b-uncut.com Launches International Artists’ Store

b-uncut, the leading crowdsourcing platform for artists, today launched a revolutionary artists’ store. It takes the already popular concept of a museum shop to a whole new dimension by offering hundreds of popular consumer goods products such as clothing, housewares, gadgets, cards, posters and more each designed with original art from b-uncut’s crowd of emerging, international artists.

And whereas museum shops are offline and promote the Masters and big name artists, the b-uncut Store is on the Web and supports emerging artists.

Lovers of art and those seeking everyday products at everyday prices designed with original art know when they buy goods from the b-uncut Store that they are supporting emerging artists from around the world – a FAIRTRADE FOR ARTISTS. For every Pound, Euro or Dollar spent at the b-uncut Store around 20% goes direct to the artist. Visit the b-uncut Store today and support both emerging artists and tomorrow’s art.

Focused Crowdsourcing is the Future

blur Group is a leader in crowdsourcing, operating a cluster of crowds that span the creative industries including art, innovation, marketing, design and media. blur Group fuses focused crowdsourcing with social media tools and techniques to differentiate itself in the marketplace.

We spent the last few years designing architectures, platforms and processes for premium ‘freelance’ crowds and crowdsourced companies. Our definition of a crowdsourced company is one which recruits and manages the vast majority of its human capital as freelancers and part timers via scalable, flexible, online ‘crowd’ networks.

As example, we built a marketing agency, blur Marketing, with a full-time industry manager and a creative leader, but the rest of the creative and delivery talent is crowdsourced via an online platform with work loads and work packets managed over the Web, sent to the most qualified members or teams. Crowdsourced freelancers and crowd members get recruited and screened online and register at one of blur Group’s Crowd Network Platforms. They are then managed throughout the process by blur Group’s crowd managers. Crowdsourced freelancers or partners quality of work (product or service) and delivery capabilities, including timeliness, gets rated on the blur Crowd Network Platform for ongoing quality control.

We build high quality, focused crowds to ensure that the premium products and services that we offer are delivered rapidly, scale effectively and offer unprecedented value -- with a greater percentage of the earnings flowing back to the producer -- a FAIRTRADE for crowd members.

P Diddy on The Importance of Human Brands

P Diddy spoke with Mashable about his perspective on artists need to develop and control their personal brands on and offline – inc social media.

“Before, it was just at live shows, now you have to be able to do a great live show, you have to be able to do a great online interview, you need to have a great Facebook page, you have to have a great television performance,” he said.

Which is exactly what blur Designs is developing with a number of artists and musicians through its unique ‘Human Brands’ programme.

Another sentence, however, proves that Diddy is onto something that the record industry as a whole still largely ignores: “You have to understand how to be able to brand yourself,” he said. As a musician, today you can do more for your image and your fans through simple, freely available tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, than an army of spin doctors hired by record companies. Learning to leverage these tools, as proven by musicians such as Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Amanda Palmers and others, will be a crucial part of every musician’s career, while record companies, in their current form, might become more or less irrelevant.”

Size Doesn’t Matter (or does it?)

At blur Group we talk about our passion for focused crowds. When we look at other crowdsourcing initiatives such as Threadless or Wikipedia we are all impressed by the number of people participating and joining every day. But these are large, one off projects and supporting crowds.

Photo by Ma1974 via Flickr

Does Size matter though? Well for initiatives such as the above, probably. But how can you get crowds to work on more complex projects and make sure deadlines are regularly met, and how do you make sure the crowd will deliver repetitively and with quality ? These are issues a number of freelancing communities struggle with.

So let’s go small! At blur Marketing by cherry picking the best of breed we believe we can keep quality high, we make sure we can anticipate deadlines and mix and match freelancers to optimize the results for more complex projects.

But let’s define small. The largest digital agencies we are aware of rely on 10/15 staff (including receptionists and assistants). We have already reached the 30 person mark and are growing exponentially with just the best. Both clients and agencies are taking note.  How’s that!

5 Great Videos about Crowdsourcing

5 videos you should watch to really get Crowdsourcing. Enjoy!

1. Overview

Crowdsourcing from Aitor Bediaga on Vimeo.

2. Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing

3. Jeff Howe on the role of Incentives in Crowdsourcing

Jeff Howe on the role of incentives in crowdsourcing from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

4. Ory Okolloh on Crowdsourcing

Ory Okolloh, Crowdsourcing Crisis Information from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

5. Monica Hamburg on Crowdsourcing

b-uncut Merchandise store

blur Designs has started work on b-uncut’s Merchandise store. Wearable, drinkable, usable art!

blur Group Moves to Westbourne Studios

Our life is crowdsourcing – but crowd learders need a home too. Here’s ours.

blur Designs starts new Human Brand™

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blur Designs starts work on it’s next Human Brand™

b-uncut Launches Art Tours

blur Group’s crowdsourcing platform for the art world has just launched a programme of art tours. Initially to Italy, these tours are for artists and art lovers and set in Rome, Florence and Le Marche.

blur Group has spent the last 2 years building a sizable crowd of quality, emerging artists from around the world and recently launched an art marketplace with them at b-uncut.com.

Taking Over Goliath

Photo by boskizzi via Flickr

Building our crowd is a fundamental daily activity of blur Marketing.

Identifying a focused crowd of talented people is no easy task.

Talent is sometimes present in the so called amateur, which is increasingly beating the professional. We are currently building an army of talented marketing people, regardless of their status to take over Goliath.

Have a look at them on our community page or if you’d like to become one send a message to julius@blurgroup.com

blur Designs, cutting the crap

blur Group has recently launched blur Designs which is a design agency for business and human brands™.

blur Designs was architected to change the old stagnant design agency approach. ‘We’re cutting out the crap’, which enables us to give you outrageous value without compromising on quality. We’re crowdsourced, so we have a focussed, hand picked group of highly creative designers, ready and primed to work on your project.

Simplicity is the key and at blur Designs we like to keep everything stupidly simple with our 1 2 3 approach. 1.Brand 2.Web 3.Video. Developing and designing or re-designing your brand for the 21st Century digital era, implementing a social media ready hub Website with social page spokes and producing viral videos. At each step of the way we give you high end creativity at a ridiculous price. £2,000 is our set price for each step, that’s how we work, simple right? It gets even better than that because 1+2+3=£5,000 giving you our whole service at an even better price.

We think of blur Designs as the cappuccino bar of design agencies. Great products, fast service and transparent, value driven prices. To learn more about blur Designs and our bid to change the design agency world visit www.blur-designs.com.

And if you’re a highly creative designer – join our crowd here.

The Need for Focused Crowds

Photo by victoriapeckham via Flickr

At blur Group we pride ourselves in bringing together the best of breed crowds to deliver very specific projects.

We reiterated it recently and the New York Times published a great article on the topic.

Worth a read.

Westbourne Studios Sneak Peek

Westbourne Studios is blur Groups’s new casa.

Here’s a preview of our awesome shared facilities.

blur Designs launches shiny new website

blur Designs is starting to break the design agency world with it’s latest website, focusing on cutting the crap out of agencies.

blur Designs are a crowdsourced design agency changing the game combining outrageous value with breakthrough vision and pace. With our latest website we focus on our innovative 1,2,3 system which takes any company or human (yes Human Brands are the next big thing!) right through the design process from 1.Brand to 2.Web then finally onto 3.Video. All wrapped up with a simple price plan to suit all pockets, giving you ridiculous value for money whilst not scarificing the quality.

Check it out – blur Designs and let us know what you think.