I have always been fond of a good t-shirt with a clever/humourous tag or design. I often find myself looking for my favourite tee at music festivals and outdoor gatherings, even distilling it further in my mind to giving top honours in both male and female categories. And for those who've followed my blog, you will know I enjoy the concept of crowdsourcing.
I stumbled upon this WSJ article on Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt business that solicits designs from the best and largest design team anyone can have: the online community. The two teenage start-ups, Jake and Jacob, ask for submissions, have people vote for them online and then print only the most popular designs. Nothing like accessing the distributed knowledge on the Web, from design to focus groups.
From an initial investment of $500, they now have a business with an annual revenue of $15M. Nice work.
The question is whether crowdsourcing is a collaborative endeavour or simply a way to find people with great skills for a great price.
Threadless receives about 150 design submissions a day. Each one remains posted on the site for a week and those winning the most votes from more than a half-million registered users are chosen. Winning designers get $1,500 in cash and $500 worth of merchandise. Threadless has received 150,000 submissions to date, with only 1 percent of those chosen for production. Even famous designers who have entered the contest have failed to win.
I like their t-shirtin' style.
/dp
Joost finally has a competitor in the P2P IPTV market with the appearance last week of Babelgum. With many pundits hyping this as the next big thing, these applications allow you to flip through channels (or create your own perosonalised channels) and then stream shows straight to your computer. Both have heavy backing with Skype and Kazaa legends Niklas Zenstrom and Janus Friis financing Joost, while FASTWEB founder Silvio Scaglia is behind Babelgum.
Joost has been greatly benefited by first mover advantage and early buzz with major content deals with Viacom, CNN, Sony, and the NHL and even taking some of these partners on as investors. Babelgum is currently only streaming more generic content, although it has just signed Spike Lee and is screening some of his movie footage.
The big difference is probably in the social networking side, with Joost offering chat and other social widgets, while Babelgum apparently having none.
Early reviews of the application and interface pitch Babelgum as behind the Joost eight ball at this stage, but all agree that competition in this exciting area will ultimately drive innovation, and that's clearly a good thing.
Meanwhile, I'll keep spending the odd lunchtime watching Ultimate Fighting on Joost, less so for the lure of the content, but more because I love the new technology.
/dp
There are lots of "search and discover" music websites out there, but one I am using a bit more at the moment is MusicMesh. I really like the interface and the fact it gives me reviews, wikipedia links, related YouTube videos and more. I guess the one downside is that I am not 100% in agreement with some of the search results it gives me in terms of related artists. However, it is improving over time. I have just purchased Xavier Rudd's new album "White Moth." On typing it in, I noticed the new album is not yet included, not so great, but it did give me Sufjan Stevens, which is not a bad genre match. This is a site worth keeping an eye on, but quite honestly, it could go either way.
/dp
