The average company in the United States faces more than 300 lawsuits, and companies with more than $1 billion in revenue face 556 lawsuits. That has increased demands for an automated way to collect, sort, cull, analyze, and present company emails, documents, and other materials to reduce the cost of manually complying with legal and regulatory discovery requirements. Despite that, legal departments and IT departments are not collaborating as much as they should, according to a survey of 250 senior IT managers sponsored by Recommind.

The survey results show that only 21 percent of IT managers who work for companies that average more than 17,000 employees said e-discovery was a “very high” priority. And only 37 percent said their legal and IT are doing a better job of working together than they did a year ago.

Part of the problem, according to Recommind, is who is accountable for these issues. The legal department “owns” e-discovery, according to 73 percent of the surveyed IT managers, as well as records management (47 percent of respondents) and data retention (50 percent of respondents). Yet, 72 percent of the time, it is the IT department that makes the decision on what technology to buy to implement those policies and procedures.

These conflicts are complicated because there aren’t clear technical specifications for e-discovery projects, survey respondents say. Only 29 percent said the IT department clearly understands the technical requirements of e-discovery while only 12 percent felt the legal department understands the requirements. This leads to a lack of confidence that e-discovery will be implemented properly, and a lot of finger pointing when things go wrong. Only 27 percent said IT is “very helpful” during e-discovery projects, and only 16 percent said the same about the legal department.

“This data should serve as a wake-up call to enterprises and industry alike that we have a lot of work ahead of us if we are to create repeatable, accurate and cost-effective e-discovery response systems,” Craig Carpenter, Recommind vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. “If enterprises are to minimize information risk and sustain growth during the economic downturn, IT and legal must communicate regularly, have a complete understanding of their respective roles and collaborate through each step of the e-discovery process, from project scoping to vendor selection to implementation to the actual mechanics of an event.”

Recommind, which sells an Information Risk Management platform used for compliance, email categorization, and e-discovery, is using the survey results to sell its risk management platform and encourage enterprises to take a proactive stance when it comes to meeting the demanding requirements of legal e-discovery and stricter regulation, which are forcing many companies in specific markets to keep corporate documents and emails for longer periods of time. That means more material to store, sort, and analyze.

The vendor is one of hundreds that are pushing to grab a piece of a still-growing market. There are more than 660 vendors in the e-discovery and automated litigation support services and software market, according to the Website of Socha Consulting. The overall e-discovery market was valued at around $2.8 billion in 2007, $3.3 billion last year, and will pass $4 billion this year, according to the Socha-Gelbman e-discovery survey and report.

There are a million education blogs, websites, and non-profits out there advocating for change. One beauty of change.org is its mission to bring together millions of people interested in change, and connect them to existing nonprofits already working to make the changes so many of us want, and in need of our support.

That vision - of serving as an activist portal that supports and grows existing groups collaboratively, instead of splintering them by creating redundant causes that compete with, and dilute, the work those groups are already doing - is what makes change.org unique.

Education.change.org is only four days old, so it’s early days here. One of my top priorities right now is to identify and contact as many education non-profits worth supporting as I can. And there’s no more sensible way to do that, as far as I can see, than to ask you all to pitch in by “crowdsourcing.”

Colektivo is a new crowdfunding startup that appears to be attempting to bridge peer-to-peer loans . A sort of Kiva for entreprenurs, bridging the concepts behind startups like CommunityLend and Vencorps. Startups are asked to fill out a loan application, and a group of lenders then decide if they want to make a loan to that startup.

Colektivo runs the first investment fund on the Internet managed by a group of investors. The investment fund sole purpose is to supply local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with debt financing. This synergy between SMEs and savers represents a real alternative to banks and traditional investment products. The incomes of interest generated by the loans are redistributed to the savers whereas the principal portion is reinvested in other SMEs. With a minimum investment of 100$, investors are able to buy investment fund units

The peer-to-peer loans industry has been under a lot of pressure and has lived under a cloud of uncertainty in almost every jurisdiction so far. Prosper.com was shut down by the US SEC in November 2008, and in Febuary 2008, IOUCentral launched and was then quickly shut down here in Canada.

