A new crowdsourcing web application has launched providing people and businesses with further opportunities to gather ideas and recognize patterns through the analysis of large populations. In August, Ideavibes launched its crowdsourcing engine, enabling users to customize and brand the web based application before being opened to the crowd. The Ottawa based company is looking to fill a niche for smaller businesses that are in need of crowdsourcing tools.

Focus is a new IT analysis service and social media platform that launched in May of 2010.  CEO, Scott Albro, hopes Focus will persuade other IT analysis platforms to change the way they operate. Focus offers free business and tech knowledge and expertise to its registered users.

More films these days are being funded by the power of the crowd – crowdfunding, in other words. The amounts raised can hardly be considered peanuts, considering “Art Machine” raised more than $26,000 using a crowdfunding platform. There are three major crowdfunding platforms available right now, including IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, and RocketHub.

Crowdsourcing just recently started taking hold in the UK thanks in part largely to the recently elected Government using it to gage public opinion about potential spending cuts. However, Jason Burrows, creator of the crowdsourcing platform Crowdworks, has noticed an increasing trend in the use of crowdsourcing in the UK with companies such as BT and Unilever enjoying a successfully crowdsourced TV campaign. Burrows’ platform provides a different, yet cost effective form of crowdsourcing that will allow any business or organisation to capture and share ideas and feedback in real-time.

Web video has seen explosive growth currently contributing to 51% of all Internet traffic, according to the latest numbers.  YouTube has obviously contributed to it by serving 2 billion video views daily, but web video goes beyond YouTube with sites like Vimeo, Daily Motion, and even Facebook.

Crowdsourcing has proven to be a versatile tool for finding out all sorts of information from views on property development to the price of gas. What about the price of good quality marijuana? It seems that crowsourcing can tell you that too thanks to the brains behind  PriceofWeed.com, which was established earlier this month. The goal of the site is to ascertain as accurately as possible the average price of an ounce (or less) of marijuana from what is considered to be the only viable source: the consumer.

Following the smart money, or piggybacking as it commonly referred to, is the most popular method of of tracking suitable investments on the stock market. However, entrepreneur and author Zack Miller, in his latest book Tradestream Your Way to Profits, identified crowdsourcing as an emerging tool for finding that ultimate money making investment.

Almost everyone has heard of (and used) Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Now there’s a new service around that might just get a lot of traffic. WikiFactCheck will provide users with an [almost] instant source of fact-verification when it comes to news, websites, or other digital media product. The brainchild of journalist Andrew Lih, the site will offer “a neutral point of view” and, “using verifiable information from reliable sources to provide an augmented news platform through annotation, correlation and visualization.”

Boston based FitVirtual has launched an online platform to help employers offer a more customized approach to staying in shape.   The service can be adopted by small and medium sized businesses and integrated with social networks for customizing and sharing your fitness routine program while also getting support, advice, and encouragement from your network group.

Launched in late 2007, Folia is a community for garden lovers to share ideas. An innovative idea of integrating social networking with people’s interest in nurturing plants proved very helpful to the novices in the field.