Online, For-Charity, Theme Party... For Profit?
(image credit: Patrick Hoesly)
Increasingly, websites and organizations are popping up where you can spend, grow and give your money – all in the same place.
Places like Kiva, where you can make microloans to people in developing countries, or Kickstarter, where you can make donations to all sorts of little projects and causes that need money, are – by millennial standards – kind of old. However, these sites are sort of like big, anything-goes charity ragers. Websites like WorldPennyJar.com and GreenFunder.com, on the other hand, are more like theme parties.
These sites focus on specific causes – WorldPennyJar rasies money for disaster relief and GreenFunder focuses on “green” businesses and projects. That way, projects and organizations that need support don’t have to compete with a million other random people, and people who want to support a specific cause don’t have to spend forever searching through the crowd.
How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel
theatlantic.com(via The Atlantic) By Jared Keller, you can follow him on Twitter here.
“In less than a decade, Wikipedia has grown from a frequently ridiculed experiment to one of the world's most popular websites. The online encyclopedia has reached near-ubiquity among Internet users and is often invoked as a synecdoche for user-generated content communities, crowdsourcing, peer production, and Web 2.0. As such, it is hardly surprising that a number of high-impact statistics demonstrating the project's unexpected success are frequently mentioned in the public sphere. As of April 2012, there have been 528 million edits made to the English-language version and a total of 1.29 billion edits across all language versions. Other commentators describe the project in terms of its article content, not the amount of work put into those articles, and such figures are equally daunting: 19 million encyclopedia articles contain 8 billion words in 270 languages, and the English-language Wikipedia alone has 3.9 million articles containing 2.5 billion words. While most of these and other statistics are backed up by a substantial amount of empirical research, estimations of the total number of labor-hours contributed to Wikipedia are one notable exception. However, this has not stopped champions of the project from stating with more and less certainty that Wikipedia is one of the largest projects in human history... ...[A] well-documented and often-repeated labor hour estimation is that of the Empire State Building, which took 3,000 laborers a total of 7 million labor-hours to construct. Figures for the construction of the Channel Tunnel report a total 170 million labor-hours, while estimations of the Great Pyramid at Giza range from 880 million to 3.5 billion labor-hours. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was written and published by 3 employees authoring 24 pages a week for 100 weeks, which is around 12,000 labor-hours assuming 40 hour work week... ...Summing the duration of all continuous editing sessions and single edit sessions, we identified 41,018,804 total labor-hours expended in the English-language version of Wikipedia... Extrapolating to all language version of Wikipedia based on the total number of edits made to each project, we estimate that 61,706,883 total labor-hours have been contributed in edit sessions for non-English language Wikipedias, for a total of 102,673,683 total labor-hours to all Wikipedia versions.”
—R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker, Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia (PDF).
FJP: That’s approximately 11,720 years of peer production.