You’d think “the wisdom of crowds” might be a tougher concept to sell now that vast crowds of businesses and consumers have been proved spectacularly wrong about how much risk they were running. Nonetheless, a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group finds growing enthusiasm for crowdsourcing as a font of wisdom for companies as they create new products and services.

In polling last month among members of the nonprofit organization of senior-level marketing professionals, 75 percent said they regard “consumer collaboration groups/crowdsourcing” as “highly effective or effective in developing new products and services” — up from 62 percent saying so in a similar survey the previous year. (For purposes of the survey, business crowdsourcing was defined as “the practice of accessing the untapped knowledge of one or more of a company’s constituent or stakeholder groups — or other relevant business experts — to create something new of value.”) This slightly exceeds the number who said the same about the company’s internal R&D resources (72 percent).

However,  Just 39 percent of respondents rated “tapping knowledge from the general public” as highly effective or effective in assisting development of new products and services.

Then again, “traditional consulting/professional-services firms” didn’t fare terribly well either, rated as effective or highly effective by 49 percent of those polled. That compares with 65 percent according such status to “employee ideas/contributions,” 67 percent to “business-to-business customer collaboration” and 67 percent to “‘expertsourcing’ from executive business networks.”

Part of the appeal of crowdsourcing lies in a sense that it’s a money-saver. The report says that “over one-half of survey takers felt crowdsourcing approaches for developing new products and services could produce cost savings ranging between 10 percent to 30 percent over more traditional approaches.”

A month ago, one of the big discussion topics at the Nationale Vakdag Fondsenwerving conference in Holland was Online Social Network Fundraising so it was great just after the event to spot a new online initiative coming from Holland looking to capitalise on the supporter engagement opportunities now available through Web 2.0.

Play It Forward is a start-up that plans to launch a new online giving platform next month, offering individuals or groups of individuals the opportunity to fund specific projects around the world.

Play It Forward looks like it’s going to have some special aspects to it that could make it stand-out as a distinctive player in the online nonprofit project crowdfunding world.

Project-wise, it looks like donors should have plenty to choose from too. Already over 70 partner organizations are listed on the site, representing a highly diverse range of activities around the world.

In finance terms, 100% of your donation will apparently go to the project chosen, which is great - as it’s exactly what donors want. However, just how this is being achieved is not entirely clear. The organisation’s FAQs explain that it will funded through the interest on donations, but I couldn’t find any specifics about how long they will hold donations to accrue interest. Hopefully they have sufficient funding in place to get them through the start-up and launch phase, because I’m guessing it could take a while before they start seeing donations at the volume required to generate sustainable income from interest payments alone.

Overall, even though their main site has yet to launch, from the content of the holding site you get a great feeling of fun and energy - which contrasts with the more ‘corporate’ feel of some online giving sites - and I love the way they have so wholeheartedly embraced the potential for project crowdfunding through people’s online social networks. As they describe it on the site, “The thing that brings it all together is the social network, connecting friends, projects, field workers and charity organisations. All communicating and working together to create a positive change. Play it Forward is more than just donating to charity. It’s a team sport. If the world wants education for all, or a wild life park to protect endangered species, it’s a matter of inviting friends.”

The world of the favicon is a harsh one. Of all the challenges facing graphic designers, compressing a company’s identity into an area 16 pixels square has to be one of the toughest. Some firms, such as Apple and Adobe, catch a break, since their graphically simple logos translate well into favicondom. But others find the task daunting, not least of which, it would seem, is Google.

For the first eight and a half years of its existence, Google was content to use a simple G, surrounded by a colored border, to mark its place in browser address bars and bookmarks, as shown at left. But last summer that old friend vanished, replaced by the small g below. The change was driven by the need for an icon that would perform better on mobile devices and was the pick from hundreds created by Google designers. Okay, no problem there, the original G was both generic and boxy, so you can see the logic in going for the small g. I don’t remember the switch taking place but apparently users weren’t happy with the new look. True, the g was so modest as to be easily overlooked and it had a Web 2.0-ish faint rounded container that was a bit corny. So it was back to the drawing board.

