Crowdsourcing - Getting the Masses to Work for Free and Like It

I just came across Quirky - a crowdsourcing website that lets people suggest product ideas, and lets others help design, rate, improve and comment on those ideas. Purportedly, if the products you help influence are chosen for production, you get a cut of the proceeds. A very cool idea, and nicely executed too. Check it out.

Incidentally, the way I stumbled across this website was that one of my favorite websites, Engadget, where I go to get my daily gadget news fix, featured a really cool product designed on Quirky - a flexible power strip. Now that's a brilliant idea - I am amazed that no one has thought about it until now.

I signed up for Quirky, and we'll see if I can influence any cool upcoming products. I doubt that individuals can make serious money on the website, but this is clearly a bargain for Quirky itself since it's getting great design ideas for very little upfront investment. For the likes of me it's a form of entertainment, I guess.

I am really curious to see where the crowdsourcing trend will lead.

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Saving More as a Nation

The U.S. personal savings rate increased to 4% last month. It is shameful that the number of 4% can be described as an increase in this country. How is it possible that we are saving so little as a nation? With our social safety net in such shambles, with unemployment near 10% and with more or less guaranteed cuts to social security in the coming years, does anyone truly believe that saving 4% of their income will be sufficient to protect them from financial disaster or will be enough to meet their needs in retirement?

Alpaca and I max out our respective 401K's, which is probably still not enough, and we are trying to save as much as we can in after-tax funds. Yes - there is such a thing as saving too much, with the risk being putting your life on hold to pay for some undetermined future event, but everyone needs to have a significant amount of money set aside in case of unforeseen disaster (not to mention as insurance against spending your senior years as a Wal-Mart greeter).

I am not saying we should save 30% or 40% of our national incomes like they do in China or India - that's not even a realistic (or desirable) goal - but isn't something like 10% a target we should aim for?

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Thoughts on iPhone 4 & Apple

I am one of the 600,000 people who pre-ordered the iPhone 4. I got it in the mail on Wednesday, a day before the retail insanity started. My verdict? It's a nice phone. The processor is blazingly fast, and the battery life is dramatically better than the one I experienced on my older iPhone 3G. Having said that, I want to share a couple of thoughts on the whole iPhone phenomenon.

Retail Insanity - what possesses people to camp out for days just to get a phone? Do these people have no jobs or families? Stranger still, why couldn't they just pre-order the damn thing online, like I did? Or else, why couldn't they wait a few weeks and just walk into any store and buy one off the shelf? I am amazed by people's impatience.

The Walled Garden - I think that this will be my last iPhone. I was seriously contemplating getting an Android based machine, but was intimidated by the hassle of prying all my music from the clutches of Apple's obnoxious music management system. There are phones out there that are just as good as the iPhone, but that don't restrict users from installing whatever the hell they please on the machines they buy with their hard-earned cash.

I hate Apple's censorship of applications. I am an adult and don't need a nanny to screen my content.

Worse still, I hate the fact that Apple is acting like a monopolist - restricting choice of carriers to AT&T's crappy network, preventing Flash from running on its platform and actively disrupting other devices from syncing with iTunes.

As monopolists go, Apple is far, far worse than Microsoft ever was.

The bottom line is that iPhone 4 is a great device and I highly recommend it, but Apple's smug and arrogant behavior makes me hope that the others guys win. Go Google Android!

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A Brand New Look

I have been on a little bit of a posting drought, haven't I? I have been keeping in touch on Twitter every couple of days, so at least it hasn't been complete radio silence.

Well - as of today, at least Money and Such has a brand new look. I like it. Do you?

Next up, some actual posts.

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