Latest Crowd Sourcing News

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I need your help planning my roadtrip through Portgual and Spain (this is a crowdsourced trip)

Image by Zach Klein
This summer I’m going to visit Portugal and Spain. I’m traveling with my girlfriend and two buddies. We have no specific plans but have following conditions:

+ We have 10 days
+ We’re flying in and out of Lisbon.
+ We’re renting a car and consider this a ‘road trip’
+ We’re willing to camp some nights
+ We expect this to be a gastronomic experience more than anything else

This maps show a basic circuit I’m planning, however we’re quite flexible. If you have any experience with this area, please place notes on the map indicating the location of your suggested stops.

Thanks ahead for your help with this crowd-sourced vacation project.

Update #1, Friday, June 19 at 9:30am

Translia.com Offers Support for Crowd-Sourced Game Translation and Localization

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Hong Kong, CN (PRWEB) May 14, 2013

Translia.com offers cost-effective game localization services that enable developers to enlist the support of their own user base to make their games available in many different languages around the world. It means that developers no longer have to rely on translation agencies or game localization companies that both are more expensive than crowd-sourcing translation services and with limited resources are more likely to take a longer time. Translia.com’s game localization and translation services offer developers the chance to both control their costs and to make their games available in a wide degree of languages as quickly as possible. This will enable them to reach previously untapped markets for their games around the world.

Increasingly, game developers and publishers seeking to market their games to multilingual audiences have been recognizing the value of an untapped resource that can aid in game localization: their own community of users. Even games that are published only in English can attract a user base from around the world due to the widespread knowledge and usage of the English language. What developers realize is that however effective game localization vendors or translation companies are at their work at the end of the day they are going to charge more and be less involved with the product then the company’s own users. This is why game developers have sought to crowd-source translation services.

When a company makes the decision to rely on their own user base to translate their games, they need to do several vital tasks. They need to assemble a group of dedicated multilingual users who are fluent in the target language, and they also need to have a system for managing the translation process.

This is where Translia.com’s collaborative translation offerings come in. Translia.com offers a power patent-pending collaborative translation platform that allows game developers and publishers to organize their translators and implement the workflow of the game localization and translation process. This streamlined workflow can ensure that the work is completed as quickly and efficiently as possible, with multiple translators working on the job at the same time, greatly accelerating the speed of the turnaround cycle.

The Translia collaborative platform offers many features including ease of ability to post work, communication tools, community resource management, as well as the ability to calculate the compensation for translators, whether it is cash, in-game rewards, prepaid game cards, or a combination of all of them. Translia.com’s revolutionary platform allows developers to quickly and efficiently market their games in numerous different languages around the world.

Translia.com was founded in 2009 and is located off of Hong Kong, China. They are an online translating company that focuses on providing accurate and timely translation for their clients. They are a privately owned company and are growing as a successful online translating service. They re-launched in March 2013, and now offer a ton of new features and benefits.







Whittard of Chelsea Offers an Exclusive Preview of Two Crowd Sourced Hot Chocolate Flavours

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(PRWEB UK) 14 May 2013

In March of this year, Whittard of Chelsea threw open its doors to ask its Facebook fans and Twitter followers to suggest an exciting and luxurious new flavour of hot chocolate, a flavour that they thought would sit perfectly in Whittard’s luxurious range of seventeen hot chocolate flavours. Following an impressive response, the Whittard master buyers were asked to trim this list down to a shortlist of just nine sumptuous flavours.

The fans and followers then had a second look at this selection of nine and were asked to further whittle down the selection to their favourite two. Having been refined by the Whittard master chocolatiers, these two have been perfected and are almost ready for release.

Whittard of Chelsea can announce that these two flavours are Amaretto Milk Hot Chocolate and Hazelnut White Hot Chocolate. These flavours will be added to the current range in autumn.

The opportunity for hot chocolate lovers the nation over to get an exclusive taste of these innovative new flavours is now here.

Twenty-five lucky people will get the chance to try an exclusive preview of both by signing up via the Whittard Facebook page. Whittard are keen to get feedback, so are asking the winners to post their thoughts once they’ve tasted the new flavours.

