Amazon, one of the initiator of the “on-demand” trend has recently showed it still wanted to innovate in this through several major announcements :

Mechanical Turk : the crowdsourcing marketplace is now more accesible to nonprogrammers by offering a Web-based editing tool. People are now able to create a task online get their work done.

Checkout by Amazon : Amazon is challenging eBay and its payment solution Paypal and offer to ecommerce websites a complete payment service handling most of the issues linked with payment (taxes, shipping charges…)

Amazon Simple Pay : allows Internet users to purchase on third-party websites using their Amazon account.

$12 Million investment in Elastra : Amazon is part of a Series B financing round of Elastra, which provides services that helps companies to deploy and manage systems in the cloud.

Nowadays your portable gadgets like mobile, laptop, navigation system may be useful wherever you are through “cloud”. That means this devices are not just at your home, at the office or in your wallet, but can easily be accessed by hooking up to the huge memory of the Internet “cloud” with portable devices.

“There’s a lot of buzz about this. Everybody wants to be connected to everything everywhere,” said Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp.

Cloud computing for mobile devices is taking off with the expansion of high-speed wireless networks around the world.

“You’re in a car driving someplace. Not only do you want directions, you want weather reports. You want know what are the best hotels around, where are the restaurants,” DiDio said.

That kind of information is available in cars — and most other places — via mobile phones, “netbook” laptops hooked up to wireless air cards and even high-end navigation systems.

The cloud has been around since the mid-1990s when Web pioneers such as Hotmail, Yahoo Inc and Amazon.com Inc started letting consumers manage communications, appointments and shopping via the Internet.

Expansion came after companies such as Google Inc offered free programs similar to Microsoft’s Word and PowerPoint, using an ordinary PC hooked up to the Internet, or a wireless handheld computer, or phone such as Apple Inc’s iPhone. Nowadays you can shoot a photo with your mobile phone and email it to a free photo-editing site such as Picnik.com. Rearden Commerce offers a “personal assistant” that manages airline bookings and restaurant reservations via Research in Motion Ltd’s BlackBerry device.

Netbooks

The Internet cloud, which also stores photos, music and documents that could be lost if a mobile device or PC were damaged, also supports huge social networks such as Facebook and News Corp’s MySpace.

“Cloud computing is going to accelerate. It’s a no brainer,” said Roger Entner, an analyst with Nielsen IAG. “The stronger the wireless networks become and the more ubiquitous they become, the easier it is to put things on the cloud.”

PC makers including Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Asustek Computer Inc have been successful in promoting “netbooks” — a class of PCs introduced over the past two years that are essentially stripped down laptops, but smaller and less expensive. They are designed primarily to access the Web.

Nine of Amazon’s 10 top-selling laptops are netbooks, which have little storage capacity and generally do not come with DVD drives. In the past, consumers paid a premium for smaller laptops, which often were high-end models.

“Netbooks hit an immediate sweet spot because of the price point,” said Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle.

A new twist

Back in the mid-1990s, Hotmail, now owned by Microsoft Corp, pioneered the use of a Web-based service.

Today Web-based email is one of the most widely used and easily accessible cloud services.

It works on ordinary laptops and netbooks. But it is rapidly gaining traction on “smart” mobile phones that share many functions with PCs. They include sophisticated devices such as the Blackberry and iPhone, as well as a new generation of handhelds from companies that include HTC Corp, Nokia and Palm Inc.

Analysts expect Internet companies to focus more attention on cloud-based applications for consumers in 2009.

“There’s no way to stop it,” said Enderle of the Enderle Group. “It’s just a case of getting more and more consumer offerings based in the cloud.”

What is Artemis Eternal?

Artemis Eternal is a professional sci-fi fantasy short intended for film festivals and traveling screenings. The film is the premier crowd-funded, professionally-led, studio-quality film with absolutely no studio intervention, and the way production is approached tackles issues of media consolidation, independence and a lack of diversity in cinema as well as eliminating the middle-man and connecting artist to audience in a direct, meaningful way. The project Artemis Eternal has tremendous vender and community support and is funded independently by you via the award-winning web experience.

Jessica Mae Stover wants independent funding for her movie project “Artemis Eternal,” so she’s turning to social media for a  “Crowd-Funding” drive.

The idea is simple enough: visitors get to follow the entire process. Contributions for the film range from $1+ with the contributor getting an online credit for the contribution, $25+ gets the contributor a credit in the film, and $100+ gets credit in the film and “Wingman” status that offers name credits on the “silver aurum,” the development map on the front page of the movies website. So far the project has raised $40,000 of the $100,000 required to produce the movie.

The idea is being pitched as cutting out the middleman, and breaking “new ground on a new formula for film finance, production and exhibition.” You can follow the process on the Artemis Eternal website here.

Johannesburg - Inflation may be easing but SA’s companies could help further stave off costs were they to adopt ‘crowdsourcing’, tipped to be the latest buzzword in the constantly morphing world of online community relations, says FNB.

The SA bank is hoping that crowdsourcing will become the best alternative to outsourcing in terms of cost and effectiveness for small and big business.

FNB is testing the programme using its own business test case, but iconic clothing range, Levi’s, is adopting it next.

“My prediction for 2009 is that crowdsourcing is going to be one of the biggest buzzwords,” said FNB Premier Banking social media strategist, Andy Hadfield, who is promoting the concept.

Hadfield shared insights of a crowdsourcing pilot project called ‘IdeaBounty’. which posed an internal business problem generated by FNB to an online community which it then asked for creative solutions.

