Brent Sordyl's blog

A spin-off of Finnish software development company Nodeta, Flowdock aspires to help developers and others sift out actionable bits of knowledge from ongoing conversations and make them retrievable. Their team messenger services allows separation and tagging of conversational elements.
(Link: Flowdock Tries to Help Turn Conversation to Knowledge)

Yesterday, California’s Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool, IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California’s IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 23 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives.
(Link: Idea Management – Innovation Management – Crowdsourcing – Suggestion Box – Customer Feedback)

Integrates with your site.

Our engine makes it easy to show your users personalized recommendations and similar content or products based on data you’re already collecting.
(Link: Directed Edge – Home)

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.
(Link: Zotero – a personal research assistant. inside your browser)

Bloomfire enables organizations to harness the other 90% by empowering individuals to quickly and easily teach and learn from each other. Unlike restrictive traditional learning systems that focus only on the tip of the iceberg we offer a system that allows your learners to create a real, fresh, and valuable self-managed learning environment. Right on time and right for you.
(Link: Bloomfire – Start Yours Here)

Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” In our very early testing it’s a pleasure to use, but we’re going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.
(Link: Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots))

Consumers are left to do their own hacky research on product review sites; reading product reviews and in the pinch literally just asking friends what is good. To add to matters, ecommerce search is broken. If I search for “Canon Digital Camera” on Amazon, I get 24,992 results. ( http://bit.ly/6g9aFR ) Are there really 24,992 Canon digital cameras? The tech sector has not employed enough computer science at this problem. Worst of all, a lot of times people are getting ripped off.
(Link: The Ecommerce Scam – @alexdmoore’s posterous)

While RUNmyERRAND is a place to outsource small jobs, what we’re actually doing is harnessing the power of a community. Social networking has become quite popular in recent years and capturing this essence, and leveraging it to get real things done, is some pretty exciting stuff.
(Link: RunMyErrand: Post your errands and get connected with local Errand Runners immediately!)

CrowdClarity™ allows you to tap into the knowledge of your employees. How?

* You set up “markets” that ask a specific question like: how many farm tractors will be sold in the US in May 2009?
* You encourage your employees and even your distributors to bet on the outcome.
* CrowdClarity aggregates the answers from the “crowd” and provides you with an accurate answer much earlier than any other method.
(Link: CrowdClarity™ allows you to tap into the knowledge of your employees)

Hunch also has an impressive interface, designed by one Dr. Fake and her team. It is unique angle for finding information: decision trees and finding correlations between strange, simple questions that describe us as individuals. It also would be terrible for someone going through any sort of emotional/personality growth. As the person changes. so would the decision trees, causing radical shifts in the person’s profile. It would make the decisions shown by hunch too unpredicitable. This however, hopefull, is only a small percentage of the population. Apparently they have started to work on issue of emotional focal points with the final question (what is most important to you) but still, I wonder if identifying them, or focal points in general, much earlier one by rating the importance of the question, would affect the decision tree. That being said, choosing decision trees strike me as smart.
(Link: Hunch review from The New York Tech MeetUp)