The competition runs until midnight of 22nd May. There will be 25 winners whose names will be picked at random by Whittard of Chelsea and announced at latest by the 29th May.

Notes to Editor:

Tea and Coffee Merchants Whittard of Chelsea have been in the business of hot chocolate since Mr. Whittard’s original Fleet Street shop became renowned for its luxurious cocoa. Today this has expanded to seventeen established delicious flavours and soon growing with the latest two sumptuous editions being added later in the year. To browse all hot chocolate as well as masterful blends of tea and coffee, visit the online store: http://www.whittard.co.uk.







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RoyaltyFreeKings.com Busy Expanding Catalog, Including Royalty Free Epic and Hi Tech Music

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Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 14, 2013

Background music licensing website RoyaltyFreeKings.com is in the process of doubling their existing catalog. In particular, major expansion is in popular areas such as royalty free epic music and hi tech music, targeting corporate video producers. The expansion will bring the number of carefully hand picked and vetted tracks to approximately 2000. Albums, collections of royalty free music sold at a considerable discount (as much as 70% off the price of individual tracks) should top out at over 100. The update will start showing up on the website in late May, and will continue throughout the summer and into the fall.

RoyaltyFreeKings.com has a big update in mind for summer themed projects. With summer fast approaching, video producers and advertisers are currently putting together warm weather themed projects. RoyaltyFreeKings.com already has a variety of collections aimed at companies in need of upbeat, fun and beach themed music, and that selection is only going to grow over the next several months

‘Summer Fun’, ‘Laidback Acoustic’ ‘Sports’, ‘Surf’ and ‘Road Trip’ are just a handful of a range of royalty free albums put together with such projects in mind. These summer themed albums consist of upbeat pop rock, surf rock, reggae, funk, acoustic and uplifting orchestral tracks. All these fun and energetic tracks are available individually at RoyaltyFreeKings.com as well.

This year brought about a recent new milestone for RoyaltyFreeKings.com: 1,000,000 plays through their demo player (powered by SoundCloud.com). In their first year of operation, RoyaltyFreeKings.com has become known throughout the world as a source of quality music. Traffic to the website and sales of the library’s downloadable background music have steadily increased each month as producers from every corner of the world have learned of the music licensing website, and the strict quality control that runs through the entire catalog.

In addition to this significant milestone, RoyaltyFreeKings.com recently clocked up over 50,000 downloads of their free tracks, which are available to anyone with a budget under US$ 250,000.

Wedding video producers have been the of focus of RoyaltyFreeKings.com’s attention of late. With over 2 million weddings each year in just the USA alone, the 40 billion dollar wedding industry has grown to include thousands of independent videographers and editors whose primary work is producing wedding videos and photo montages. Music licensing website RoyaltyFreeKings.com has amassed a collection of music aimed squarely at these wedding video producers, with dozens of heartfelt instrumental tracks designed for montages, and live renditions of wedding classics, such as: the Wedding March and Pachebel’s Canon for traditional use within wedding ceremonies.

With wedding season just around the corner, RoyaltyFreeKings.com offers several hand picked albums of royalty free wedding music, including: Weddings & Romance volumes 1 and 2, three diverse “Drama – Light” albums and two “Laidback Acoustic” guitar albums. As with all the music found on the site, every track has been handpicked for quality and maximum emotional impact.

In addition to the music for wedding videos offered at RoyaltyFreeKings.com, over 1000 tracks covering a wide range of genres are available for immediate download.

In recent months, RoyaltyFreeKings.com has been busy with major under-the-hood updates in preparation for the aforementioned steady stream of new royalty free albums and tracks. The considerable addition to the catalog includes a eclectic selection of new albums, including western film music, solo piano and epic orchestral trailer music, all aimed primarily at independent producers.

Several new releases include: ‘Wild Wild West’; a royalty free western music album featuring sweeping orchestral film music and brooding western acoustic soundscapes, ‘Moody Piano’; solo royalty free piano tracks aimed at independent dramatic films and perfect as music for a documentary; and ‘Epic Worlds 3’; modern royalty free epic music designed for use in trailers and promos.

