Much ink has been spilt on the wisdom of crowds, and that ink has a good point: Sometimes the most difficult problems can be solved by simply floating questions out there and seeing if anyone has an answer.
As one of many examples of the power of crowdsourcing, Netflix significantly improved its movie recommendations by offering the world's engineers $1 million for the best improvement to its movie recommendation system. Ultimately, the crowd came up with the answer, resulting in a relatively cheap (even at that price) solution to a problem that had flummoxed Netflix's own engineers, who had already improved the algorithm as much as they could.
Evolver.fm is all about music apps that do for music players what the MP3 did for music over a decade ago: make them invisible and nearly free to distribute. We've seen everything from apps that regulate your jog with perfectly-timed tunes, sing along with your GPS, immerse you in an another world, sound like T-Pain, fingerpaint with sound, and tackle countless other tasks.
But we're still not satisfied. Great ideas are always out there, and we want yours -- now.
Head over to Evolver.fm's Untapped Apps section to vote on some outlandish music app ideas brainstormed by the author and other staff members of The Echo Nest (publisher of Evolver.fm). In addition to helping to shape the future of music apps, you'll have the chance to submit your own original ideas to the next round of Untapped Apps. If you've ever had an idea for a music app -- but no idea or inclination how to build it yourself -- send it over. If enough other people like it, your bright idea could become a real app for music fans everywhere to use.
Voting will be closed for the next session shortly, so cast your votes and send us your ideas soon.