Collective intelligence: Users of the navigation app Waze can report hazards on the road ahead. Their GPS positions are also automatically tracked to provide real-time traffic information.
Credit: Waze

Nearly three years later, RunMyErrand.com has gone from idea to startup. Now known as TaskRabbit, Busque's site is a network of several hundred "runners" willing to do short-term jobs on short notice. People who need the jobs done—"senders," as they're known on the site—post errands and the maximum amount they're willing to pay to have them completed. Runners then bid on the task. The sender can choose among them, or have the site do it based on factors that include price, speed, and the runner's reputation. TaskRabbit earns a small fee on each transaction.

But what’s happening at PlumWillow is a sign of an even more intimate relationship between a company and its customers.

Moving beyond “the old-fashioned focus group and into co-creation with your demographic is something that will happen more in the next couple of years,” Ms. Etlinger says. “All business will have to learn how to cope with a new generation of users that are used to their particular experience of the Web.”

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Whom do we increasingly trust less? Us.

It's a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman's latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, believes it's a sign of the times -- and the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.

The medical establishment is about to get a dose of web 2.0-style medicine in the form of a crowdsourced, socially networked contest that opens the fight against Type 1 diabetes to the public at large — and to Harvard’s medical research departments — using InnoCentive’s online challenge platform for competition and collaboration.