Soulseek, which was creted by former Napster programmer Nir Arbel and visibly resembles early versions of Napster, is not one of the most popular filesharing apps. It doesn’t have the mainstream appeal of Kazaa or Limewire, nor does it garner the press attention of BitTorrent. And that’s all probably fine with its users, who tend to gravitate toward more independent musical fare. But Soulseek has done something the others haven’t — made the jump to the iPhone.

Developer Errrick created iSlsk, a new filesharing client for jailbroken iPhones that works with the Soulseek network, by basing it on open source versions of the client for the Mac. “I saw all the capabilities this little gadget had and then thought ‘why didn’t someone already do something like this?’” he told TorrentFreak.

iSlsk lets iPhone users search for and download files directly on their phone. The software also imports downloaded files to the iPod music database so that they can be played with native iPhone controls.

This is not an application you'll ever see in the upcoming official iPhone application database. Apple certainly won't let applications that a) potentially facilitate illegal file sharing and b) cut into their iTunes Store revenue into their official app distribution channels. If iSlsk and other music and video sharing applications catch on, will we continue to see jailbroken iPods even after the release of the official app store? Even if Apple starts selling phones that aren't tied to AT&T?

A video of the of the app in action is below:

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the “wisdom of crowds” (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We’ve written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we’ll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.

The official definition of crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.” Last year we laid out a set of rules for successful crowdsourcing, which might be helpful to keep in mind when employing the services of any of the companies listed below.

Graphic Design

One of the most well-developed areas of crowdsourcing services on the Internet is graphic design. Generally, these sites exist in the form of graphic design contest web sites where clients put up a call for submissions for a piece of graphic design work, and designers compete for a cash prize by submitting designs.

crowdSPRING is the latest entry into the increasingly crowded crowdsourced graphic design service market. The service officially launches today, after a $5000 design competition it held over the winter to design the crowdSPRING site itself — a wise move because it shows that the founders are willing to “eat their own dogfood” and also attracted an initial set of designers to the site.

crowdSPRING is well set up, offering legal protections for both buyers and sellers and a guarantee that all projects posted on the site will get at least 25 entries. crowdSPRING charges a 15% commission on all posted projects.

99designs is very likely the largest graphic design contest site on the web. From its humble beginnings as an area on the web development discussion forums at SitePoint, to being spun off from the SitePoint Marketplace a few months ago, 99designs has experienced astonishing growth to become a leader in its market. The site now has 18,000 registered users — 11,000 are designers — with 150 being added each day. $10,000 worth of prize money is put up for grabs on the site daily and it serves 5 million page views per month.

SitePoint co-founder Mark Harbottle tells me that many designers use the site for lead generation, and that often, winning designers find that contest holders will turn into long term clients who forgo the crowdsourcing option on future projects to work directly with a designer whose work they know they like.

GFXContests is a forum-based design contest site founded two years ago that seems to attract mostly logo design jobs. Full disclosure: I was one of the co-founders of GFXContests, and sold the site earlier this year. I am no longer involved with it. An interesting note: the site’s logo was designed via a design contest held on the SitePoint Contests service (now 99designs).

DesignOutpost is one of the oldest design contest services, sometimes credited with originating the idea — though that’s up for debate. The site is forum-based and relies on a “design team” (pre-approved designers) to fill out its crowd.

Designcontest.net is another large, forum-based design contest site that also relies on the pre-approved “design team” concept.

Pixish (our coverage) is a design and photography contest marketplace launched in February by well-known designer Derek Powazek. Unlike many of the design contest services in this round up, prizes on Pixish aren’t always cash.

Others

A number of large web development discussion communities host contest areas, including NamePros, v7 Network, and Webmaster Talk. Meanwhile, Grapic Competitions is a directory of individual graphic design competitions (not affiliated with the above sites), many that offer cash prizes.

Programming

Top Coder uses a competition approach to leverage is distributed network of over 50,000 developers to create software for its enterprise clients.

The software development community — especially the open source community — has long used “bounties” to help lure developers to certain tasks. microPledge (our coverage) is an escrow service that allows people to do three things: set up, contribute to and pay out software bounties, accept donations for projects, or set up a fund/bounty for an in house project (as a developer). In essence, that means people can give the crowd an incentive to work on a software development project.

Like microPledge, Cofundos.org (our coverage) is a web service for offering and managing software bounties. Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. Expanding beyond software development (to say, event funding) is something that microPledge has also hinted at pursuing.

