We’ve released our first market test!
Ever wondered what happens when instant messaging meets Mortal Kombat? The answer: Gwabs.com!

Gwabs derives its DNA from two crowdsourced ideas: Desktop Creatures and Online Area Combat Game. Gwabs pits two people’s desktop creatures against each other in an intense (a.k.a. bloody) desktop-to-desktop battle.

Gwabs was inspired by two community member ideas. These ideas were chosen to help illustrate a point; parts of an idea can lead to Royalty Points if its’ a good one. (Clever, isn’t it?)

|\,|att, hailing from Gibraltar, was the inspiration behind the battling desktop creatures that could move-to-machine, challenge, and smack talk all who cross their path.
Cory Ross, an aspiring entrepreneur from Utah with a taste for Taco Bell, fast cars and even faster computers, was the vision behind Gwabs’ brutal and tough persona.

So there have it - the stories behind our very first market test (tissue, anyone?). Tell your friends, tell your moms… decide if these ideas should fly, or flop. Whatcha’ think?

You can give us your feedback about this market test in the Gwabs Forum!

The results are in.
The goat’s being weighed.
The wisdom of the crowd has prevailed.
An African family has a fresh supply of goat milk!

Thank you to everyone who participated in our Weigh the Goat Contest. It was a lot of fun receiving your guesses, and it brought us closer to an outstanding foundation in Africa – Heifer International.

At the end of the day we gave away 7 sumo suits, 7 iPod Nanos, 7 Casio Digital Cameras, 7 JVC Stereos, and 3 Xbox360s.

PS. For those of you who are curious, the goat weighed 38.5 pounds.

The Google’s been fed. The goat’s been weighed. And we’re ready to launch.

Beta++ has several new features:

• New and improved IdeaWarz
• Private Messaging and Discussion Forums
• A call for Coders and Creatives
• Market Tests (ohhhhhhh yah!)
• The release of NorseForge
• Diet Coke rockets launching into outer space (as they do…)
• And of course, a Viking goat in a boat. (We’re busy little beavs’ aren’t we?)

So fire up Pandora, put on some smokin’ good tunes, and explore our new features.

It’s getting REAL, people.

PS - Ratings in IdeaWarz have been reset to accomodate the new rating system, but don’t sweat it, we’ve got the rankings from the previous system. We’re also recording napkin battle outcomes, but they are not going to be reflected on the list rating system.

Look ma, we made it to #3!

Now that the tsunami of digg users has subsided, we can now happily claim that we survived, thanks to Akamai.

See that huge spike? We went from 0.5 Mbits/sec to 6.5 Mbits/sec. That’s a 1300% increase.

On top of that, we had:
- 22,057 visitors
- 64,038 page views
- 802.44 GB of video streamed
82% of our traffic came from digg.com on that fateful day. That’s the digg effect.

PS – Less than 9.5 hours to go, then Primetime!