innovation

It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."

V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's … Read more

If you're a person who would gladly relinquish the task of parking your car to a computer, there may be a Volkswagen in your future.

Last weekend, Volkswagen Group of America and Stanford University's School of Engineering hosted a dedication ceremony on the Stanford campus for the new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) that included the "first ever" autonomous parking demonstration by a driverless car.

The car, a VW Passat called Junior, was developed jointly by VW and Stanford and is the same one that finished second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Driverless cars have … Read more

Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.

Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise … Read more

There's a little panic over the fact that Bing's market share dropped last month, but you have to remember, folks, Bing is young. Rafe puts it in perspective for us. Also, Kindle gets a price cut and goes worldwide, yo. That's big. What is also big is the keylogger network that's hijacking everyone's Web mail accounts. We can help you out with that, a bit.

Another Kindle price cut…and it goes wireless internationally http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/10/06/financial/f210208D88.DTL&tsp=1 … Read more

Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.

Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder), Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen … Read more

It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction … Read more

I've just returned from the IDSA conference in Miami, and I'm both convinced that, in ten years, there won't be an IDSA conference to go to - and that isn't a bad thing. I don't mean this in a disparaging sense; I enjoyed the conference, caught up with old friends, made new friends, and learned a bit. But a trend that I've observed at past conferences is only more evident this year, and it's patronizing to continue to skirt what is becoming increasingly obvious: the … Read more

SOUTHBURY, Conn.--IBM's "green" data center here is kind of like a techie version of the "This Old House" television show. But in this case, the project was to build a showcase for energy-efficiency computing, rather than construct a new addition for a suburban home.

IBM's main problem was data center sprawl. Five years ago, internal IT staff could barely keep up with growing demand for computing resources from employees, causing an expansion from one data center location to four--a situation that was costly and inefficient.

Now, those four data centers have been consolidated … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--At some point during the TechCrunch50 conference it became evident that the Web 2.0 floodgates are no longer open.

Maybe it was when conference co-organizer Jason Calacanis asked one of the panels of judges what they'd thought of a round of pitches from just-launched social-networking start-ups like inbox aggregator Threadsy and photo-sharing iPhone app Clixtr. Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and former Facebook exec who will be portrayed as a "Silicon Valley bad boy" in the film adaptation of Ben Mezrich's dot-com scandal tome "The Accidental Billionaires," leaned his elbows on the … Read more