TrendCentral: Curation and crowdsourcing are the key concepts behind Jelli, an app that offers choosy listeners a collective, collaborative radio experience. Jelli provides a centralized portal for preexisting radio frequencies, putting a station’s playlist on display and giving listeners the opportunity to vote songs up or down in the rotation. This democratized approach takes the radio DJ out of the equation (as predicted by Tom Petty); in essence, every track played is a request. Listeners also have the power to stop a song mid-play, turning traditional radio programming into a sort of Gong Show for the airwaves (and striking fear into the hearts of Beliebers everywhere).

What’s Your Frequency? [TrendCentral]

Springwise: The ability to direct a live video shoot across multiple cameras in real-time has historically been a luxury reserved for professionally equipped directors. However, once again, app-based technology has turned a well-established norm on its head. Offering the same capability to anyone in possession of a smartphone or tablet, we recently came across CollabraCam.

To use the app, between two and four iPhones, iPod Touches or iPads can be connected via wifi. The director of the shoot will then be able to view all the cameras’ streams on his or her device, and select which footage should be visible on the main video stream at any one given time. Cameras can also be put on standby in order to prepare them for the next shot, and the director can silently issue instructions such as pan and track movements to camera operators via a display on their screen.

App enables live video direction across multiple mobile devices [Springwise]

Springwise: Italian 2Spaghi.it has launched the SpagoGuida 2011, a physical directory of restaurants that links to online reviews.

The guide is available from the company’s website for EUR 15.90, and offers listings of over 1,000 restaurants throughout Italy. Each listing is provided with a QR code, which — when scanned by a smartphone with the appropriate software — links to that restaurant’s page on the 2Spaghi.it website. These pages are populated with user-generated content, providing the reader with the latest opinions from the 2Spaghi.it community and allowing them to provide feedback on their own experience.

Restaurant Guidebook Links Online Content for Fresh Revenue [Springwise]

Chip Chick: Kodak is a company looking towards the future of picture sharing. Introducing a new line of products that focuses on accessing and sharing photos through social networks and e-mail, Kodak products are moving away from the old way of sharing pictures and videos and into a new realm.

The new booths feature improved sharing features and easier, better photo retouching. In the past, you had to bring your camera’s SD card to the kiosk in order to print out copies. With the new kiosks, you can even access your photos stored online using Kodak Gallery, Facebook, or Picasa Web Albums.

Aside from making it easy to access your photos, the picture booths also make it easy to retouch your photos–kind of like a simplified version of Photoshop that anyone could figure out. Some uber cool features include Pet Eye Retouch and Facial Retouch.

The new photo kiosks will be available in July 2010.

New Kodak Picture Kiosks Help You Share and Print [Chip Chick]

Let your tweets exist in real world! TweetBookz allows you to create and order high quality books of your tweets. Soft and hard cover versions are available in four unique designs. The books have full color covers and inside pages of black and white. Each one stands 5.5 inches high and 8.5 inches wide and features up to 200 of your tweets, one per page, starting from the most recent. You can chose to remove any tweets you don’t want included. All tweets are printed in America on 100% recycled paper.

SignOnSanDiego.com: A small La Jolla company thinks it has a technology that could represent the future of scientific publishing.
The company, MolSoft, recently launched a platform it calls ActiveICM that enables authors to include three-dimensional, interactive graphics with the text of their articles. That means readers can click at the appropriate point in an article, call up an exhibit and view it from any angle.
The interface is straightforward, with an article’s text on one side of the screen and whatever exhibit the reader has chosen to look at on the other. Authors can include Internet-like links in the text as frequently as they want to direct readers to the exhibits.
“It’s not just animation,” Abagyan said. “It’s a fully interactive environment, which is extremely powerful, where you can look for things and in theory you can build it into any view (of the exhibit).”
Abagyan said a big advantage of the platform is that it works both online and off. So a reader can look at an article on the Web, where academic journals get much of their readership these days, or download it to read on a laptop whenever it’s convenient.
3-D software could give publishing a new angle [SignOnSanDiego.com]

Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
TrendCentral: Harnessing the power of the people, new online experiment Spot.Us hopes to change the face of journalism by putting a new spin on community-sourced content. During a time when many a reader has become wary of traditional news media outlets for delivering sensationalized, biased, or elitist content, Spot.Us offers San Francisco-area community members citizen journalism-style opportunities in which anyone can submit an idea for an investigative story and/or donate money to story ideas or “pitches” that they want to see covered. Those pitches which reach their funding goals (to cover the reporting costs) are then written by freelance journalists and published on the Spot.Us site.
Community-Funded Reporting [TrendCentral]

Tikatok.com, a leading online children’s book community, makes it possible to give your children’s own original stories captured in beautiful hard or soft cover books for between $15-$20 as very personal gifts for family and friends this holiday season.
The books created by children on Tikatok.com are truly one-of-a-kind presents that tell the stories and showcase the artwork of your children in professionally bound books, accompanied with their author page and photo. Unlike traditional photo books, these are the actual writings and illustrations from your children’s own creative imagination and something that can be cherished forever as personal keepsake from your favorite authors.
In addition to these books, Tikatok is also offering gift cards to its members as great stocking stuffers or presents for those hard-to-shop-for people on your list. Beginning November 1, gift cards can be purchased on Tikatok.com for $25, $35 or $50. Recipients can use gift cards to order hard and soft cover copies of books they create on Tikatok, or even copies of their favorite books by other child authors. For kids new to writing, these pre-paid cards provide a great incentive for them to create and publish their very first book.

