crowdsourcing
Ford is bringing crowdsourced navigation app Waze to its SYNC 3 infotainment system, the companies announced at CES 2018. The app will be available via Ford’s AppLink tech, offering up…
Waze gains support for HOV lanes, motorcycles and voice activation
Waze is getting a few new features today that are either firsts for any navigation app, or just functionally super convenient, including an option to optimize routes for travel by…
A company called Confido raised a small ICO by selling special CFD designed to allow “safe and trustless cryptocurrency payments. According to ICODrops they raised their goal of about $400,000…
Toronto begins sharing traffic data with Waze, and vice versa
The city of Toronto has begun sharing its traffic data with navigation service provider Waze. Google-owned Waze will also provide access to its real-time traffic and road conditions data back…
Where human intelligence outperforms AI
With every new trend comes a counter-trend. And so despite the current excitement over the wonders of artificial intelligence, one company is betting that human intelligence can still deliver solutions…
Google launches crowdsourced TV show and movie reviews, but only in India
Google has added a new feature that allows web users to contribute their own movie and television reviews right within Google search results – a step towards the possible implementation…
The Kaggle data science community is competing to improve airport security with AI
Despite being slow and invasive, the TSA doesn’t have a great record at catching threats. With the help of the Kaggle data science community, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)…
Reddit’s new location tagging feature continues its push to become a social network
Reddit is continuing its march towards becoming a social network after it added location tagging to its mobile app. The service is famously known as “the front page of the…
CityStream gives cities real-time road data
CityStream from Nexar harnesses the company’s dashcam app and allows municipalities to make use of the crowdsourced data. The idea is to share traffic patterns and behaviors so that cities…
CommonBond now offers direct student loans alongside debt refinancing
CommonBond, one of the biggest of the second generation of startups tackling online lending, has launched a direct student loan product as it expands its footprint in the debt business.…
Google partners with VCs to host its own machine learning startup competition
On the heels of acquiring data science community Kaggle, Google is launching a machine learning competition of its own for startups. Google is targeting early-stage companies taking an innovative approach…
With a $1.5M seed round, Eloquent Labs mixes AI and Mechanical Turk to fix customer service
Keenon Werling would be the first to agree that conversational AI is regularly overhyped. So instead of taking the traditional approach and gloating about a glitzy new deeper learning algorithm…
Kaggle hosting $1M competition to improve lung cancer detection with machine learning
Kaggle, the nearly ten year old startup that hosts competitions for data science aficionados, is hosting a competition with a $1 million purse to improve the classification of potentially cancerous…
Mall cop robot startup Knightscope is launching a “mini-IPO”
Knightscope, the Dalek-like mall security robot startup we’ve mentioned here before has decided to do one of those new crowdsourced “mini-IPOs.” Also referred to as Regulation A+, these types of…
Five industries that should take a cue from Netflix and crowdsource parts of its tech
By crowdsourcing for solutions using machine learning to utilize the abundant data available across these five industries, we can find relevant signals and patterns among the noise and make these…
This Indian team plans to be the first private company to land on the moon
TeamIndus, a private company located in Bangalore, India, is the one and only Indian entrant into the Google Lunar X-Prize, the international competition to land a private spacecraft on the…
Google to shut down Map Maker, its crowdsourced map editing tool
Since 2008, Google has run an online tool called Map Maker that allows anyone worldwide to contribute data to Google Maps. Now, that tool is shutting down. The company announced today in…
CrowdFlower announces a scientific advisory board as it works to combine AI and crowdsourcing
When crowdsourced labor company CrowdFlower recently raised funding from Microsoft, co-founder Lukas Biewald told me his team was focused on technology that allows businesses to supplement algorithms and artificial intelligence with human…
Kenyan startup Ushahidi launches a crowdsourced campaign to monitor the U.S. election
The Kenyan software company Ushahidi has launched a campaign to observe the upcoming U.S. elections. The operation, called USA Election Monitor, will track voting irregularities reported via website, email, Twitter and SMS…
Uber’s latest redesign aims for a quicker pickup
No, the little feature that tells you your Uber driver is 2 minutes away (but feels like it’s more like 10 minutes) isn’t going to change. But Uber is rolling…
Moovit and Rock the Vote team up to get you to the polls
Transit app Moovit and the nonpartisan, nonprofit Rock the Vote organization are working to get you to the right poll on time. On election day — Tuesday, November 8 —…
Weed on-demand startup Eaze inhales $13 million in funding to grow into new markets
The “Uber for weed” startup Eaze has grown quite a bit over the last year and it intends to expand even more. To get it there, Eaze has closed on…
The interactive navigation app Waze, with its 65 million active monthly users, has partnered with Esri, which provides geographic information systems (GIS) software to 25,000 state, local and national governments.…
Amazon to spend $2.5M on university competition to build “socialbot”
If you need an Uber, Amazon Alexa has your back. Unfortunately if what you need is a conversation buddy, the personal assistant isn’t quite up to the task. In an effort…
Alphabet, Apple and Uber may be spending billions on exhaustive new mapping technologies to power the self-driving car revolution, but there’s a new generation of companies betting that a combination of crowdsourcing…
Self-driving Uber vehicles spotted on the streets of San Francisco
Several folks started noticing self-driving Uber cars in downtown San Francisco yesterday, fueling speculation the ridesharing company could soon be deploying autonomous vehicles for commercial use right where it all…
YouTube enlists volunteers to moderate its site via a new “YouTube Heroes” program
Earlier this month, YouTube launched its own social network of sorts with the debut of YouTube Community; now it’s enlisting help from viewers to help moderate it, along with other…
Glance Clock keeps your life together with subtle yet vibrant notifications
There’s something intriguing about low-fi solutions to high-tech problems and the Glance Clock is no exception. In today’s world, a missed Uber can be the difference between a confidence-inducing 5.0…
Don’t break regulation — get a policy strategy now, startups told
The days of startups being able to hit the ignition and, Uber-like, accelerate away from the law are done. The regulation disruption party is over. That was the loud-and-clear message…
Google Maps is turning its over a billion users into editors
Google has begun to further tap into the power of the crowd in order to improve its Google Maps application, the company announced this morning. This is being done through the…
