Australian crowdsourcing website, DesignCrowd, has acquired its US-based rival, Brandstack.com for an undisclosed price, and has followed up the acquisition by launching BrandCrowd.com, which will combine the Brandstack service with the existing DesignCrowd community.

Communications solutions provider, Whispir, has been awarded a $2 million Commercialisation Australia Grant by the federal government to develop its $4.5 million OpenWhispir product – a next-generation solution, combining the company’s latest developments in web and social collaboration with its advanced communications technologies.

Australian Internet start-up company, DesignCrowd.com, has had an injection of $3 million by Melbourne-based venture capital firm, Starfish Ventures, as it seeks to further expand its business into the global market. It is the second time, in tough economic times, that the company has secured investment funding.

The National Library of Finland has turned to crowdsourcing to clean up errors in digitised documents. Volunteers are rewarded by turning the tasks into a game.

An advertising 2.0 company, established to tap the wisdom of crowds, last week received 590 different creative ideas for a new Harley Davidson campaign, after putting out the brief over the internet. It’s just one example of how internet based crowds are starting to disrupt conventional business practices an international summit was told today.

An internal IBM application that translates between English and 11 other languages embodies contributions from the company's 400,000 employees.