Customer Support

Fixya is a question and answer community, in which people ask and answer technical support queries. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers for tech support. Uniquely, though, Fixya has partnered with some companies to provide an official channel for crowdsourced tech support. Most recently, the site launched a co-branded version of their service for Best Buy.

The goal of Get Satisfaction (recent coverage) isn’t really to crowdsource customer service, so much as to make it easier for people to get access to companies they have an issue with. However, people do provide one another with help on the site — similar to at Fixya — and companies can use it to monitor customer support issues to more quickly tell if an issue isn’t just an isolated incident.

Research & Development

IdeaScale (our coverage) does for research and development what Get Satisfaction does for customer service by providing Digg-style feature request boards. Companies are able to tap the “wisdom of the crowds” to learn what their customers want from their product or service.

featurelist.org is very similar to IdeaScale, but more public, not branded, and focused on software.

FeVote is another suggestion board web application that lets companies crowdsource their research and development. Like Get Satisfaction, FeVote aims to put the control in the hands of the users by encouraging them to make suggestion boards for their favorite companies.

CollabAndRate is “organic collaboration” software that enables companies to poll their customers, employees, or partners for new ideas. Essentially, this is the same idea as the three sites mentioned above, but with a slightly different pitch.

Whatever You Can Imagine

Amazon’s Mecahnical Turk service (recent coverage) is what the company refers to as an “on-demand workforce.” In reality, Mechanical Turk is a 100,000 strong member crowd that people can call on to complete a wide variety of tasks. See the 10,000 Cents art project as example of how one can leverage Amazon’s crowdsourcing service.

Kluster (our coverage) is a recently launched crowdsourcing site that utilizes a crowd workforce to create any sort of project. The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can work, though it seems likely to be used mostly for intangibles (graphic design, copy writing, programming, etc.).

Think of BigCarrot (our coverage) as microPledge or Cofundos.org for just about anything. BigCarrot specializes in “inducement prizes,” which are basically cash bounties for achieving a specific goal. In fact, inducement prize contests and software bounties operate on essentially the same premise — dangle a carrot and let talented people fight for it. Large-scale inducement prizes aren’t easy to organize, though, so BigCarrot hopes to make it easier by crowdsourcing the prize creation process and letting anyone create or contribute to a prize

Tomorrow a new breed of investment firm called Prototype Invest will officially launch, though the site is available now. Prototype Invest is a unique type of early stage investment firm. Rather than put money into startups, Prototype supplies technology in exchange for equity. This is an investment firm for anyone who has ever been told, “Ideas are a dime a dozen, kid. Come back when you have a working prototype.”

Founded by web developer and Denmark native Michael Christensen, Prototype Invest will provide people who have an idea but don’t possess programming or design skills a way to take their idea and turn it into a prototype to show investors. “Think of us as a Venture Capital firm providing software, web applications and guidance, instead of money,” says the company on the site. “All we ask for is equity in your idea - you don’t have to pay anything for our services.”

The company has a network of developers and designers which it will employ to create prototypes or full products based on ideas submitted by entrepreneurs. In return, it will take an equity stake in the app it helps create. Prototype Invest will evaluate ideas submitted to it based on merit as well as the character of the entrepreneur who pitched it.

“There are so many great ideas wasted for the wrong reasons - we are here to change the rules of the game,” Christensen told me. According to Christensen, any entrepreneur who is unhappy with the results of their relationship with Prototype Invest can walk at any time.

Prototype Invest has a lot riding on trust — in fact they say on their front page that “without trust we simply can’t exist” — which means that ideally, anyone willing to fork over an idea to the service has not only been told that ideas are a dime a dozen, but also truly believes it. Prototype will work out contracts and the amount of equity taken on a case by case basis, and Christensen tells me that they’re open to signing an NDA with entrepreneurs prior to being pitched.

But there will need to be a certain amount of trust on both sides that ideas won’t be stolen or misappropriated.

Along with development services, Prototype Invest also offers to help entrepreneurs pitch their idea (and newly minted prototype) to investors, which makes sense given that Christensen and team will only make money if the app is a success. At some point in the future the team is also considering offering Y Combinator-style microfunding.

Will Prototype Invest work? It’s hard to say, but there is little doubt that they won’t lack for ideas being sent their way — they are a dime a dozen, after all.

Rock band Radiohead has already pushed the envelope in the past year by first releasing their new album under a pay-what-you-want price scheme in October, and then calling on fans to create a music video for any of the album’s songs in March. Now the band is at it again, teaming with Apple, makers of iTunes and GarageBand, to launch a public remix contest.