Silicon Alley Insider: Yes, newspapers are screwed. But that isn’t stopping some of them from coming up with some really interesting digital projects. So far we’ve seen the New York Times release a slew of cool gizmos and gadgets. But the Wall Street Journal’s Mobile Reader is easily our favorite to date.
The software, available today, is one of those tools that makes instant sense the first time you get your hands on it: It delivers all of the Journal’s content, updated constantly, in whatever form makes the most sense to you.
If you want to just scan headlines, you can do that. Click once and you’ll instantly get a one-paragraph summary; click again and it will download the entire article, which takes about 10 seconds, max. The reader also passes our subway/airplane test with flying colors — it lets you save stories you’ve downloaded so you can read them when you’re underground or in the air.
Yet Another Cool Digital Newspaper Product: Get The Wall Street Journal, For Free, On Your BlackBerry [Silicon Alley Insider]

What is WEbook.com All About? from WEbook.com on Vimeo.
WEbook.com is an online publishing platform that allows writers, editors, reviewers, illustrators and others to work together and create great works of fiction and non-fiction, thrillers and essays, short stories, children’s books and more.
The WEbook.com website gives writers a great interactive platform on which to write and through which to share their works with friends and readers around the world. Users’ projects, submissions, reviews, groups, and friends list are collected and updated on a personalised WEbook profile and homepage. Whenever your project has a new submission or your work gets new feedback, you’ll get notified via a live feed. There are more: on WEbook you’ll find live forum and research tools available to use within all projects to help you interact with other writers, contributors and readers.
WEbook.com

Guardian: If you fancy being a journalist, there has never been a better time – provided you don’t mind giving your services for free.
Dozens of websites now want you to report for them, especially if you have been involved in an earthquake or flood, or been on site during a campus massacre. Train and helicopter crashes, forest fires, robberies and countless other events can at least make local news.
Among these websites is CNN’s iReport. All you have to do is upload your story, photo or video. Last month, CNN featured 915 user reports drawn from more than 10,000 submissions. Both numbers are expected to grow. What’s often called “user-generated news” is mainly the result of the mobile phone revolution. People have always been around newsworthy events, but only now do they have the means to report them to hand – literally.
iReport: Now anyone can be a journalist [Guardian]

While the trades rank who’s who in discovering ways around the norm, Boston takes time to pay homage to pranksters disobeying the status-quo completely.
In true copycat behavior, city artists replicated events that had once shut down the city. An act in remembrance of trouble-making comrades, Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky. One year ago, the two twenty-somethings riled up city law enforcement by placing LED light boxes in public arenas. What turned out to be an ad campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force was, at first, a bomb scare.
This year, supporters scoured the city for eye-catching spots to position throwback LED panels. Instead of the ATHF ‘moonite’ character, this ’08 edition uses George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Jesus and others to give life to the irreverent art. Bringing back the homeland security controversy between media shock value and uncouth terrorism.
And the controversy isn’t contained to the States. Czech rabble-rouser, Ztohoven’s, is currently pending trial on ‘attempted scaremongering’ charges. 6 members face up to 3 years in jail and/or a fine for streaming video of a fake nuclear blast on the morning weather channel. Surprisingly, residents didn’t seem to react. Nonetheless, the deed re-evoked the question; is media-manipulation art or tampering?

Katie Sherman is a NY-based freelance writer. After years of multi-tasking at downtown ad agencies, she’s recently returned from a European backpacking sabbatical. During the day she works as a Copywriter in Soho. In the off-hours she concentrates on analyzing social/ cultural trends, business innovation and local entertainment. Her work has been published on PSFK.com, CoolBusinessIdeas.com, EatDrinkSleepny.com, and Glamourite.com. Email her at katie_sherman@hotmail.com

Iconoculture: Recently debuted Organize Magazine gives consumers a guide to regaining control of their lives by eliminating clutter. Covering an array of topics, from neat-freak products to the question of letting go (knowing when to say “when” when it comes to orderliness), the rag doesn’t shy away from any issue. The mission? “Organization projects for real people with real lives.” Think Real Simple meets Container Store.
Read your way to a more organized life [Iconoculture]

Springwise: Think consumers can predict the next big book, CD, television show or movie better than top producers and publishing houses can? Media Predict challenges users to put their virtual money where their mouths are with an online prediction market game, where players buy and sell shares based on how well they think new entertainment ventures might do in the real marketplace.
Here’s how it works: when users register, they get 5,000 virtual dollars to begin investing. They can scan the markets for book proposals, up-and-coming musical acts, script treatments and TV pilots. Each is valued in virtual dollars per share based on perceived potential. If shares of a particular book proposal are going for 55 dollars, for instance, the book has about a 55% chance of being published. If a project seems like it might take off, a wise investor can put his or her money behind it. Or, conversely, he or she can sell if stock seems like it might plummet. In doing so, players drive the market value—and those who have a keen eye for the next big blockbuster get rewarded for it. When a deal goes through—for instance, if a book proposal gets signed to a publisher—shares pay off at USD 100 each. And on the flipside, when a venture doesn’t succeed, share value bottoms out at USD 0.
Crowdfinding The Next Blockbuster [Springwise]