TopCoder
In case you’re wondering, all of our web design and architecture is being created by TopCoder, another crowdsourcing company that uses competitions to build software and graphic design. They’ve been tremendous in getting Tongal off the ground.
We’ve employed the TopCoder process to not only build out a logo, splash/welcome site and to design and build our entire site, complete with community functionality and video hosting.
What is Tongal?
Tongal is a web company I founded with Mark Burrell and Rob Salvatore to crowd source video content over the Internet. If you don’t know what crowd sourcing is, it’s like Wikipedia, where you take a job normally performed by an employee and “Source” it out to the world online. In a nutshell, we work with a company that needs a video, then design a contest on our website to get our members (think facebook) to work together to create it in different rounds of competition.
The idea is that it has been historically so ridiculously expensive to create video content because conventional wisdom says that only a handful of people are capable of doing this. We think that’s a load of bs. There’s a billion people connected over the internet and millions of them create video content for free. We’re just looking to find a way to put them to work.
We’re going to start running contests late next month. First were going to focus on commercials, then on instructional video (for example we’ll “crowd source” a video that shows how to put together an Ikea table or something) then we want to experiment with music video. We’re thinking that a la “Yacht Rock” we are going to go to big labels and get them to leverage their old libraries, kind of like “make a video for this song that was around before they had videos”
Tongal Test Contests
Coming this November…we’ve decided that we’re going to test the site by running commercial parody contests along the lines of the old SNL commercials.
Ghostbot
Just returned from San Francisco where I recorded the voice track for the forthcoming Tongal animation which should be live on the Tongal site in about two weeks. Corrine Wong, Alan Lau and Brad Rau of Ghostbot are doing a great job and we’re all having a lot of fun producing this.