The contest offers up the single “Nude” from the album for remix. The band has for sale on iTunes “stems” for the bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums for the song and anyone who purchases all five gets access to a GarageBand file that can be opened in GarageBand or Logic.

Until May 1st, the public can vote for their favorite remix, and remix authors can use a MySpace or Facebook widget to allow fans on social networks to vote for them. The prize, though, is just that Radiohead promises to “listen to the best.”

So interesting idea, but like the rest of Radiohead’s innovative marketing techniques, this one also feels a bit gimmicky. Requiring entrants to purchase the source files, and then offering as a prize only that the band will listen to the winning entries is somewhat lame in our book. Still, the site has already collected 142 remixes, so some great new music could come out of this for Radiohead fans.

Further, Radiohead has perhaps inspired many other mainstream musical acts to take the plunge and embrace alternative methods of distribution. Nine Inch Nails released an album via BitTorrent, REM open sourced their music videos and streamed their new album on iLike, and Pennywise put their album on MySpace. We may be able to credit Radiohead with making distribution experimentation cool, which can only mean a win for consumers in the long run.

Image credit: Steve Rhodes

Leave it to Radiohead, the pioneering alt-rock band that released its latest album last fall under a pay-what-you-want price scheme to a lot of fan fare (and some criticism of gimmickry), to push the envelope further. The band is now asking fans to create their first music video for the album in a contest utilizing online YouTube of animation (and Crunchies finalist) Aniboom.

Radiohead is hardly the first act to call on fans to create a music video. In the past couple of years the Decemberists, Modest Mouse, Junior Boys, Willie Nelson, Bjork, Jonathon Coulton, and The Hold Steady, among others, have all held video contests. The Beastie Boys went a step further and relied solely on fan footage for an entire concert DVD. Even Madonna, known for lavishly expensive music videos, held a “Make My Video” contest with MTV for “True Blue” in 1986.

The Radiohead In Rainbows contest is being run a bit differently in that they’ve partnered with an independent video site, are focusing on animation, and are using a tiered voting approach that allows fans to be involved with picking the winner. Further, any song on the album is eligible for being turned into a video, which means fans will in many ways get to define the band’s first single.

Until April 27th, anyone can submit a storyboard or clip to Aniboom detailing their idea for a Radiohead video. Users will vote on the 10 best, who will then each be given $1,000 to create a one minute version of their concept. The band will choose the winner, who will receive a $10,000 budget to make the full video for the band in June.

Check out the storyboard example below:

Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.

The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can work.

Kaufman got the idea after the Bevy, one of Mophie’s most popular products, was designed by the crowd at Macworld using sketch pads and a precursor to the system that evolved into Kluster. The keychain/bottler opener/iPod shuffle case was one of Mophie’s best selling products, and it was designed in just 72 hours by a crowd, and launched as a product just 2 months later. Kaufman realized he was potentially onto something.

The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or “phase”), people submit what are called “sparks.” Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit “amps” — which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign “watts” to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.

Then an algorithm that takes into account “each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history” goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).

The whole concept is similar to the one behind Derek Powazek’s new site, Pixish (our coverage). The main difference is that where Pixish is strictly for design related tasks, Kluster is for anything suited to crowd creation. And at Kluster, the crowd is also being relied upon to pick the best result.

During the TED conference, Kluster is hoping to use their system to create a new product in 72 hours. It will be unveiled on the last day of the conference, March 1 at 8am. Unfortunately, the Kluster site has been having a lot of problems, so getting in to participate might be easier said than done. There are $15,000 in phase prizes up for grabs.

Can lightning strike twice? Or was the Bevy a fluke? Kaufman admitted earlier this month that right now most companies see participation in Kluster as a means of viral marketing to connect with their die hard fans. It will take a few hit products to come out of the Kluster process to prove that it is a viable way for companies to conduct their R&D. Do you think it will work? Let us know in the comments below.

Outages aside, there’s no doubt that the rise of web scale computing platforms, like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, have lowered the barrier of entry for Internet startups. Going completely serverless would have been unheard of during the late-90s dot com boom, but new cloud computing platforms have made it possible for small companies to scale quickly, easily, efficiently, and cost effectively. However, even if services like Amazon’s have made hosting and scaling a web app more simple, there is still a good deal of server management involved. Enter Mosso, a Rackspace-backed company that merges the idea of cloud computing with the familiarity of a managed, shared environment.

