Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jun 15, 2012

Article of the Week
Social curation is much more than just a market (GigaOm)
Big Idea:  Is digital curation here to stay or a bubble? Based on our love of creating and collecting, one would think the Internet is a perfect ecosystem to support curation.  Startups like Pinterest, with a $1 billion valuation, have exhibited curation is a much needed capability in a sea of digital content.

Editor’s Choice Articles
InfoArmy mobilizes the crowd to build business intelligence reports (GigaOm)
Big Idea:  Crowdsourcing continues to find opportunities to create new businesses.  Jim Fowler, who created the crowdsourced contact database company Jigsaw, is now trying to do the same with business information and an army of distributed researchers.

Drilling Down: Does the ‘Freemium’ Model Really Work? (NY Times)
Big Idea:  Is “Free” really a business model?  Dmitri Leonov, from email inbox priority software company Sanebox, doesn’t think so.  Free can certainly grow your user base rapidly, but they are also a drag on a company since there is still an expected level of support.

Microsoft Gives Windows Azure Amazonian Facelift (Wired)
Big Idea:  Microsoft’s cloud service Azure is trying to catch up to market leaders like Amazon Web Service.  Azure has gotten a major facelift as Microsoft tries to provide more capabilities and recruit software developers to their platform.  And it’s not all about Microsoft tools as they try to woo open source software developers.

Can Software Drive Innovation? (Innovation Excellence)
Big Idea:  Can innovation be taught?  The answer is most likely no.  But organizations can introduce cultural and process changes that will help support innovation.  By giving employees the freedom of choosing their own “tools” like collaboration software, innovation can be ignited.