Smartlife

Financial decisions can be the most difficult to make. A wrong move can have major consequences for you and your family. That makes it crucial to get as much information about finances as possible. Over the past several years, online communities have proven to be a valuable resource: you can crowdsource important parts of your finances, using other people who have more knowledge or skills to help you decide on a next step and carry it out.

These sites provide a variety of tools, communities and help with your finances.…

If you’re unfamiliar with the practice of crowdsourcing design work, check out this post and then zip on back.

Since first reading Sean Johnson’s excellent post on how to crowdsource designs last April, I’ve had the experience of running several design contests. 99designs has been my preferred venue, but there are others out there such as crowdSPRING and LogoTournament.com.

So what has my experience taught me? Here I share:

1. Talent hub. If you need…

On the surface, it seems like filing a patent shouldn’t be too difficult: you describe your idea, fill out forms, and send it off to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But there’s a very important step missing from that process: the search for prior art. When filing a patent, it’s important to be sure that no one else has filed a patent on the idea previously, as well as to be aware of any related patents that another company may have filed. Such a search can require a…

Heading into the marketplace, you’ll find a lot of terrific products that get lost in the fold due largely to poor branding. On the flip side, you’ll also find a lot of mediocre products that have skyrocketed to monumental success, largely thanks to great branding and marketing.

In this way, spending time to create and develop a strong brand is well worth the investment. The conventional route would be either to come up with a brand name on your own or to hire an advertising firm to come up with…

These days, it seems like everything is being crowdsourced. Threadless uses crowdsourcing to make T-shirts, Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk uses crowdsourcing to offer a virtual marketplace for intellectual capital, and the Democratic National Committee’s Flipper TV uses crowdsourcing to expose Republican flip-flops, contradictions, and “out-of-touch” policies. By letting the wisdom of the crowd guide decisions, organizations are finding innovative ways for both themselves and individuals to lower costs, achieve higher-quality results, and come up with groundbreaking ideas.

Every relationship has its problems, so how can we use the Web 2.0 age to resolve our “he said/she said” arguments and save our relationships? Let the masses solve our disputes for us! SideTaker.com, a new website that was just featured on TechCrunch, allows couples to voice their stories about an argument anonymously and let the users decide who’s at fault. Finally, an opportunity for me to show my significant other just how right I am — all the time!