Alongside the new tracks and albums, a wide selection of free-to-use production tracks is also available to anyone working with a low to medium budget (US$ 250,000 or less per project). The music is immediately downloadable and ready to use. This complimentary background music section has proved to be very popular with students, educators and charities around the world. The range of styles and genres in the music given away by RoyaltyFreeKings.com include: epic dramatic orchestral, ambient piano, jazz, comedy, rock and suspense tension.

The mission of RoyaltyFreeKings.com since launching in 2012 has been to make searching for background music for video production incredibly easy and streamlined. The crowd-sourcing business model (where anyone can upload music), like that used by many competing royalty free websites, has the benefit of a rapid expansion of content. The downside is that with so many tracks being uploaded, the catalog easily gets bloated with mediocre music that does little to enhance a project, whether it’s a commercial, wedding video, film or webisode. Producers looking through these crowd-sourcing music licensing websites have to spend significant time sifting through vast collections to find something they’d actually want to use, or worse – settle for something inferior just because they don’t have the time to continue searching.

By hand picking each track, RoyaltyFreeKings.com only allows in music that meets a strict standard of musicality and production value. The growing catalog of hand picked tracks at RoyaltyFreeKings.com is produced by an international group of over fifty award winning composers, including a pop rock producer in Finland, a Nashville based folk and country expert, a heavy metal specialist in Italy, a renowned acoustic guitar artist in Hawaii and several well known trailer music composers. The high quality of tracks from these composers results is a streamlined shopping experience where producers can find, purchase and download the music they need within just a few minutes.

A guiding principle for RoyaltyFreeKings.com is fair treatment of their content suppliers. The composers who provide the carefully vetted music are given an equal share of the sales, before any discounts a customer might receive. This is in sharp contrast to many of its competitors, some of whom are offering far less – 40%, 35%, or in some cases just 30% of the sales to composers.







Clipcanvas Offers Video for Any Project

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Oslo, Norway (PRWEB) May 14, 2013

Clipcanvas, the Norwegian based video marketplace, just announced they have released a completely new design and user experience for their services. In previous years, Clipcanvas has taken the non-traditional approach of presenting their service in a sleek and completely dark “night mode”-style interface, but now the service looks a lot brighter, more user-friendly and intuitive to use.

According to Cato Salter, founder and CEO for Clipcanvas, the change has been an ongoing process, “We have been discussing this for a long time, several years actually, but we were so passionate about our user interface and constantly got great feedback from those using it, so this has been a hard decision to make. Still, we decided that the best way to take advantage of some of the new abilities in CSS3 and modern web design techniques was to opt for a more traditional user experience. We killed our darling, and now we’re ready to see it rise from the ashes.” Follow this link to visit Clipcanvas and explore the changes yourself.

Clipcanvas have also made a big change in their market approach, targeting a wider audience signified by their new main slogans ‘Get videos for any project’ and ‘We help people tell stories every day – Let us be part of yours.’ Cato explains, “Well, this is really what it’s all about, helping people tell stories. It’s the essence of what we do. Our main users today are filmmakers, videographers and video editing and post-production artists, but in the years to come we are 100% sure the use of video to tell stories will be widespread.” He goes on, “In many settings where images are used for communication today, video will be used tomorrow. Video drives todays development of portable devices, like mobile and pads, people consume entertainment like never before, and it is only a matter of time before this focus hits the marketing spend of traditional business, industry and trade. Video implies longer sessions for user engagement, offers the sender an opportunity to tell more complex stories and currently implies a massive opportunity as far as we can tell.” When confronted with the question that we have already heard this story many times before, Cato explained that the market just takes a long time to develop, is costly and that it demands different skills of the end user compared to what is required from someone using images. “Just look at the young generations of today, they have no problems putting together videos to tell stories. They just know how to do it and the tools are already there. They’re not waiting.”

