The Advent of the iPad According to Stephen Fry

The advent of a tablet has not been greeted with such anticipation since biblical times.

Yesterday, at 10am in Silicon Valley, eyes from all over the world were on Apple while its boss, Steve Jobs, unveiled the latest, revolutionary Apple gizmo.

Apparently, one of the biggest enthusiasts was British actor and comedian Stephen Fry who said of the iPad:

“It’s transcendentally smooth and fast. It’s astounding. God, it’s beautiful. The display is stunning. I’m drooling with anticipation.”

It’s not exactly Crowdsourcing opinions – but, hey, it’s Stephen Fry after all. So we thought we’d share.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

blurGroup.com Version 3 Live!

blurGroup.com Version 3 is live!

Buyer focused, marketplace drive. Faster than ever. Do you need a Crowd?

Start-ups Starving for Investment; A Western Crisis

The western world is still in crisis. Following the financial tsunami of 2008/9 the West faces another emergency. As the dust settles on the economic meltdown it is becoming clear that not only did we strangle our recent start-ups, but there is no capital around for the new ones. Banks are still not lending to new businesses and Venture Capital firms are focusing on later stage investments. There is almost no institutional, early stage, risk capital available but the world needs start-ups now more than ever.

Recent US research reveals that nearly all net hiring across the US in the last 10-15 years came from businesses that were less than 5 years old. Barack Obama and David Cameron have made innovation, aspiration and increased private sector employment central to their election manifestos and government strategies – yet start-ups cannot start without funds. Money that they re-invest in people, technology and innovation.

Following the recent crisis, every sector of business and government could do with innovation – sometimes even disruption. Big business and big government is outdated, bureaucratic and inefficient. The opportunities that await us in the digital world, Web and mobile universe, healthcare sector, clean energy space, financial services industry and beyond are unprecedented. We need start-ups to invent, innovate and lead these changes. Start-ups need capital. In philosophy, we call this a conundrum.

The established routes to capital have been levelled in the recent banking collapse. As a result we need something new. Something that facilitates the breakdown of the barriers between the ever rarer beast, the investor, and his counterpart, the entrepreneur. We need a Web platform that brings together the best entrepreneurs and their ideas with the most relevant early stage investors and angels. It has arrived. Innovatrs, a leading Crowdsourcer of early stage entrepreneurs, has just launched a Web service that sources and introduces entrepreneurs with great ideas to early stage investors. See Innovatrs.com. Crowdsourcing could prove to be the best mechanism for tackling the age old challenge of how entrepreneurs find quality angels and vice versa.

Innovatrs sources and develops entrepreneurs. The innovatrs crowd is approaching 500 early stage entrepreneurs from around the world and they attract 5 new entrepreneurs per day. Today, Innovatrs added a novel, early stage, introduction and matching system for investors. They are calling all angels to Innovatrs.com. Hopefully this international service can help address the crisis and funnel deserving start-ups to active, early stage investors. There are plenty of both still around, but they require an efficient, universal platform to unite them. If it works a paradigm shift in start-up investing could unfold. It is sorely needed.

Need a Writer? Get blur Media!

The past few years have seen huge changes in the television, music, advertising and marketing industries. At blur Media we asked ourselves “How will the publishing and writing industries be affected by all these changes? And what new challenges will be created?”

In answer to this we launched www.blur-Media.com

blur Media’s offering is simple, from journalists to bloggers, technical writing to narrative adaptations, screenwriting to fiction, we’ve got it covered. blur Media has built a crowd of talented experts and authors ready to fulfil your needs. Do you need writers for your PR campaign? Or maybe you need someone to ghost a newspaper article, or a blog post?

We’re constantly looking for new talent. Professional writers can apply for membership at blur-Media.net and become part of our fast developing crowd.

If you need a writer, the next generation writers’ agency is one click away: www.blur-Media.com

The Guardian Gets Serious about Crowdsourcing MP’s Expenses

The Guardian has just launched a Crowdsourced platform to facilitate MP expense reviews by its readers.