To provide an incentive to participants, called ‘creatives’ in FNB’s online lexicon, a prize of $2 500 was offered. A panel of judges has already sat with the winner, who will be disclosed shortly. (The winner hails from Paris, no less.)

Is it better than outsourcing? Could be, said Hadfield, who said the new process saved money and added to the pool of knowledge.

“Crowdsourcing is untapped in SA. We have over three million broadband users in the country. That’s a lot of brains that we can tap into,” he said.

“If we had to hire 800 consultants as a think-tank, it would mean there would be more brains on board and more hours that we would have to pay.The costs would just grow exponentially. With crowdsourcing, the costs just stay the same,” he said.

Hadfield had also admits one disadvantage of crowdsourcing was that the community would: “think we are just a big ugly bank trying to steal all their ideas.

But by keeping the online community group closed - except to the judges - the online community’s intellectual capital would be preserved. Feedback would also be provided to the “creatives” within the online community.

“We have to be transparent,” he said, adding that another advantage of a closed group would be that the bounty, or winnings, could also be higher.

Only Hadfield and the CEO of premium banking, Robert Keip, sat down to review the ideas to avoid leaks, assessing each idea on practicality, novelty and effectiveness, and then providing feedback while interacting with the community every time.

Hadfield said that with campaigns like this, feedback is not normally given. “Sometimes you submit an idea and if you’re lucky, in six months they might just get back to you.”

In crowdsourcing, “interactiveness was necessary to keep people coming back to you with more ideas,” he said.

In terms of the FNB pilot project, “creatives” had to find ideas on how to get FNB’s premium clients - those who earn an annual salary of R350 000 or more - to switch to online banking, as a large portion (30%-40%) of their premium bankers weren’t using online banking.

“You’d assume that someone uses internet banking when they earn more than R350 000 a year, but a lot of them don’t.”

Overall, the campaign received over 130 submitted ideas, of which 60% came from SA and 40% from the rest of the globe.

It seems clear that the current US primaries represent an important political watershed. I am not talking about race or gender. I am talking about the use of the Internet in campaigning. This was prefigured last go around in Howard Dean’s campaign but this time it is central to Obama’s success. Whatever your political orientation, it is clear that Obama has been remarkably successful at mobilizing people and money through the network.This is the thrust of an intriguing article by Joshua Green in the current issue of the Atlantic. It talks about the use of communications technologies in his campaign.

There is much of interest in the article, but in term of the regular interests discussed in these pages, I was particularly struck by one major theme: the combination of social networking techniques and the diffusion of connectivity through mobile and other devices have allowed Obama’s campaign to scale very effectively, both in terms of numbers participating and amount of funds raised. He is easily raising more money than other candidates, and Green comments “it’s possible to track the network effects in the growing fund-raising numbers that seem to arrive in every larger denomination ….”. In February he was raising nearly $2M a day.

On scale:

“If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.”[The Amazing Money Machine]

On social networking, Green talks about My.BarackObama.com in these terms:

The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one … that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone an choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barak Obama cry “Yes we can!” and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too. [The Amazing Money Machine]

And a nice example of hyper-connectivity:

Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign - to win their commitments right there on the spot. [The Amazing Money Machine]

Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong? In this authoritative and fascinating new book, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative-even when you’re alone. (That “eureka” moment in the bathtub couldn’t have come to Archimedes if he hadn’t spent so many hours arguing and comparing notes with his fellow mathematicians and philosophers.)

Sawyer draws on compelling stories of inventions and innovations: the inventors of the ATM, the mountain bike, and open source operating systems, among others, to demonstrate the freewheeling ways of true innovation. He shares the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, to show us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity.

InfoWorld talked to dozens of vendors, analysts, and IT customers to tease out the various components of cloud computing. Based on those discussions, here’s a rough breakdown of what cloud computing is all about:

2. Utility computing
The idea is not new, but this form of cloud computing is getting new life from Amazon.com, Sun, IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts of the datacenter. Other providers offer solutions that help IT create virtual datacenters from commodity servers, such as 3Tera’s AppLogic and Cohesive Flexible Technologies’ Elastic Server on Demand. Liquid Computing’s LiquidQ offers similar capabilities, enabling IT to stitch together memory, I/O, storage, and computational capacity as a virtualized resource pool available over the network.

View the Original post from Infoworld.com here

This news came from Nokia.com

N-Gage gamers direct future developments

If you are one of those who is interested in startups and also like to dabble in stocks or trade stocks then Startup exchange is for you.

Startup exchange, which is now in alpha phase  is a part of the Tradevibes . Startup exchange is a virtual trading exchange where members trade stocks of tech startup companies. TradeVibes describes itself as the best way to discover, research and discuss hot startup companies and Startup Exchange is one of the products that is offered by the users to maintain their interest in the core product.

In joining Startup exchange you give 100,000 virtual dollars and you can start right away. Trading in stock of the tech startups trying to earn virtual money. The winners are declared every week and there are prizes for the highest earner (return) and for that member who has the highest net worth that week. The prizes are interesting ranging from a meeting with a tech entrepreneur to Wii.

Startup exchange is a good example of how crowd computing can be used to generate konwledge. In the case of Startup exchange crowd computing is used to predict the stock markets. The concept is interesting as Tradevibes uses this game to evaluate the value of the tech startups. In their own words “the prices of the companies in the exchange represent the community’s view on the valuations for these companies”. They hope to attract enough members so that they are able to predict the trends in the actual market.

If you want to explore more about Startup exchange then head to their blog which has more information.