IdeaEconomy.Net

Companies are flocking to social media and crowdsourcing platforms in the hopes of finding cheaper or more effective ways to market their wares. This is understandable for we all need to make a living, however, I think the real promise of social media is bigger than just a financial transaction. People give their time and money for reasons above and beyond financial gain.

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With inexpensive access to technology and a talented team, the costs and time required to build a new business from nothing are essentially zero. Here are two recently examples of companies conceived and developed in a weekend.
Mingly
ReadWriteWeb recently wrote about the universal address book startup Mingly.
In November of last year, more than 50 people came [...]

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Spudaroo.com is new site allowing companies to crowdsource business documents like copy writing, resumes, brochures and business plans. Now you can have writers compete to create documents and companies can choose the best among many submissions. This is following crowdsourcing design sites like 99Designs and CrowdSpring, but will it work for documents?
The site is new [...]

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Crowdsourcing is a big idea, but many companies still don’t get it. Having the general public co-work on projects together just doesn’t make sense. Yet, it works and sometimes it works better than anything else.
The best example has to be Wikipedia. The idea of having volunteer writers create the content and edit the world’s largest [...]

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Here is a great video discussing the shift from the institutional control of ideas to opening them up to the world. Clay Shirky mentions examples of Flickr and Linux and how the users or community freely contribute to large projects without any material rewards. A particularly cogent example, is how mobile phone ubiquity has greatly [...]

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