Every week I roundup the newest deals, launches, developments and other interesting tidbits from the crowdsourcing world. This week we start out in Austin at South by Southwest and windup "stumbling upon" all kinds of interesting projects on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding SXSW

By the end of next week, South by Southwest, the mega-festival of music, movies and digital culture held each March in Austin, Texas will be underway. Dozens of films will be screened over a few days, and at least 31 of them were funded through Kickstarter. That's almost twice the number of films that used Kickstarter to make it to Utah's Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. And it doesn't even take into account the number of filmmakers who used other crowdfunding platforms like USA Projects.

Telligent marries innovation and social

On the Open Innovation front, social enterprise firm Telligent is adding an ideation and innovation management solution to its offerings called InnovationCast. The firm touts the new platform's unique marriage with social collaboration capability.  Telligent will hold a webinar on InnovationCast March 22.

Everyday Citizen Science

Discover Magazine and SciStarter.com are launching a new citizen science project designed to connect weekend scientists with leading researchers. The basic idea is to crowdsource some basic tasks, ranging from analyzing distant galaxies to monitoring frog, firefly and whale populations, to detecting home and body microbiomes. Projects will be featured on DiscoverMagazine.com

Digital and biological eyes on the page

Microtask and Ephesoft announced a new partnership this week to combine automated optical character recognition with crowdsourced human readers to validate the machine-based OCR capture. Both companies are hoping the collaboration will amount to a major advance for document processing worldwide.

a $5 million crowd creativity deal?

The blur Group announced this week what they believe to be a major Crowdsourcing milestone. There's little in the way of details, but the agency which built a huge Creative Services Exchange says it has been briefed on a project worth $5 million. We'll be interested to learn more.

Mo' money for merging AI and crowdsourcing

Crowd creativity wasn't the only area where big deals were going down this week--CrowdControl wrapped up a $2 million funding round from Greycroft Partners and RTP Ventures. CrowdControl looks to merge artificial intelligence techniques with crowdsourcing to improve overall results.

'Stumbling' Kickstarter

One cool tool I, uh, "stumbled upon" this week is Fundhaus, an experimental side project from Hype Machine which combines a StumbleUpon-like interface with Kickstarter to add a new element to navigating the site and make exploring new projects as easy as a single click. Be careful, though, it can be habit-forming.

 - Eric Mack is a contributing editor for Crowdsourcing.org. He also currently contributes to CNET. In the past, his work has been featured by NPR, Wired, the New York Times and other outlets. You can contact him at eric.mack@crowdsourcing.org. Find him on Twitter and Google+. Also be sure to follow Crowdsourcing.org on Twitter.