In the video marketplace industry, Clipcanvas is the first to take a more general approach to their market and users like this, and it’s a bold move. In previous years, they have already added freemium clips, production music and video editing capabilities to their service in order to offer a more complete set of tools for video creatives. On the question of where Cato sees Clipcanvas going in the future, he says “I expect the use of video to be widespread, our job is to make it so. We have been working on this opportunity for many years now, and we know a great deal about this business and where we want to go. However, we have always been faced with the challenge of attracting sufficient growth funding, and the European market has been sluggish in the past years. This has held us back. We are now turning our attention towards the North-American market, and intend to establish our presence there to compete more aggressively. In order to take the next step, we are now also reaching out to investors who see the obvious opportunities inherent in this market and who are willing to take risk in order to transform Clipcanvas from what it is today, into something significant that anyone can use.” So the message seems pretty clear, if you recognize the potential for this market going forward, reach out to Cato.

In any case, make sure to visit Clipcanvas and check out their brand new pages.

About Clipcanvas

Clipcanvas offers videos for any project. Comprising more than 450.000 clips, crowd-sourced through thousands of videographers, it is currently one of the largest sources for creative and editorial video on the interweb. Videos are licensed for perpetual use via one-time license fees.

To learn more about Clipcanvas, visit their service on http://www.clipcanvas.com







Lightning Talks 2013 – The Democratisation of Creativity, David Alberts

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Lightning Talk on the Creative Sandbox @ Cannes, June 2013 Speaker: David Alberts, Chief Creative Officer, MoFilm How crowd sourcing creative talent is pushi…
Video Rating: 5 / 5

Maryland Association of CPAs Features Innovative Technologies and Social Media to Increase Engagement and Collaboration at Innovation Summit

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Towson, MD (PRWEB) May 15, 2013

The Summit theme of Innovation, Connection, and Collaboration is designed to showcase innovation in the CPA Profession and features almost 20 of the top thought leaders in the Profession, top technology vendors and leading innovations in Accounting Standards, XBRL, Healthcare and more. All in an event designed to spark serendipity and innovation.

A recent IBM Global CEO study identified collaboration as the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees, with 75 percent of CEOs calling it critical. The CPA Horizons 2025 Report by the American Institute of CPAs also identified collaboration in the top five skills needed by CPAs in the future. MACPA Chair Anoop Mehta said, “We are very excited to be able to use these technologies to enhance and accelerate collaboration among summit attendees, sponsors and speakers. These relationships will be instrumental in keeping our members ahead of the rapid pace of change we find ourselves in.”

Here is how these exciting technologies will be used at the Innovation Summit.


ThinkTank by Group Systems (http://www.groupsystems.com) is a powerful crowdsourcing, crowd-computing, and group decision support platform that wows participants, significantly accelerating and enhancing outcomes, creating a profound collective experience for participants. It will be used in a special session (on May 16th) with Learning Leaders across the CPA Profession titled, “Turning Training and Learning into Business Results” by the Business Learning Institute’s Richard Flanagan, author of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning and Bob Dean, CPA, CLO, Founder of Dean Learning & Talent Advisors

Flybits (http://flybits.com) is an exciting location-aware technology that connects people to places called “zones”. It is the way we are distributing conference materials to participants at the Innovation Summit. It’s an incredible technology that delivers specialized content to your mobile device based on where you are at any moment. Want some fun? See what pops up when you visit a vendor’s booth (aka “Flybits zone”). Zone’s will be created for the MACPA and our Platinum Sponsors, CPA2Biz (http://www.cpa.com), Sage (http://na.sage.com), CCH (http://www.cch.com), Ziptr (http://www.ziptr.com), and Simplified Innovations (http://simplifiedinnovations.com).

Conferences.io (http://www.conferences.io) is an innovative web-based audience participation application used to increase engagement and make learning more collaborative. Special polling and social Q&A features allow for constant participation during and after events and will be used in several sessions at the Summit.

MACPA Groups (http://cpa.tc/roups) is our newest tool to help MACPA members connect and collaborate and share the “wisdom of the crowd”. The Federal Tax group was recently used to crowd-source MACPA’s testimony for the House Ways & Means Committee about the “tax season from hell.”

Social Media will be used extensively at the Summit as a connection and learning tool. Special pre-summit webcasts were held with our members (Social Media Quick Start) and with sponsors (How to Tip the Adoption Curve) to teach them specifics around ”how to crush a conference”. A special Social Media Guide has been created to connect people to our sponsors and speakers. Follow the conference at hashtag #MDSUMMIT13.

