Last week I wrote about the ‘rigged’ EDGE poll, that the EDGE had to eventually take down because they suspected someone was trying to bias the results. It was later revealed that a handful of IP addresses were responsible fro the bulk of the votes–presumably the fake ones. An IP address defines a unique internet connection, but not necessarily a unique device. You can try this...
A couple of months back, I wrote a short post about a Malaysian project that was successfully funded on kickstarter. Today, I can proudly say that Malaysians continue to surprise me in untold ways. Pitchin.my is the Malaysian kickstarter, and recently it saw a successful funding of a project on it’s website–that literally brought tears to my eyes. The project entitled “Sponsor a...
Crowdsourcing has come to the Asia Pacific region–and it’s come in a big way. A couple of months back, I was contacted by the people organizing Crowdsourcing week in Singapore to attend the event, unfortunately due to personal commitments I was unable to make it–bummer! Crowdsourcing week is a great idea that brings a whole bunch of great speakers including Jennifer Gustetic, an...
Crowdfunding is exploding, and kickstarter is exploding with it. In 2012 alone, Kickstarter successfully helped start 18,109 projects, from pledges of nearly 300 million. That’s a lot of cash from just random strangers hoping to help someone else realize their dreams, or to help the public in general. Noteworthy projects include an open-source geiger counter to detect radiation levels in...
A couple of days ago, I was invited to blog about crowdsourcing trends for a big event happening in Singapore on the 3rd to 7th of June. It’s called Crowdsourcingweek and if you’re interested in learning more about crowdsourcing there’s a whole boat-load of interesting speakers and events going on–so I definitely encourage you to attend. The article was about crowd...
A couple of months back, I wrote about I was helping kickstart the brilliant guitarist Igor Presynakov. I was getting a bit worried that this was yet another kickstarter failure, as I had just receive a couple of updates and nothing much else. But then things got interesting, 2 weeks before Christmas I got a surprise package in the mail, and it was a beautifully packaged crisp IGGYFIED CD. I felt...
Just the other day, I walked into an MPH bookstore and saw something that looked oddly familiar. It was a book titled “When I was a kid” and I couldn’t help but think I’ve seen this somewhere. It took me a while, but suddenly it hit me–this was the book from kickstarter. A couple of months back, I wrote a post for a kickstarter initiative by a friend of mine, in that...
Kickstarter is a great crowdfunding platform for budding entrepreneurs, musicians and inventors to get their creations from inside their heads into peoples hands. I personally have funded my favorite youtube guitarist on kickstarter and I should be receiving an album anytime soon–with my name in the credits. How cool is it to get your name printed in the credits of an actual physical CD...
Continuing my series on bigdata and Google bigquery, I’ve decided to share a rather interesting snippet of information regarding our very own Malaysian Airlines and their wikipedia page. First, just to illustrate how important Wikipedia is in general, the Malaysian Airlines Wikipedia page gets roughly 30,000 hits per month. That’s just one page of Wikipedia getting more hits than my...
Wikipedia is quite possibly the greatest repository of information mankind has ever seen. It’s built around an amazing concept of allowing anyone the ability to create, document and moderate information in real-time, and so far the concept has proven successful–some may even argue that it’s too successful. For the past two days, I’ve been writing about Bigquery and Big...