zoomer - 25-5-2006 at 20:41
Along with the article featuring the lovely & talented Polverone, there is an article in Wired on the new applications of "crowdware" (aka
"crowdsourcing"). That's where you throw a project or problem out to the masses on the internet, and everyone contributes what they can for the
benefit of all. (That's what it says in the brochure, anyway.) Wikipedia is the best known example of crowdware.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=1&am...
In the article, they mention a relatively new site called InnoCentive. On that site, Fortune 500-type companies post problems that their own R&D
can't solve / resource. But there's a diff from Wiki -- if you solve one of their problems, you collect a bounty from $10K to $100K USD. Yup, up to
$100,000. Most problems are in the $10K-$20K range, but that's still much better than a sharp stick in the eye.
http://www.innocentive.com/
Why post about it here? I didn't see it mentioned before (apologies if I missed it), but most of the current problems are about chemistry, and mostly
about organic synthesis. I'm betting some of the very clever people on this board could probably make a score there. Maybe could even use SciMadness
forums for crowdsourcing the solution to a particularly interesting problem… 
Z