Tag: Crowdsourcing

LiveTweeting, Real-Time Event Coverage With Crowdsourced Translation

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LiveTweetingLiveTweeting is a new real-time interactive web application that was launched as a tool for multi-language live coverage of events around the world, based around the popular micro blogging service twitter.

The way it works is that a group of people present at a certain event would tweet their updates covering the event as it happens, while on the other hand a number of multi-lingual twitter users would simultaneously translate and tweet the updates in another language. Both versions, the original and the translation, are aggregated on the LiveTweeting site.

People following the live coverage of the event (both original and translation) on the service are able to vote on the tweets they like by starring them. No user registration is currently required to follow an event’s coverage or to vote on the updates for it.

LiveTweeting

LiveTweeting was officially launched earlier today (Dec 9th 2009), just in time to be able to cover the Le Web 2009 conference in English and have its translation crowdsourced into Arabic.

The idea behind the service was conceived by Samer Karam (Lebanon), developed by Beshr Kayali (Syria) and designed by Maya Zankoul (Lebanon). Everything was put together over the span of one week.

# LiveTweeting

Argaam Opens Up To Contributions Through Alpha Beta

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Alpha BetaArgaam, the Arabic financial portal, has just launched Alpha Beta, a section of the portal for informed visitors to contribute through posting their analysis of news and events taking place in the market, as well as any information that they might have that isn’t necessarily common knowledge to everyone interested in the stock market and economy in general.

Alpha Beta is open for direct contributions in the form of articles, news, opinions, analysis about regional or worldwide stock markets, investment opportunities; as well as comments and followup on articles published on the portal.

Argaam hope to create a vibrant open environment for discussion and sharing of new ideas, enabling the portal’s visitors to connect, interact and exchange opinions and information that will help enrich and develop the investment culture in the Arab world.

The portal’s editors will go over submitted material before it is published to make sure of its quality, accuracy and reliability, as well as its adherence to the guidelines for these articles, which ask for them to be focused, unbiased and precise among other criteria.

It’s an interesting move from Argaam, attempting to tap into the knowledge of the crowds for insider information about a financial market where there’s more to each story than what figures in the official press releases and news, in addition to all that takes place behind the scenes.

As with the parent portal Argaam, Alpha Beta is available in Arabic only.

Bayt Launches Contest To Crowdsource Explanatory Videos

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Bayt.comAfter asking people to help them redesign their website in a previous initiative covered here; Bayt, the leading Middle Eastern job site, has now launched a new video contest soliciting help from creative people in creating a visual style for a series of multimedia videos that can clearly explain what Bayt.com does and how their users can get the most out of the website.

Dan Stuart, Head of Strategic Initiatives at Bayt, created two scripts for the videos, and launched a microsite where he asks people to submit one video that shows their use of an original visual concept to one of his scripts.

The winning video concept will receive the contract to create more than three trilingual videos for Bayt.com. Also, both the winning designer and design will be promoted on Bayt.com, in all contest-related PR, and promoted on the contest Microsite.

The deadline for submissions is March 6th, 2009.

For more information, to submit videos and for the legal details, you can check the contest microsite that can be found here: icandraw.bayt.com

Leading Arab Job Site Bayt.com Crowdsource New Design Online

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Bayt.comBayt.com, the leading job site in the Arab world, are looking to give their website a facelift, and instead of fully doing it in-house or going to some design company to work on it for them, they’ve decided to try and crowdsource the design online.

From their side, they’ve done a lot of thinking and benchmarking internally, and their staff came up with a preliminary design, that they’re now opening up to different people online to get a fresh perspective on it all, and how everything can be laid out and designed.

They’re doing this through 99designs, where they’ve posted a contest asking people to submit their designs and the way they see the website.

The initial mock-up files featuring Bayt’s own ideas and the elements they want included are provided, with a number of guidelines, what they’re looking for and need in the design, and the no-nos that designers should avoid.

The winning design gets a $500 prize.

It’ll be really interesting to see how this experience works out, and what comes out of it in the end. Really nice move from Bayt.com to try and explore different ideas and artistic directions.

The contest details, how to take part in it, as well as the already submitted designs can be found here: Bayt.com Homepage Facelift.