Crowdsourcing Science Promises Hope For Curing Deadly Disease Sarah Fortune, a tuberculosis (TB) researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, had thousands of images of multiplying TB cells piling up in her lab. Her team of graduate students were inundated: all the pictures had to be labeled; some probably held the key to combating a deadly bacteria that infects one-third of the global population, mostly in poor parts of Asia, Africa and South America. But that information was locked away in images that could take years to decipher: a single day of research could take weeks to interpret. Fortune's solution might prove to be a watershed moment in biology. CrowdFlower, a firm usually enlisted by Fortune 500 companies to farm out small data tasks piecemeal for anyone to solve, took on the challenge and designed a new protocol for the world to identify TB bacteria (you can try your hand at it here). Once the data was sent, the results were almost instantenous, says Fortune. CrowdFlower says it may now enter the science space. [Image: CDC]
10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. 1. In other words, life was going to be great. Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. So they sent me to two months of remedial programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. I know this because I ran into a guy I used to work with ten years ago who works at the same place I used to work at. 2. 3. 4.
How the Peace Corps is Building a Community of Volunteers Online When volunteers return home from service with The Peace Corps, they often want to stay in touch with fellow Corps members. Can social media help them do that? Yes, says Erica Burman, director of communications at The National Peace Corps Association (NPCA). The Peace Corps, a U.S. service program, sends Americans across the world to volunteer and develop cross-cultural understanding. Peace Corps members, who serve for 27 months, share a bond with one another. "Once a volunteer, always a volunteer," goes their informal motto. Erica Burman's organization is an "alumni association" for Peace Corps volunteers who have returned home. "Social media is really important to us," says Burman. Before the days of social media, trying to maintain a community of returned volunteers was a tedious challenge. But social media has changed that. The NPCA makes it a point to celebrate these user-created groups while simultaneously tying them to the larger Peace Corps online community.
How To Get A Job At A Startup If You Have No Skills Editor’s note: This guest post is by Justin Kan, cofounder of Justin.tv and TwitchTV. You can follow him on Twitter and read his blog. Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was interested in doing product management at a startup. He was working as a consultant, but wanted to join a company like foursquare as a PM. However, he wasn’t getting any return calls and was becoming frustrated, and wanted my advice on why. I told him this:Guess what? The risk that each party takes has to be equal. Sometimes these young people watch The Social Network or read stories about other Millennials founding companies with no experience and think they should be able to join a startup with little domain background. This is a fallacy, however. So what should you do if you want a career switch to a job at a startup you don’t have any experience in? Instead, I’d recommend a couple things. Lastly, try to give yourself some experience. Image credit: Shutterstock/IKO
The Key To Crowdsourcing? Smarter Crowds For nearly a decade, we’ve been hearing about the power of the crowd and the ability of social networks to unleash their power in everything from building an encyclopedia to helping people predict the ebbs and flows of equities markets. Crowds are a great resource and a trove of valuable information - when they work. When they don’t, it doesn’t take much to question the wisdom of the crowd. In Sunday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt gave a primer on crowdsourcing, complete with the failure of crowds to predict the Supreme Court’s recent health care decision. That decision gave critics of crowdsourcing fodder for attacking the model, but Leonhardt was quick to point out that the so-called experts and insiders are often just as flawed in their own predictions. “The answer, I think, is to take the best of what both experts and markets have to offer, realizing that the combination of the two offers a better window onto the future than either alone,” he wrote. Not All Crowds Are Created Equal
Beyond Badges: The New Rules of Gamification Foursquare does it. Mint.com does. Even NBC and Warner Brothers do it. Like it or not, gamification is here to stay. Rajat Paharia, founder of San Jose, California-based Bunchball, one of the earliest entrants into the gamification sphere, believes gamification's explosion is simple. Certianly, that's a loaded description. Build a model that's inherently social. When building a gaming aspect into your site, it's essential to let your users show off to—or compete against—their friends or online connections. "It's a way for people to show the world that they're accomplishing things," says Sims. A corollary benefit of making the gamification aspect shareable over social media, Sims says, is that it can bring new users to the site. Gamification should drive customer loyalty—all the time. Traditional marketing loyalty programs may soon become extinct. His advice? The goal isn't just to create a game. "In my mind, we're not here to build a game," says Chris Cartter, founder of Daily Challenge.
Testing a Start-up 8,000 Miles From Silicon Valley In India, water brings uncertainty: when it will arrive, how it may arrive, whether it will arrive. Anu Sridharan, a young entrepreneur from California, tells the story of a woman in India who would have had to miss a wedding to wait at home to collect water, if it hadn't been for the service provided by Sridharan's new company, NextDrop. "She could send her brother home to collect water, because she got our text message telling her that the valve had been opened," Sridharan says. Sridharan's company, NextDrop, was started out of a classroom at the University of California-Berkeley, but is being tested halfway around the world, in the "small" town of Hubli, India, population: one million. Going instantly global is a tall order for a little company with a big mission. NextDrop found Hubli, which has a cutting-edge city government with a utility board that could not afford the hefty sum of $40 million to provide 24/7 water (something, in fact, no city in India provides).
Startups, Investing, And Daily Deals: Five Questions With Mark Cuban Some think Mark Cuban is a genius, some think he’s lucky. Either way, the guy has a knack for seeing value where others may not, for locating long-term investments, and for ending up on the right side of the deal. Some may disagree with his approach, but Mark Cuban is a billionaire, and while making money is a lot easier when you have stacks of it to play with, becoming a billionaire doesn’t happen by accident. For those on the younger side who haven’t yet made their first billion, the investor’s early story should be comforting: After graduating from college, Cuban started his career (auspiciously enough) as a bartender. He later founded MicroSolutions, a systems integrator and software reseller, but it wasn’t until eight years after grabbing his diploma that he sold his first business, which CompuServe acquired for $6 million in 1990. And, what’s more, as a bonus for readers, Cuban has also agreed to answer a few of the “top” questions posted in the comment section of this post.
Exploring The “Labs” Trend in Consumer Startups Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semil For those of us who studied (or suffered through) chemistry at some point in life, images from the chem lab inspire nostalgia (or dread). White lab coats. Protective goggles and gloves. Glass beakers and measuring cups. In the world of technology companies, the “labs” concept and nomenclature found a friendly home. Big tech companies have hearty budgets to set up “labs” for their best and brightest to cook up new ideas within. Fast forward to the eve of 2012, where it’s significantly cheaper to develop web and mobile applications now that software costs have plummeted and large distribution networks exist for startups to harness, though it still remains very difficult to get discovered. Why all the “labs” startup companies all of a sudden? There are a host of reasons.