Jennifer Warawa, Sage’s vice president of partner programs and channel sales, said in a recent press release, “This event is different from any other in the profession, so our approach to how we engage with the show and its participants is different. Sage is getting social with the help of MACPA and there are several initiatives planned to get everyone online and talking in the social channels.

MACPA CEO, Tom Hood, CPA,CITP, CGMA said, “we are now at a point where the collaboration curve can help us jump the experience curve. We are excited to see how these innovative technologies can help our members amplify their connections at our Summit and increase their ability to collaborate for years to come.”

About the Maryland Association of CPAs: The MACPA exists to help CPAs connect with each other in strategic ways, to be the organization to protect our members’ interests, and to help them achieve greater success. We provide the resources and services that CPAs need to excel in their profession. Since 1901, the MACPA has been a national leader as a premier professional organization in the CPA Profession. Tom Hood, our CEO, was recently named as one of the Top 25 Thought Leaders in Public Accounting by CPA Practice Advisor and a one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the CPA Profession by Accounting Today Magazine (eighth time in 2012). We’re honored that the Baltimore Business Journal and Washington Business Journal have named the MACPA as one of the top 5 largest networking organizations in Baltimore and D.C. for each of the past five years.







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David Levinson, CrowdSource CFO, Earns Nod for St. Louis Business Journals 2013 CFO of the Year Award

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Swansea, Illinois (PRWEB) May 15, 2013

Each year, the Saint Louis Business Journal nominates business leaders for its CFO of the Year awards program. This year’s nominees demonstrated excellence in contributing to their company’s growth and profitability, as well as contributions to other areas of corporate management. David Levinson, CFO of CrowdSource, is one of three finalists selected in the small corporation division (revenue below $ 99.9 million).

“It is an honor to be nominated alongside some of the best and brightest CFOs in the Saint Louis area,” noted Levinson. “Truly, this award is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the entire CrowdSource team.”

Under David’s leadership, revenue grew 900% in 2012 and is forecasted to grow 600% in 2013. Furthermore, during 2012, David raised $ 12.5 million in Series A funding from Highland Capital Partners, which represented the highest company valuation in the industry and the largest capital raise among its competitors. The capital raise will allow CrowdSource to continue expanding its scalable content solutions for enterprise clients.

Stephanie Leffler, CEO of CrowdSource, understands firsthand the knowledge and expertise David brings to the table as CFO of CrowdSource. “David not only provides financial expertise, but also brings a wealth of experience to our leadership team,” noted Leffler. “His past experience with Ernst & Young offered him a window into the inner workings of a number of businesses, which has helped tremendously with the rapid growth of CrowdSource.”

In addition to leading CrowdSource’s financial operations, David leads corporate development, legal, human resources and facilities management.    

About CrowdSource

CrowdSource is the industry leader in a multi-billion dollar market, providing clients with on-demand access to a scalable workforce. CrowdSource specializes in content solutions for Fortune 500 online retailers, publishers and media companies. By using a distributed workforce, clients receive high-quality, cost-effective results at unprecedented speed.

CrowdSource is headquartered in St. Louis and backed by Highland Capital Partners.







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KKMedia Inc. is Now Quickly and Quietly Emerging as One of Silicon Beach's Most Innovative Companies

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Beverly Hills, CA (PRWEB) May 16, 2013

KKMedia Inc. and its emergence as a leading force in Southern California’s Silicon Beach has been driven by a unique and innovative business model.

Over the past three years KKMedia Inc. and its emergence as a leading force in Southern California’s Silicon Beach has been driven by a unique and innovative business model. KKMedia Inc. is a creative firm like the old school ChiatDay and an incubator/investment partner like IdeaLab fused into one company.

Founder and CEO Keith Kaplan says, “It’s very effective in today’s environment to have a combo of advertising, technology and business where you create, brand, design, and engineer in unison as a complete process; not to mention the benefits you receive in lower design and development costs because of efficient departmental communication. As we continue to progress technologically, this process is, and will be, the way of the future as we see the ability to combine creative and technological practices. Traditionally, agencies, software development firms, and investment firms have been separated and this division creates issues for effective deployment and innovation; we are changing this for the better.”

