Hamey

When was the last time you used your DVD player, mobile phone, MP3 player, and wondered why that button was there, or why they seem to design purely to compete without any original innovation and creativity? That could all change with the TechCrunch40 finalist CrowdSpirit from France. We've seen how Ponoko can use crowdsourcing to shake up the supply chain for furniture, jewelery and general industrial design. ...

Do you think 50,000 people from all over the world who have never met each other could make a feature film? A Swarm of Angels is a web 2.0 community aiming to create exactly that, with a budget of £1m by gathering 50,000 people willing to contribute £25 each. The film gets released under creative commons and any profit gets put into the next project. ...

   If you need that little hit to see if your idea is viable, a new ongoing competition backed by Advanta Bank called Ideablob has just launched and might be able to help.  The site lets aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners share and compare ideas and compete for a monthly user voted $10,000 prize for the best idea.  Advanta claim that launching Ideablob is:"Supporting and providing service to small businesses ...

At the recent TechCrunch40 conference New Zealand startup Ponoko caused a stir (and managed to pull 1 million hits to their site in under 24 hours).  It is a fabulous business proposition: a matchmaking service for designers, manufacturers and consumers.  Put simply, if you are a designer (and we are talking industrial here) you can get your ideas (jewellery, coffee tables, whatever) made by a convenient manufacturer somewhere ...

Apple have kicked off their Worldwide Developers Conference with the usual flurry of announcements to surround it: New Apple website It has been a long time since I remember seeing any aesthetic changes to the Apple website, and it looks stunning now. Their old site was looking a bit dated. Check it out at www.apple.com. I particularly like this page, fantastic design, it really feels alive ...

There has been a fair deal of speculation about Joost and criticism that their content is not up to scratch. Is everyone forgetting they are in a selective beta? Obviously they aren't going to spend a whole lot of time and money sourcing cool content to throw straight in, now. I imagine they would be more concerned about making sure the software actually works, especially ...

Australian blog-to-email service Zookoda has been acquired by PayPerPost for an undisclosed amount. Zookoda was started in May 2006 and went up for sale in September 2006. With 10,000 bloggers sending emails to 2.3 million people, the numbers speak for themselves. PayPerPost has the controversial business model of paying bloggers to write about specific things. There has been a lot of talk about whether this will corrupt the ...

There are two repeated questions about Web 2.0: What is it? How do you make money from it? There is plenty around to answer number 1 (appropriately, the Wikipedia definition provides a good explanation), but here is a pocket-sized look at making dough from web 2.0.