3taps Supports Creative Commons with a Matching Challenge!

Today, we'd like to turn your attention to 3taps, a new startup that makes sifting through classified ads a whole lot easier. 3taps is supporting our fall fundraising campaign with a $3000 matching challenge! That means if you donate now, 3taps will match your donation dollar for dollar — but only for a limited time. Read on to learn how two friends who once worked at the Federal Reserve see the powerful potential of the CC Public Domain Mark and donate today to have your gift automatically doubled!

Say you're looking for a 2002 Saab Viggen—a rare car that could take hours to find if you were to have to comb through every Craigslist, eBay, and Hemmings listing site. A new web service called 3taps, founded by Karen Gifford and Greg Kidd in San Francisco, is making searching for products and services a whole lot easier: it indexes factual data from different sites and neatly spits out relevant search results on their web, iPhone, and iPad interfaces. You can just type "2002 Saab Viggen" into the search box and, within seconds, have a full list of search results from the over 6.7 million posts made each day that the software sorts through.

Gifford and Kidd both worked at the Federal Reserve and later met working at a financial consulting company. When their large, global clients would run up against systems and data incompatibility issues, they recognized that there was a massive amount of financial data out there but no central database. Thinking about the issue of data management sparked many ideas for Gifford and Kidd and eventually led to the idea of 3taps. While searching for a car seems like a completely different function than searching for aggregated financial data, Gifford and Kidd explain that the concept of having snippets of public information easily available is the same. "The idea is to be ubiquitous," Kidd says. "Everyone should have equal access, open access, and clarity about what's out there that is not protected by copyright."

3taps aims to make the data currently kept in silos more accessible by clearly marking it with the public domain mark once it is located. "We're using the CC public domain mark to bring clarity to the idea that facts are in the public domain and not protected by copyright. Equal access to pricing information is a public good. We see the public domain mark as really important in clarifying what information belongs to the public."

That is one of the many reasons 3taps supports CC. They are showing their support with this matching challenge and we are inviting everyone to make the most of 3taps's generosity by donating to CC now to have your gift doubled.

Why 3taps supports CC:

"3taps indexes factual data about items offered for exchange, like price, quantity and item description. Facts like these are important public information that let people find the best deal on the item they want. There has been a lot of confusion about the status of factual data on the Internet, and confusion in this area inhibits innovation. Creative Commons' newly-released Public Domain Mark is an important tool for bringing clarity to this area. It couldn't have come at a better time for those interested in collaboration in the sphere of data."
— Karen Gifford

Check out the super-cool science-themed CC shirt now available in the CC store. The world-famous web comic XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon, and it's all yours for $20. 

Microsoft has supported us for the past five years and has given again to this year's fundraising campaign, saying the company "is very proud to continue its support of this important organization and the crucial public resource it makes available" and encouraging other technology companies to do the same.

Amazon #1 bestseller, sci-fi anthology "Machine of Death," goes Creative Commons. Read why its authors chose to do so.

Apply for a 2011 Google Policy Fellowship with Creative Commons — open to undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy. Find out more and apply.

Read stories of people and projects using Creative Commons in education, government, and data, and add your own to contribute to our case studies project.