In response to Intellectual Ventures’ decision to sue high profile software giants for patent infringement a global crowd of researchers has been called into action. Article One Partners has asked its crowdsourcing community to research 4 patents held by the Seattle based patent holder for any evidence of prior art that might invalidate the claims.

If you’ve been looking to gain a better understanding of how to make Open Innovation work for you, a book recently published by Dwayne Spradlin and Alpheus Bingham, The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise can help answer that question.

Rock legend Paul McCartney has launched a crowdsourcing contest in the hopes of finding a new way to interact with his audience. Inspired by the lyric “send me a postcard, drop me a line”, taken from the classic Beatles track “When I am 64?, McCartney has invited fans to submit works of art based on, and inspired by, his nearly five decades worth of music.

Dear Crowd: I’m a one year old media company that’s become the center of crowdsourcing news, resources, and information. I enjoy being transparent, unbiased, & innovating within this amazing space. [Almost] everyone loves me. It’s time to get my greedy little hands on other people’s money, so I’m opening up my heart to find the salesperson of my dreams.

IDEAME.com has announced its official launch and the conclusion of its first round of financing during the 2011 Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit which took place in San Francisco between the 28^th and the 30^th of June.

Last February, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) partnered with Local Motors and announced the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge. The public was asked to design a military vehicle that could execute two types of missions: Combat Reconnaissance and Combat Delivery & Evacuation. A prototype of the winning design, the XC2V Flypmode, has just recently been constructed.

It’s that time again. The Daily Crowdsource, thanks to the folks over at InnoCentive, has 5 copies of The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise to give away. We are trying to build our forums into the premier crowdsourcing discussion venue and would like to see more input from you, our readers. In that vein, we plan on giving away copies to three random forum participants, the top contributor, and the most thought provoking post in the next couple of weeks.

For the German based company Clickworker, the last 12 months have been rather eventful thanks to the birth of their North American operations. The company has recently announced the appointment of Mark R. Allen as Vice President of Marketing Sales. Allen will oversee the expansion of Clickworker’s North American marketing operations in addition to his responsibilities in improving client services and business strategy.

uTest, a leader in crowdsourced software testing, announced the release of version 4.0 of the uTest platform today. This latest version brings with it three major features that both clients and testers have been asking for: tiered bug support, test case support, and bug fix verification. uTest expects these new features will increase the focus and value of the testing services it provides.

Bombay Sapphire, a brand of gin distributed by Bacardi and launched in 1987, decided to use Facebook fans to crowdsource its recent Imagination Campaign. Their objective was to achieve a creative advantage in their marketing by using their fans’ artwork in a 3D projection show held on June 8th at London’s Battersea Power Station. Doritos and Samsung have likewise used 3D to draw customers, but Bombay Sapphire was the first to crowdsource campaign inspiration.