In September of 2006, Richard MacManus theorized that “in the future [...] the big Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, will operate ’server farms’ that become too cost efficient for other companies not to utilize.”

So far only Amazon of the big web companies have opened their hosting architecture up to outsiders, but a number of smaller players have tapped into the growing market for cloud based hosting solutions. Mosso’s platform seeks to match the scaling power of a compute cloud with the ease and simplicity of a shared hosting environment.

Unlike competitors such as Joyent or Amazon, Mosso’s system does not offer customers root level access to their servers. Instead, servers are preconfigured with a range of software options and are fully managed similar to a shared hosting environment. Keeping their hosting platform standardized is what allows them to easily monitor and scale the service as needed. For example, last week Mosso experienced a significant spike in load on its PHP cluster and added 10 servers without customers noticing, company executives told me.

Today, Mosso is announcing a new payment scheme that they feel is an industry first for a cloud computing platform. According to Mosso, scaling on Amazon or other compute cloud options means adding more instances, which means you’re still paying on a server by server basis. Mosso’s new pay structure is based 100% on requests, which they feel is more accurate in terms of charging you only for the resources you use.

Mosso’s pay structure starts with a base fee of $100 per month, with a rate of $0.25 per gigabyte of bandwidth, and $0.50 per gigabyte of storage. They also charge $0.03 per 1000 requests with 3 million included. Being charged per gig on bandwidth and storage is a familiar pricing structure for anyone on shared hosting or a managed server.

The company is also announcing an updated control panel and will soon roll out a MySQL backup utility that will take automatic snapshots of databases down to the table level. That sort of utility wouldn’t be possible on EC2, accoring to Mosso, because every instance is configured differently.

Or at least, they’re supposed to be announcing these things today. As I write this Mosso’s homepage has been kicking up a 404 for about the past 45 minutes. Some of the sites they host still appear to be online, but not being able to keep your company homepage up doesn’t really inspire confidence in your hosting platform. Maybe they’re more like Amazon than they care to admit…

They say imitation the most sincere form of flattery. If that’s true, then Paul Graham must be about to drown from all the praise. His Y Combinator project, which has funded nearly 60 startups since 2005 and has arguably inspired a new emphasis on smaller scale investments at traditional venture capital firms, has collected a cadre of imitators. Lots of them, from all over the world. While Graham may not like it, there are a large number of start up incubators following the model he created with Y Combinator and handing out microinvestments in web startups in return for a small stake.

If you’re a startup founder looking for a bit of seed funding to let you quit your day job and finish your web app or service, our guide to seed fund incubators will help you figure out where to apply. (Be sure to also read this great account of what it’s actually like at one of these programs.)

Name: Y Combinator

Location: Cambridge, MA and Bay Area, CA

Investment: $5,000 + $5,000 per founder (i.e., $15,000 for two founders, $20,000 for three)

Stake Taken: 2-10% (usually about 6%)

Companies funded: Too many to list (about 58), but many you’ve heard of, like Reddit, Scribd, and Xobni (Wikipedia has a full list)

Next application deadline: April 2

Name: TechStars

Location: Boulder, CO

Investment: $5,000 per founder, up to $15,000 (3 founders)

Stake Taken: 5%

Companies funded: 9 so far, including Villij, and Intense Debate

Next application deadline: March 31

Name: SeedCamp

Location: London, UK

Investment: 50,000€ (about US$74,000)

Stake Taken: 10%

Companies funded: 6 so far, including Tablefinder

Next application deadline: August 12

Name: YEurope

Location: Vienna, Austria

Investment: 5,000€ per founder, up to 15,000€ (3 founders)

Stake Taken: 2-10%

Companies funded: Soup.io

Next application deadline: None

Name: Summer@Highland

Location: Lexington, MA

Investment: $7,500 for individuals or $15,000 for teams (split evenly)

Stake Taken: ?

Companies funded: 8

Next application deadline: Not yet announced

Name: LaunchBox

Location: Washington, DC

Investment: Between $15,000 and $30,000

Stake Taken: 4-8%

Companies funded: None yet

Next application deadline: March 14

Name: DreamIt Ventures

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Investment: Between $10,000 and $30,000

Stake Taken: 4-8%

Companies funded: None yet

Next application deadline: March 12

Name: Bootup Labs

Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Investment: ?

Stake Taken: ?

Companies funded: None yet

Next application deadline: None / not yet launched

Name: Bootphase

Location: Atlanta, GA

Investment: ?

Stake Taken: ?