But instead of Google’s staff designers trying harder or, better yet, hiring a top design and brand management firm, this time around Google inexplicably invited anyone and everyone to submit their take on what the next version should look like. Response was apparently heavy and from the submissions Google picked the work of Brazilian computer science student André Resende, shown at left. Another take on the small g, this one sports the four colors used in the Google logo. I could have lived with it but the Google designers saw fit to “improve” it by moving the g to the left, thereby making it look like… what, exactly? They also added a second area of blue, reducing the simplicity of the original submission. The dominant color is now green, the color least present in the Google logo.

Piqqem is a new way to predict the movement of stocks.  It’s new because it leverages the wisdom of crowds.  Specifically, Piqqem captures users’ stock predictions, analyzes them, and then displays aggregate results back to the users, enabling them to see what ‘the crowd’ thinks about particular stocks.  As opposed to other social investing sites that try to find the best pickers in the crowd, Piqqem aggregates the opinion of the crowd, therefore capturing and displaying the stock market wisdom of crowds.  Please see the attached summary for a longer elevator ride.

How is this different than other expert communities like CAPS and Covestor?

Piqqem differs from other sites in that We believe the crowd has more knowledge than any single individual. Instead of looking for the best individual stock picker and weighting votes based on investment ability, which is what CAPS and other social investing sites do, we look at aggregate opinion and allow everyone to vote as much as they want. This orientation towards crowd wisdom manifests itself in our crowd indicators, such as top rated stocks, most active stocks, stocks with most rising sentiment, and stocks with most falling sentiment.

Ten thousand cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.

TheSheepMarket.com is a collection of 10,000 sheep made by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to “draw a sheep facing to the left.” Animations of each sheep’s creation may be viewed at TheSheepMarket.com

Marketers now view crowdsourcing as a more effective way of creating new products and services than consulting or internal R&D, according to a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG).

The percentage of respondents who saw crowdsourcing as effective or highly effective for new product and service development shot up from 62% a year ago to 75%, overtaking R&D which fell slightly from 73% to 72%.

The percentage who rated traditional consulting and professional services firms as effective or highly effective fell from 54% to 49%.

In the same period, familiarity with the term crowdsourcing – which describes organizations using web 2.0 tools to tap the knowledge of stakeholders and experts through open invitations for help and ideas – rose from 30% to 72%.

Richard Guha, chairman of MENG, said: “Tapping the wisdom of crowds over the internet can be enlightening for an organization in many ways, providing marketers with valuable insight to expand their brand mind share and market share. However, like any good customer insight, interactive ideation or predictive analysis effort, it’s important to frame the issue, manage the process and carefully assess the value of the collective data.”

The survey was conducted last month in association with online social network Crowd Forum.

Lau Chak Onn and Alvin Yu are crazy over Threadless T-shirts, and between them they own almost 100 Threadless T-shirts. Threadless prints and sells T-shirts to the public that are designed through contests, and two former high-school classmates figured that the same concept could apply for greeting cards and so Foldees.com was born.

“(The greeting card business) is a very traditional-type industry with very old players, so we reckoned it could use a good old kick -in-the-nuts,” says Lau Chak Onn, or Chak as he prefers to be called. “What we’ve always wanted to do is to bring the joy of greeting cards to the youth (ages 13-35). How we plan to do it is through a combination of great designs that relate to our generation, and giving them the means and reasons to send greeting cards.”

Like Threadless, Foldees.com solicits designs from the public through various competitions it runs with prizes up to US$2,500, which it then prints and sells. “We have a firm belief that with the right designs and the right functions on the site - such as full integration with Facebook to track birthdays and recommending cards based on their Facebook profiles - youngsters will rediscover the joy of sending real physical cards versus e-cards or stodgy Hallmark-type stuff.”

Since its launch in mid June last year, Foldees.com has grown to a modest 1,500 users, with about 700+ pageviews a day. Its primary source of traffic is through the contests it runs, with designers publicizing their designs on their blogs, and general community and media interest. That may seem like a small number, but Chak says the people in his community is extremely active. “Each card gets about 17 comments and rated up to 200 times each. If there are two consistent comments about our cards, it’s that the designs are bizarrely cool, and the quality of the cards is astonishing. This is part of the reason why our designers are fiercely loyal to our site.”

“If you are a designer, do join one of our contests! Even if you don’t win some of our fantastic prizes, you’ll still get royalties and loads of feedback about your designs.”