We all heard about the first experiment to crowdsource a review of MP’s expenses. Now 458,832 pages of documents are getting reviewed by Guardian readers in an unprecedented effort to bust bad usage of taxpayers’ money. 25,000 people got involved with staggering results. ‘Only’ 240,581 pages to go!

The Guardian recently kickstarted the 2nd version of the project with a further 40,000 pages. For your inner geek enjoy this great post by Simon Willison which explains how they developed the platform for this complex project.

Note the part about asking the right question:

“The biggest mistake we made the first time round was that we asked the wrong question. We tried to get our audience to categorise documents as either “claims” or “receipts” and to rank them as “not interesting”, “a bit interesting”, “interesting but already known” and “someone should investigate this”. We also asked users to optionally enter any numbers they saw on the page as categorised “line items”, with the intention of adding these up later.”

Read the rest of the post.

Thousands Flock to blur Group Crowds

blur Group is becoming the world leader in focused Crowdsourcing with thousands of creative professionals now joining its crowds. Indeed, over a thousand cool, leading creatives join one of blur’s Crowds every month. By the end of 2010 they will have over 15,000 artists, marketers, designers, writers and entrepreneurs. Why is this important?

It’s because of what these crowds achieve together on the blur platform and under its umbrella. blur artists use Crowdsourcing to operate the worlds leading emerging art marketplace, its designers the worlds largest, most diverse design agency and its marketers the worlds first meta-marketing group. blur Group is also developing the worlds most dynamic entrepreneur network and the newest writer collective.

blur Group uses focused Crowdsourcing to flatten the creative industries, providing a fundamentally better deal for both buyers and producers, by cutting out needless, expensive middle men and middle managers. For too long art dealers, design agencies, marketing firms, publishers and venture investors have been ripping us off by layering cost on cost and providing ‘thin’ value. It’s time for something different.

blur Group changes the value equation with its 21st Century, Web-based collectives (Crowds), that unite and organise ‘independents’ whether they be artists, designers, marketers, writers or entrepreneurs and together bring the products and services that we want, at the prices we need – from the worlds best talent. All that was lacking was a global entity to organise them – while buyers require a single, trusted party to deal with; blur Group.

blur Crowds (collectives) of creatives are becoming so large and effective that today they challenge the establishment and compete with the big guys. Clients and buyers are lining up to work with and buy from these talent clouds, gaining access to their products and services more easily and cost effectively than ever before, while remaining comfortable in the knowledge that more of the money spent goes direct to the creative talent. A kinda FAIRTRADE for the creative industries. Try it for yourself.

Where Aol. went wrong

Now we all know about Aol.’s demise from Warner Brothers and yes they had the right idea, a fresh start and a new brand. A brand that will put their past behind them and lead them into the future. However the execution of this process seems to have gone wayward.

I have a feeling that everything to do with this re-branding was rushed, as Wolff Olins has a great portfolio, though their visuals on this occasion look lazy and circa 1999. Old ideas and visuals for an old company, I’ve seen that goldfish before! Creating a brand is an art form that goes beyond the visual look of a brand, it needs to create brand experience or a brand image. Your brand’s identity should portray how you want your customers to perceive the band and everything that goes with it.

AOL’s Aol.’s new capital A & . (period) is also a branding minefield. For one it no longer reads as A-O-L it now looks/sounds more like “aole”. Why not use lowercase for the whole word aol. which really works, what’s their URL?

The logo works a little better in motion, but still where are the original next generation ideas? Perhaps they were in the pink horse!

This was Aol.’s chance to really recover from the position, not only their branding was in but also their company. Ok they got alot of press over the preview of their branding, but what happens when December 9th comes and goes and your left with sub-standard branding and no one is talking about you!

blur Media: The Future of Publishing

In a handful of years publishing companies will be very different. They will combine on-demand, digital publishing with social media and Crowdsourcing. They will give away Web-based books and short stories in exchange for followers and fans that will then get monetized through physical book sales, Kindle downloads, merchandising and ticket sales.

The future is Media as a Service – with the writer at its epicentre. In the process, writers will, for the first time, garner a direct, scalable relationship with their readers and they will find multiple, diverse mechanisms for monetizing their content. Along the way, they will also gain financial leverage.