Companies funded: None

Next application deadline: None / Not yet launched

See also: Charles River Ventures’ QuickStart loan program, in which seed round startups receive a loan of up to $250,000 against a future Series A venture round (which CRV has the option to participate in). And see the annual Google Summer of Code program, in which stipends are awarded to students working on open source projects.

Steve O’Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google’s OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O’Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.

“It seems that almost everybody got a little carried away about what OpenSocial really stands for, falling for Google’s attempt to outmaneuver Facebook and paint the latter as the big bad wolf of data lock-in,” writes O’Hear. “Except OpenSocial isn’t really designed to give users the ability to move their data from one social network to another.”

Instead, he says, OpenSocial’s goal is to standardize widget development. According to Canter, many of the social networks that have signed on to OpenSocial never intended to open their network and allows users to transport data, regardless of whether that was part of Google’s plans. Rather, networks wanted access to Google’s OpenSocial gadgets (their word for widgets) in an attempt to strike back against Facebook’s successful platform.

This is something Marshall Kirkpatrick picked up on shortly after Google announced OpenSocial. “As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this ‘OpenWidget’ - though the press wouldn’t have been as good. We’ve been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?” he wondered in November.

And if Google is really just trying to standardize widget development, are they the ones we want at the helm? Snipperoo’s Ivan Pope argues that “we’d be better off working from the ground up rather than getting suckered by a Google et al inspired bit of marketing flammery.” I’m inclined to agree. Other than the seeming lack of data portability as part of the OpenSocial initiative, one of the other chief concerns that our own Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about was whether Google was exercising leadership or control.

“Still remaining is the question of Google’s control over the standards creation process. It’s not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large,” he wrote.

So if OpenSocial is really not about data portability and interoperability between networks (except as far as widget creation is concerned), we’ll have to look elsewhere for that. But that’s not to say that OpenSocial is a total wash — widget standardization isn’t such a bad idea. As we wrote in November, there are plenty of winners when OpenSocial is adopted. “The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people — whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn’t have developer APIs), app developers,” we said.

The question is, do we want Google to be leading the way in widget standardization? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The vast majority of the blogosphere exists in the long tail, and as we have often talked about recently, attracting an audience in the long tail is very hard to do. So it stands that many good blogs go virtually unread. Automatic aggregators, like Techmeme, end up acting somewhat like gated communities that are dominated by the biggest blogs — who link to one another and prop each other up. Paid syndication like Blogburst is hit or miss and also favors the more prominent bloggers who have name recognition.

Brooklyn, NY-based The Issue aims to bring the best of the wider blogosphere into focus via a daily, human edited online newspaper that aggregates quality blog content in a single place.

The Issue is presented with a very clean, newspaper-esque design that organizes content into six main categories: US, world, business, science & health, art & culture, and musings (think: editorials). The paper also highlights a handful of "featured stories" (major headlines) across multiple topic areas, and each day The Issue presents one "Issue of the Day," which it explores in depth with a handful of insightful posts. Previous issues have tackled laws in virtual worlds, hate crime legislation, the diamond industry, and entrepreneurship in America.

The Issue’s editors seem to attempt to take a balanced stance to contentious issues by presenting writing from multiple sides. For example, when writing about Blackwater, the controversial American private security firm operating in Iraq, The Issue presented posts from both conservative and liberal bloggers, as well as supporting information that was more non-partisan in nature.

Along with daily news and debates, The Issue has some other interesting features, including book reviews (reprinted from outside sources), political cartoons, and a pair of daily art photographs. However, one of the online newspaper’s most intriguing features is the “What Ever Happened To…” section, which endeavors to revisit forgotten issues and update with recent information from the blogosphere. Recent W.E.H.T. entries include ebola, radioactive waste, and the hole in the ozone layer.

The Issue, which launched in July, relies on a volunteer network of editors to keep the content flowing. The site is only monetized with a single Google Adsense strip on most pages, so it is unlikely that they’re making enough money to hire a paid editorial staff. Regardless, I’ve been reading The Issue for about a week now since co-founder Jean-Baptiste Cossart emailed to pitch us the site, and I have been exposed to a good number of insightful blog posts by writers whom I probably wouldn’t have found. If Cossart’s objective is to bring attention to the quality writers working in the long tail of the blogosophere, so far, mission accomplished. I’ll definitely be adding The Issue to my daily reading list.

See also Newser, another human-powered (partially) news aggregation service that launched earlier this year (our review) — though, Newser does not focus on the blogosphere.