CrowdSpirit announced that their beta platform will be launched in the coming days. All participants who joined the CrowdSpirit community here (before Wednesday 1st of August), will receive an invitation for participating to this beta testing.

CrowdSpirit is trying to revolutionize the consumer electronics business by involving end-users in every aspect of a product’s life-cycle. This is how it works: inventors submit ideas for innovative new products and contributors submit problems for inventors to work on. Members vote, define a product’s specifications, and can invest money to finance development. After a first prototype has been created, selected members test and help fine-tune in cooperation with manufacturers. Once the stage of product development has been completed, customers can purchase products thanks to the CrowdSpirit Supply chain. The community ensures the product support and recommends products to retailers. In the first stage of the project, CrowdSpirit will primarily focus on consumer electronics products with a market price below €150 or 190$. Products will be launched in parallel, so the community will be able to work on several projects at the same time.

It will be interesting to see how this crowdsourcing initiative unfolds in the coming weeks and months. CrowdSpirit is setting up a pioneering crowdsourcing business model that could have a far-reaching impact on the traditional way of thinking about business structures and companies (if successful). The most important hurdles will most likely be issues concerning Intellectual Property and Rewards. CrowdSpirit clearly states that contributors give up all intellectual property rights when they submit an idea or product, or when they help define a product (if the idea is accepted and only for a period of 12 months). I think that given the arguments they provide in their faq, this is indeed the best way to avoid some possible problems. It remains to be seen however, how people’s contributions will be valued, and how and when these contributions will be rewarded. Anyhow, a crowdsourcing initiative to keep an eye on in the months to come!

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Star Wreck Studios aims to create a platform to help independent films get made through crowdsourcing. The idea for such a platform is based on the success of their first internet-based film project, Star Wreck, which is the most successful Internet Feature Film of all time. There was no major production company behind the film, but five students and unemployed people from Tampere, a bit of blue linoleum and a few home computers. With these building blocks they created a great adventure and a motion picture that was downloaded over 5 million times so far. The big productions couldn’t afford catering for the money that went into our film, yet the end result is in many ways a historic, loved, and appreciated film.

Star Wreck Studios now intends to build a new platform to help independent films get made through crowdsourcing (the original Star Wreck film was produced with over 300 people in the credits). Think of it as SourceForge for internet-based film projects. For smart entrepreneurs: Definitely a crowdsourcing business model that can be extended to other types of internet-based projects, like writing books. For business leaders: Rather than viewing this type of open source crowd projects as a threat for your business; look for opportunities, create your own platform, pick up interesting innovative ideas from outside your own organization, and develop them internally or externally. A globally spread crowd of people is likely to be more creative than only a couple of internal experts, or at least providing some interesting thoughts for the internal experts to work on.