A FAIRTRADE for writers.

blur Media is the answer to the question, “How will publishing companies change?”. It is a new, on-demand publisher and book promoter that uses the power of crowdsourcing to discover emerging writers. It provides selected authors with the multi-media platform that they need in this revolutionary digital and social media universe. blur Media combines the wonderful experience of reading a good book, with the community, speed and convenience of the web. Social media style. Centered around the author.

It is what Amazon is not and what Scribd wishes it could be.

By going to blur-Media.net, any writer can sign up for a free, Web-based writer’s studio and get discovered alongside other like-minded, emerging authors, sharing his or her work, knowledge and opinions. They can develop writer and reader groups or promote events. In fact, there is little that they can’t do within this digital writer’s network.

blur Media’s first, emerging author to be plucked from the crowd is Philip Letts, notable artist and entrepreneur, with his debut novel ‘Death in Girotondo’. This fast paced thriller follows Angela’s reckless and alarming ride through the beautiful landscape of the Tuscan countryside and can be read, along with the short story ‘The Last Day’, for free simply by signing up at PhilipLetts.net.

PhilipLetts.net is the first writer’s hub developed by blur Media. It’s the kind of platform that every good writer deserves.

Out with the old, In with blur Designs

The worlds greatest designers are rarely found in large design agencies. They are often freelancers or independents. blur Designs is a new kind of design agency, located in London with designers spanning the globe. Born from crowdsourcing, it is shaking up the agency world with an unrivalled roster of talented and diverse designers.

With a crowd of over 600 freelance designers, tightly co-ordinated and organized over the Web, blur Designs is already the largest design agency in the world

Nike, Levis, Intel, Coca Cola, FIVE, BBC, Sony and Harrods are just some of the companies our designers have produced work for.

Traditional agencies get bogged down with the limited capabilities and resources that they have. At blur Designs we have an abundance of world beating, creative talent from graphic to product designers, so our creativity is almost limitless. Which guarantees our clients better value, greater choice and continuously fresh inputs for their design work.

blur Designs offering is quite simple: from world-class branding to websites that talk to your customers, not just brochure-wear, we’ll build a community around your web presence. Thought about adopting viral advertising, we have motion designers as well as producers and editors at your disposal.

blur Designs is the next generation design agency: fresh, ready and highly creative. So, out with the old and in with blur Designs.

London Creatives Meetup: Where Cool Creatives Hang

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups.

It believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.

So do we.

This is the main reason why, less than two months ago, we stepped up as organizers of the London Creatives Meetup group.

Well, this and the fact that we are lucky enough to mingle with creatives in our daily routine and to work in a place that has lots of space available for cool meetups.

The group has since become a weekly gathering where people can hang out on comfy sofas, get free Wi-Fi and unleash their creativity with like minded, web-designers, artists, entrepreneurs and digital media people. The objective of the meetings is to create a café style environment where people can discuss, bounce, share, create or simply enjoy the atmosphere and get work done.

We promise to be around every week, and over time we hope everyone will get comfortable enough to start something special. At the Creative Cafè!

blur Marketing: we deliver innovation

blur Marketing is a new kind of digital agency. It is an international agency born of Crowdsourcing – driven by an emerging collective of both skilled and diverse marketing professionals that banded together to create the largest player in the speedy evolution to social media. 

Past: While social media has changed marketing, most established agencies are content merely to create ad hoc divisions to tackle the new digital challenges, resulting in traditional answers to new questions. Exacerbated by the fact that old media all too often talks at its audiences as established agencies talk down to their customers. Perhaps foolish given that the new game is all about how brands ‘entertain’ and ‘court’ their consumers, now found in vibrant, open Web communities such as Facebook,twitter or LinkedIn?

Present: The harsh reality is that in order to truly engage with online communities, it helps to be a community yourself. By drawing together a focused, growing crowd of digital marketers, geeks and event professionals, blur Marketing has positioned itself to rapidly deliver the most innovative campaigns to both large and small businesses fit for tomorrow. blur Marketing is a virtual organization with approaching 500 talented, individualistic marketers that come together under the blur roof to deliver real innovation and choice at lower prices. People and Web technologies are the guts of the agency – optimized to deliver a new generation of truly enticing customer interactions.

