Robinhood Fund (www.robinhoodfund.com) is a community wishing well where you can make a wish or make wishes come true. The Robinhood Fund is dedicated to inspiring people to make a difference in their lives and others.

The Robinhood Fund empowers everyday people to make a wish. Created in the spirit of Robin Hood, the fund grants wishes based on community votes. You can use the fund for anything: a wedding dress, credit card debt, or even money for college.

Robinhood Fund is an idea MJ had way back even before the days of Cambrian House. We market tested the idea in the first few months of operating, then put things on hold to get our own website up and running. Now we’re back on it.

Today we’ve just started beta testing and have seeded the fund with $1000! Get your wish in before Wednesday noon for a chance to win your share! Just check out www.robinhoodfund.com

You can submit your wish into one of 5 categories:

Weekly Wish: Inspired by Gwabs, tell us why you need some extra $$ for alienware gear or other gaming accessories.

Twist of Fate: Have you had a bad week? Some unexpected expenses put you in a bind?

Health and Wellness: Are you or a loved one going through a tough time with your health?

Me, Myself, and I: All about you. It never hurts to ask.

Help me help others: Have a wish to help others?

Voting begins Wednesday at noon MDT and wishes will be granted during the Web 2.0 conference on Wednesday November 8th.

But just because we’re testing doesn’t mean we don’t have any tasks for Royalty Points! We’re looking for help with the Robinhood Fund logo, home page and the Ask Maid Marian feature (like our Ask the Queen). If you’re interested in jumping aboard the RHF team, just check out the Robinhood Fund project page.

So check out Robinhood Fund, submit a wish, and let us know what you think: www.robinhoodfund.com

Hiya all,

Midnight rolled around, the votes are in, and the Golden Hammer Tournament is officially closed for voting. A big thx to all our awesome participants, and community for making the very first IdeaWarz tournament as exciting and fun as it was.

The tournament champion will be announced, with MUCH fanfare, at the upcoming Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco November 7th.

But just because we are not announcing the Golden Hammer winner until the 7th, doesn’t mean we can’t kick off another tournament this week! Wednesday night will begin next chapter in IdeaWarz – The Golden Axe.

Contenders for the tournament will be contacted today – so make sure you ideas are ready for battle.

All the best - JR

Hiya all,

Well here we are - the IdeaWarz Golden Hammer tournament final. Just three weeks ago 16 of the finest ideas in the land stepped into the ring to give it their best shot, and now there are 2.

Without further ado, our finalists, for the first ever IdeaWarz Golden Hammer tournament are:

AndyDoan and his fantastic Film Funder

Vs

The techiest of tech guys, techguy, and his ever popular Spoil My Spouse

Does Film Funder have enough movie magic to stave off elimination for one more round?

Does Spoil My Spouse have the power of the people to propel it into the IdeaWarz stratosphere?

I don’t know.

But I do know this is going to be a final of epic proportions. So epic in fact that we are going to announce the winner at Web 2.0 in San Francisco November 7. That’s right, our IdeaWarz winner will be revealed among the bright lights fanfare that comes with this premiere business / technology conference. Speakers include people like:

Needless to say we are super pumped about announcing the winner at this event.

So those of you who haven’t submitted your ideas yet, get them in soon for the November tournament (date to be announced). We would love to put your name and idea in lights as a tournament champion.

A big thanks to all our contestants thus far - especially Doymarn and BuddySaul who made it to the final four.

All the best to AndyDoan and techguy in the final.

Got a comment or something you would like to say about the tournament? Be sure to check our IdeaWarz forum here.

Some of you may have noticed a new badge appearing on people’s ideas.

These badges of honor represent ideas that have competed in an IdeaWarz tournament. Each badge will have the graphic used for that tournament, as well as a number for how many rounds they fought in battle.

I am super pumped about awarding these because good ideas are what we need, and these members ideas are worth voting for.

Congrats tournament veterans - your badges are well earned and deserved.

