Kermit Pattison

FreeRisk: Crowdsourcing Credit Ratings?

Kermit Pattison — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:07:46 -0400

The recent financial meltdown demonstrated that credit rating agencies were blind to the dangers ahead. Toby Segaran of Metaweb Technologies and Jesper Andersen of the Open Data Group hope that crowdsourcing and transparency can help fix this mess. They launched an online project called FreeRisk, that encourages users to generate algorithms for analyzing credit risk and anyone can view the results.

Powering Down: Q&A With Saul Griffith, Makani Power

Kermit Pattison — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:28:04 -0500

Forget about a new gym membership or diet. The most important New Year’s resolution for 2009 may be slimming down your energy footprint. Saul Griffith, a MacArthur genius grant winner and president of Makani Power, believes that a mass movement is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. To that end, he and his colleagues created WattzOn, a personal calculator that allows users to track energy consumption down to the last apple they eat.

Crowdsourcing Innovation: Q&A with Dwayne Spradlin of InnoCentive

Kermit Pattison — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:48:17 -0500

In recent years, corporations have turned to open innovation to solve their toughest research problems and reduce runaway costs of R&D. Now non-profits are beginning to see prize-based innovation as a strategy for humanitarian causes too, such as developing medicines to fight tuberculosis in the developing world, cleaning up oil spills or designing solar technologies for villages in rural India and Africa.

The Twine that Binds: Q&A with Nova Spivack

Kermit Pattison — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:54:47 -0500

Half a century ago, management guru Peter Drucker introduced the concept of the knowledge worker. Today his grandson, Nova Spivack, is trying to turn their knowledge into something more than the sum of the parts and boost their collective intelligence. Spivack is founder and CEO of Radar Networks, which recently launched Twine, which bills itself as the first consumer Semantic Web application. Twine has raised more than $20 million from some big names in the venture capital world, including Velocity Interactive Group, Vulcan and DFJ.