SUBMARINE ROBOTS LEARN TEAMWORK. Robotic Vacuum Cleaner Takes the Puppy Metaphor Too Far ... I loved that little OCD cleaner bot MO in WALL-E.
I also love dogs. But somehow, combining the two just ends up…weird. I’m talking about the “Puppy Robotic Vacuum Cleaner,” whose name is actually a bit misleading. Puppy Robotic is composed of several parts: A “mother dog” base — complete with “docking tits” (seriously!) — and four mini-Roomba style “puppy” cleaners with “docking mouths” (how else would they suckle power from their mother unit?). Each puppy has a rolling brush and suction hole for cleaning, and a display screen that relays whether it’s in cleaning mode (a smiley face), entertainment mode (a music note), or feeding mode (what appears to be a nipple).
From the images, it also looks like you can hook a remote control on your actual dog’s collar so that the cleaner pups trail it, sweeping up the animal’s muddy footprints as it trots along. There’s a lot of animal-inspired robotics out there: robot smartbirds, baby robo dinos and sneaky robot snakes, to name a few. Can Business Be Crowdsourced? 135 Real-World Examples. Public collaboration, network effects, crowdsourcing - call it what you will, the read/write web is based largely on projects where the value of the whole is greater than the sum of countless parts.
Those parts are contributed by individual people all over the world, often for free. It's world-changing stuff, but can businesses make effective use of this paradigm? Anjali Ramachandran, a strategist at London-based digital agency Made by Many, has compiled a very useful list of 135 real-world examples of businesses leveraging crowd contributions online. From small projects like the collaborative advertising creation project FatMuffin to big company efforts like SAP's Ecosystem, this list is great for inspiration and context. The web is proving to be quite disruptive to all kinds of old approaches to doing business, but there's still a shortage of case studies when it comes to new paradigms like crowdsourcing. The Crowdsourcing List is itself a crowdsourced effort. 10 examples of crowdsourcing. The mind-bendingly awesome podcast RadioLab once told the story of a 1906 country fair at which attendees were invited to guess the weight of a large ox.
Hoping for a cash prize, about 800 people made guesses, though no one got it right. Afterward, a statistician analyzed the written guesses and discovered something shocking: the average of all the guesses was a mere one pound away from the exact weight of the ox. The moral? Sometimes a crowd can be smarter than any one of its members, even when they're not actually working together. This is just one of the many, many things that fascinates me about crowdsourcing, the idea of taking almost any task and farming it out to the masses. Today I wanted to highlight a few clever uses of crowdsourcing, just to show how it's quickly changing almost every aspect of online commerce, research and even human interaction.
The list begins, in no certain order, after the jump. We Are Hunted James Patterson's AirBorne Galaxy Zoo GooseGrade CrowdSpring Brand Tags.