On July 19th, the hottest conference on the future of crowdsourcing took place in LA - Crowdopolis. This is the story of what went right & what went wrong.

This was the first major conference produced by Daily Crowdsource so we anticipated a few bumps. Waiting until we could roll out a polished off agenda would've taken 12 months of studying other conferences while planning, polishing, test-running, & polishing Crowdopolis off some more. That's not a very flawesome approach to innovation - one we closely follow & highly encourage. Since our audience has been asking for us to do this for a while, we set out to bring it to you.

Two of my close friends, Gil Weiss and Ben Horne, were identified as missing last month while climbing a new route in the Cordillera Blanca region in Peru.

Once friends sounded the alarms that Gil and Ben were overdue we all sprung into action. One friend was charged with calling the parents, one was charged with calling the embassy, another the airline, etc… My role was to deploy satellites to try to get a visual on where the guys were climbing (That's right, luckily I have access to a platform that uses satellites).

Raising money through crowdfunding got a little easier today because now your friends, family, and Internet compadres can send you money using their phone - as long as your project's on GoFundMe.

Crowdopolis is back by popular demand, and this time we're going to the East Coast. The 2nd installment will take place February 27 & 28, 2013 in New York City. This 2-day conference is geared towards Fortune 500 employees who want to learn how crowdsourcing can solve their common business problems. Today also marks the start of the interest list for anyone considering attending. Hosting Crowdopolis: Big Apple in New York finally gives a chance for the East Coast to see why Crowdopolis is considered one of the hottest new conferences.

In early 2012 I started researching all the biggest providers of crowdfunding services, and hadn’t even heard of some of the companies I researched. Life seemed to evolve around the single biggest player, Kickstarter, with others far behind. What I realized during my research, was the small players are going to stay small, while the major players are going to grow exponentially as crowdfunding matures. With crowdfunding holding such strong roots to “crowds,” it’s an obvious assumption.

We here at Daily Crowdsource consider ourselves blessed to have the ear of the crowdsourcing & tech world, and we're glad that our posts can help many of you out there crowdsource and crowdfund better every day. And, we, like no other, understand that as an organizatin becoming great at what we do can only be made more amazing by listening to our crowd.

If you're an early adopter in need of a new career, LinkedIn is hiring a Program Manager of Crowdsourcing. The fairly straightforward job description paints a picture of how LinkedIn intends to inject crowdsourcing: In a big way. This gives further validation to the crowdsourcing model, in the sense that it's a valuable work process that can be used across all industries & any size business - Valuable enough for a well-known & growing corporation to create an entire position for it.

When we describe crowdsourcing to another person, the most likely three categories we mention are microtasking/microlabor, like Mechanical Turk, Crowdfunding on sites like GoFundMe, and Open Innovation on sites like Innocentive...then we make some passing comment about collective knowledge and Wikipedia. However, we all know that there's more behind crowdsourcing than just these few models that have created a market for themselves.

In the last of my quick app reviews covering sites that push the traditional workplace out of the realm we consider universally accepted, and introduce it to the wild world of microtasking, I'll be looking at crowdsourced landing page optimization. If you're looking for an optimization platform geared towards small businesses, then look at what Pluralis has to offer. Their model is straightforward: is your company landing page not getting the conversion numbers you need? Put up a contest on Pluralis and their crowd of optimizers, web designers, and SEO gurus will get to work redesigning your site. Whoever redesigns the best landing page is the designer that gets paid. Simple stuff, right?

Classic movies can teach us a lot about life and the world today. It seems they may be able to teach us a little something about crowdfunding, too.

I recently went through quite a lengthy phase in which I was watching only Hollywood classics and film noir from the 1940s and 1950s. Of course, I eventually rediscovered the works of Humphrey Bogart and watched just about everything this silver screen legend starred in, from his first major role as notorious outlaw Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest to his most memorable –– Rick Blaine in Casablanca.