Currently, KKMedia Inc. is the incubator and angel investor in two new internet based companies, meStori.com and Obeylist.com described in detail below. Additionally, KKMedia Inc. is supporting as a creative agency/web development firm the launch of XPrize’s new company FIX fixhq.com and Authority Auto’s mycarbuyingsecrets.com also described in detail below.

meStori.com – Your digital life, your stuff

Social Media and Cloud Storage like nothing you’ve seen before.

meStori.com is the first ever complete solution to create, organize, share, and store in a safe and completely private way all your photos, videos, and documents of the most important thing in your life…Your Life, Your Stori.

meStori.com seamlessly creates a beautiful left to right timeline of all your life’s digital memories that you can have completely private or if you wish, share socially. With meStori’s innovative Facebook and Social Digital Content Pull you can migrate all your digital content from your favorite social media networks to your meStori timeline with the click of the mouse, and it’s really cool to see it instantly appear in your timeline too.

The history of your life told with an elegant timeline created with the power of personal Cloud Storage combined with Social Sharing enables you keep safe all your memories without the scatter of multiple hard drives, websites, and jump drives. You can even send meStori your boxes of photos and videos and we will digitize it for safe keeping forever. Imagine, no more fire or flood risk, not more dead hard drives, just your most precious memories, your life story, private and safe in the cloud.

meStori.com is currently in private beta 1.0 and is seeking additional investors, please contact us for more information.

Obeylist.com – Hover and Discover

Where the cool kids get their news and MEMEs

There are a lot of great content sites out there and let’s face it, they don’t give you the ability to hover and discover with thousands of 80px thumbnails of the hottest trending stories and stuff by category. The fact is they are cool but they are not as cool as obeylist.com’s hover and discover interface. This is a brand new way to sell products and advertising — thousands of banners per page, millions of e-commerce sales.

Obeylist.com gives young people and early adopters a great and fast way to see, share and create the top 1000 trending stories and MEMEs on the internet by category page. Obeylist.com changes the ways young people quickly find and buy the top trending items and sales on the internet and enables young people to see what celebrities are wearing and using then quickly and easily make an e-commerce transaction to own it.

Obeylist.com is currently in beta 1.0 and is seeking additional investors, please contact us for more information.

FIX – The New XPrize Company

Bringing Crowd Sourcing to a problem near you

XPrize is taking the FIX to Crowd Sourcing with the formula created by the incredible success of XPrize Challenges like Virgin Galactic and the current “Tricorder” XPrize sponsored by Qualcomm.

FIX will be crowd sourcing the funding, educating, training, initiating, conducting, and communicating on a global scale the entire scope of a FIX Challenge on a global scale.

KKMedia Inc. has the honor to be the partner on the announcement and website launch to the world about FIX. All our best to the FIX team and to all that are ready to make a difference.

mycarbuyingsecrets.com

“Getting a good price isn’t always a great deal!”

Oren Weintrob is one of the leading consumer advocates for car buyers in the United States and has created the first ever online application and training program to expose all the backend secrets that are used to create profit centers for vehicle dealers.

We are proud to work with Oren to create this innovative and revolutionary application. KKMedia Inc. did it all, from concept to programing, a full for hire incubation of a brand new internet product. Oren is already an incredible success and we are sure this will only add to what he brings to the car buying consumer.

If you have a company or are an entrepreneur that wants to work with KKMedia Inc. as your forward thinking agency and application development company for hire, KKMedia Inc. is currently accepting interviews for new opportunities.

If you wish to contact KKMedia Inc. for press and speaking engagements we will be happy to accommodate your needs.







Fraxinus: a Facebook game to crowdsource the fight against ash dieback disease HD

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Please share and embed this video with credit to BBSRC. See full press release here: http://bit.ly/14Gxc2u Let scientists keep the lab coat, goggles and pipe…
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Greenpeace’s one-of-a-kind new flagship ship, the Rainbow Warrior, is in Seattle this weekend for free public tours. The 3o million dollar paid for by crowd …