Relationships: blur Marketing’s growing client list includes enlightened digital agencies that rely on its trusted and sizable network to bring fresh approaches to their marketing activities. And it is the ‘power of the network’ that has enabled this newborn agency to deliver international briefs for global brands at such an early stage in its development.

Future: Its community hit the trenches with Web 2.0 marketing projects, teaming up to create original campaigns from the bottom up. And to date we have only seen crowds of consumers engaging with interactive campaigns, imagine if that crowd was enhanced to include a bunch of the most dynamic professionals? blur Marketing – the ‘future’ in marketing agency.

Innovate ™ – Change your life, reach your potential

Innovatrs.com is a different kind of website for entrepreneurs. Innovatrs.com is an emerging, crowdsourced    ecosystem of entrepreneurs, financiers, designers, developers and marketers. It is a center of innovation    where each and every one of its crowd members, in one virtual space, compete to launch and develop the next  big idea into the wider world knowing that they are surrounded with the advice and guidance that they need –  cost effectively delivered over the Web.

What this ecosystem required to get it off the ground and lend it weight was a written-down, systematized methodology for innovation and a startup system. Then everything else could develop around it as its starting point. That is why Innovatrs founder, Philip Letts, wrote Innovate ™, the worlds first true attempt at a comprehensive innovation methodology and business-build system. A step by step guide to how to develop a great idea, launch it successfully and build a cool business. A practical startup system.

Over the last few years Innovate has been tested against a whole host of startups, entrepreneurs and innovation experts. It works.

Today we are ready to opensource Innovate at Innovatrs.net, ready to publicly launch Innovatrs.com and ready to build the worlds first global, Web based ecosystem of entrepreneurs, innovators and their supporters. A place where ideas can become great businesses and entrepreneurs can get rich and famous. A place where investors will gather and governments will listen. A Silicon Valley for the rest of the planet. On the Web. Here for you 24×7.

blur Group: the Power of Collective Intelligence

blur Group gives groups of individuals the power to profoundly shape the future. A digital future, designed by crowds, shaped around crowds, sourced by crowds. blur Group disrupts the status quo and the workplace as we know it. Wiping off the static, analogue culture in order to grant its crowds immediate and direct access to the resources and markets they need to drive this altered state.
 
The secret lies in a word: Crowdsourcing.
 
Crowdsourcing means making the most out of collective intelligence. At blur Group it means re-architecting the creative industries. Means enabling buyers of art, digital design, marketing services, media and innovation to get more affordable access to top talent. Means fair deals for their crowds of artists, designers, marketers, writers and entrepreneurs.
 
We believe that a few, highly qualified managers from an office and small, niche, highly managed-through-the-web crowds, coordinated in the right way, will become the virtual organizations of tomorrow. Why not build a marketing agency solely by crowdsourcing and remotely managing marketing professionals/consultants? Why not organize world artists to develop a new generation art market?
 
The benefit of doing it with a managed crowd as opposed to legions of full time employees is lower costs, greater flexibility, a more international approach, highly personalized services and, once more, better deals for both crowd member and client. Infinitely scalable intellectual property clouds.
 
This is the future of business. This is blur Group.

Kellogg’s take branding to a whole new level

Kellogg’s have become so concerned about supermarket cereals that they are now using a laser to burn their brand into each individual corn flake!

Helen Lyons, lead food technologist at Kellogg’s, said: ‘In recent years there has been an increase in the number of own brands trying to capitalise on the popularity of Kellogg’s corn flakes. We want shoppers to be under absolutely no illusion that Kellogg’s does not make cereal for anyone else.’

Which ever way you look at, it’s genius although maybe a little off putting when sitting down for breakfast, not only brand your packaging brand your product.

New blurgroup.com Live

The new blurgroup.com has gone live.

Check it – and thanks to everyone for their inputs.

Feedback welcome.

iPhone or Aston Martin?

