It’s always fun to see how advertising jumps in the game of co-creation. Votervoter.com, which is run by Wide Orbit, is an interesting take on using YouTube-like participation. It allows you to create and publish your own political ads targeted to long tail segments.

I’m curious to see if they’ll be able to make money by most of what YouTube offers for free. I want to think they’ll succeed, but as I was forced to enter all of my information, phone number, etc, just to register, I bailed out. I get enough junk mail as it is.

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After a slight postponement, the Beta version of the CrowdSpirit platform will be launched very soon. Yesterday, invitations to the early subscribers were sent announcing the launch. Since Lionel David (CrowdSpirit’s founder) assured me things are going very well now, I expect the beta platform to be up and running by next week.

Can a large crowd co-develop electronic products from scratch? From product idea to selling the final product? Check out the following Inkling Market, and buy shares or go short depending on your expectations: Inkling Market about CrowdSpirit.

Previous post: CrowdSpirit - Consumer Electronics Crowdsourcing.

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!