Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia
Crowdbased medical diagnostics? I am a little bit skeptical - But am giving it a try. If it works out I may get a cane :)
Platform harnesses the crowds to solve rare disease cases
When doctors don’t have the answer, CrowdMed relies on the knowledge of a broad set of users in order to find out the potential causes of rare diseases.
Full Story: Springwise
Soon to be online education giant Coursera now profitable. A good sign and proof there is demand for this.
Coursera, the increasingly popular provider of free online courses, is beginning to make money.
The Silicon Valley-based company brought in $220,000 in the first quarter after it started charging for verified completion certificates, its co-founders said. The company also receives revenue from an Amazon.com affiliates program if users buy books suggested by professors.
“It’s the beginning of revenue,” said a Coursera co-founder, Daphne Koller.
» via Inside Higher Ed
Crowdsourcing: Democracy at its most fundamental.
Icelanders Approve Crowdsourced Constitution
Social media has proven successful in giving Iceland’s citizens a key to the government: For the past year, the country has used Twitter, Facebook and other sites to crowdsource provisions to its new constitution, and Icelanders seem happy with the final result.
Crowdsourcing: Coming to a government near you?
Finland is about to start using crowdsourcing to create new laws
By David Meyer, gigaom.comThe Finnish government has approved the technology behind a new ‘Open Ministry’ platform, which will act as a hub for citizens who want new laws voted on in the country’s parliament. But could that work elsewhere?
Who makes laws? In most of the…
Crowdfunding has been producing spectacular results almost daily. (See sites like Kickstarter and Rockethub for examples). So what exactly is it?
“Crowd funding or crowdfunding (alternately crowd financing, equity crowdfunding, or hyper funding) describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.” - Wikipedia
The new thundering herd. Talk of crowdfunding as a short-lived fad has largely ceased, as evidence mounts that lots of people value personal engagement with projects they help to finance.
Pentagon Pushes Crowdsourced Manufacturing
Designing and building things for the United States military is a notoriously slow-moving and costly endeavor. The time from idea to manufacturing for a new armored personnel carrier or a tank is typically 10 to 20 years.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to change that, and drastically so. It seeks to cut the design-to-production cycle to two to four years.
Full Story: New York Times