A recent survey by CoolBrands revealed that Apple’s iPhone is now more desirable than an Aston Martin! A closer look at the list tells the bigger story about Apple’s brand, they took 3 spots out of the top 5! Apples dominance is unsurprising – consumers are way too happy to queue for the latest gadget. What is surprising however is another survey by SuperBrands (same company as CoolBrands) which reveals that Microsoft are the top super brand, whilst Apple are down in 9th. But with cloud computing and applications on-line maybe we’ll see MacBooks on the list next year further boosting Apple’s position.

Whichever way you look at it Apple’s brand is their most prized asset, which proves that getting your brand right has to be a leading priority.

Rabia @ Shoreditch House

blur Designs traveled over to the trendy Shoreditch House last night to see their latest Human Brand project, Rabia. Here she is singing ‘Fronting’.

It was a great gig and the crowd loved her. blur Designs is onto the next stage of Rabia’s Human Brand, watch this space!

blur Group Powers the Crowd

blur Group is a leader in focused crowdsourcing. Their crowds are tightly managed, highly focused and extremely productive. They manage crowds as virtual organizations. Un-corporations. And as a result their crowds of artists, entrepreneurs, digital marketers, designers and writers act as ‘collectives’ of independents that come together under the blur umbrella to take on their respective industries. Scalably and profitably.

After all, just 90 days from now b-uncut will house over 800 artists and be one of the largest artist studio networks in the world. As a crowd they could challenge any gallery, auction house or art Website. 90 days from now Innovatrs will have over 250 Web savvy entrepreneurs in its fast growing crowd – each benefitting from the worlds most innovative start-up system and learning community of practicing entrepreneurs.

blur Designs will have nearly 500 leading graphic and Web designers – making it one of the worlds largest design agencies. And blur Marketing will organize over 150 digital marketers, able to compete for pitches with any digital marketing agency in Europe. Even the nascent blur Media will have 30 odd writers ready to stand behind this new, on demand publishing and media label and network.

No wonder the head of Innovation at Ogilvy & Mather recently wrote that blur Marketing could be the agency model of the future. Is it surprising that IDEO is looking hard at blur Designs. No shock that one of the worlds greatest living painters just threw his lot in with b-uncut. Is it strange that angel investor groups and VC’s are increasingly approaching Innovatrs to partner with them and their entrepreneurs.

Or weird that one of the world’s leading social networks just chose blur Marketing for a critical new marketing campaign they’re launching in the run up to Christmas and that blur Marketing now receives 2-3 new client briefs per week. Is it credible that blur Designs is launching their first Human Brand – an emerging singer named Rabia and that prize-winning designers are joining the crowd. Can it be possible that b-uncut has launched a leading Web gallery and art merchandise store in the last 90 days that will sell hundreds and potentially thousands of items in the run up to Christmas. Could blur Media have designed, produced, published and launched their first crowdsourced book, ‘The Artists Diary’ in less than 90 days.

In 2010 can blur Marketing take on WPP, or blur Designs tackle Elance. Should b-uncut unsettle Saatchi Online and ruffle Whitecube. Could Innovatrs inform business schools. Will blur Group be talked about as a future Virgin Group. We believe so. But don’t just take our word for it – join the movement. Spread the word, sign up to a crowd and become a part of the crowdsourcing revolution.

Sneak peak of Rabia’s Human Brand™

Rabia has come into see us about her Human Brand™, she loves it, do you?

Let us know what you think?

What does it say to you?

If you’re new to Rabia check out this video.

Please feel free to comment below, thanks and we’ll keep you updated on how Rabia’s human brand turns out.

Human Brands™ are everywhere

The Portobello film festival kicks off tonight at our Westbourne Studios! Big piece on Street art, got talking to sickboy a leading street artist from Bristol.

Turns out he was one of the first street artists to use a logo instead of a tag, known as the ‘Temple’ which can be seen on walls and wheelie bins worldwide. Human Brands has worked for sick boy, he is tipped as one of the street art movement’s most investable artists.

Walking to our Studio’s?

After a productive Friday morning, we decided to make a short film showing the route to our studios from Westbourne Tube Station. Which will also freshen up and make our contact page more interesting.

Spot anyone you know?

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™

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/rMECjbAj8SE" width="440" height="270" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

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.

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.