Digg and Revision3 co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have provided crowdsourcing startup 3Crowd Technologies and its founder Barrett Lyon with an early Christmas present of funding.
Lyon says the angel investors join Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates to “give 3Crowd the shot in the arm it needs to take off,” likely sometime early next year.
This marks the second time Rose and Adelson have crossed paths with Lyon, who co-founded BitGravity, the streaming video service that Internet television studio Revision3 utilizes.
San Mateo, California-based 3Crowd has yet to reveal how they plan to transform crowdsourcing (or how much funding they have secured), but Lyon’s history and apparent entrepreneurial fervor to change the web has clearly excited 3Crowd’s investors.
“This concept is yet another disrupting, dis-intermediating idea from Barrett. These are the technologies that change the game,” Adelson says.
Lyon, who is also the subject of the forthcoming book Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn, says that while the Internet has provided the platform for much success, it is still imperfect and needs to change.
“At this point, my goal is to make change – to take the Internet in its current form (resembling digital duct tape) and transform it into something stronger and more scalable,” Lyon says.
Before co-founding BitGravity, Lyon created the Opte Project: “software that traced all the routes of the Internet,” he says. Images from Opte Project have been used in movies, books and are permanently on display in museums of art and science in both New York and Boston.