Hiya all,

Last week capped off another exciting week in the tournament. We had big brain ideas; kids programs, spouses and secretaries, and even the movie industry vying for your votes. Well vote you did and the results are in.

Advancing to RND3 of the Golden Hammer Tournament are:

The final outcome is anyone’s call.

Virtual Business Units have been popular for sometime, but lots of people would be thrilled to see an independent film project. While many of us have spouses and partners we’d love to spoil, protecting kids online is tough competition.

So, get your votes in by midnight, Tuesday Oct 24th, and help decide the two finalists for the *first ever* IdeaWarz tournament.

Best of luck to our final four.

If you can’t work out your product, service, or offering to your customers on paper, how are you ever going to realize it in the real world?

Experience it manually is a term we use to describe the process we go through whenever we have a new product or service for our customers. We need to get in their heads. We need to understand the benefits and meaning the product will bring to them.

In the past we have made the mistake of jumping into implementation too quickly. We started building web pages, writing copy, and building software before we really understood what the product or service was doing for our customer.

If we had worked it out completely on paper, and experienced the process by acting through the various scenarios, we would have saved ourselves a lot of time and energy.

We are not afraid to failing fast, but before we try something we first work it out on paper.

Why web devs should be using IE, and not just because it has 85% market share.

Are you a web dev who has migrated to Firefox? Most of Cambrian House’s devs use Firefox for their day-to-day browsing. It’s simply a better product. Pages look nicer, sites render better and the program crashes less.

And therein lies the problem.

We get spoiled with better technology. Early adopters of better technologies reap the benefits of not having to deal with the issues of the inferior product. It’s a new adage, but will ring true in the ears of ever web dev: Build in IE, test in Firefox, get three errors. Build in Firefox, test in IE, get three hundred errors.

We recently had to re-learn this hard lesson with the release of IdeaWarz 3.0.

In building the new version, we tested the site in Firefox - it looked great, worked great and everything was just right.

As an oversight, we didn’t fully test in IE during development, so when we did final testing in IE, there was an overwhelming number of errors, the site looked terrible and was just plain broken.

Many of the team were burning the midnight oil to IW 3.0 off the ground because of that one oversight.

Let’s hear it one more time for posterity’s sake: Build in IE, test in Firefox, get three errors. Build in Firefox, test in IE, get three hundred errors.

Hi all,

What a week! 16 of the finest ideas in the land battlin’ it out, and after five days of intense voting the results are in. Pairs advancing to the next round are:

Last day for voting on these eight Round 2 ideas will be Wednesday Oct 18th.

I want to thank all our first round contestants for their participation, as well as wish the winners success and luck in Round 2.

See you in the final 4!

We love Jack Welsh. You may not agree with all of Jack’s management philosophies, but one thing you can’t criticize him for is not telling you what he thinks. At GE Jack was responsible for bringing back intense candor to the company.

Practicing intense candor means telling it like it is. It means not holding back and withholding criticism. It means giving honest and sincere feedback and appreciation.

The price of not being candid with each other is speed and cost. We waste more time and money when we avoid making unpopular decisions, and go down paths we know we shouldn’t because we don’t have the courage to speak up.

Employing intense candor gives us a competitive advantage. By not being a consultancy, or the UN ,we can make mistakes, correct each other respectfully, grow, and move on to success faster then ever.

Intense candor doesn’t mean not respecting individuals. It means we are not respecting each other if we are not telling it like it is.

Props to Marissa Mayer, Google Customer Products Director, for inspiring us to spread the word on creativity loving constraints. Check out this video of Marissa Mayer talking about creativity loving constraints as well as and other great innovation points.

Entrepreneurs are an endowed bunch. No really - let’s be honest. They’re ambitious, visionary, risk-taking, detail-oriented, driven, motivated and creative. They’re also highly constrained.

Similarly, working at a startup, there are constraints everywhere. We face tight deadlines, are often under-staffed and given limited resources. And our creativity thrives as a result.

At first this may seem contradictory. The assumption is that creativity is fostered when it is boundless. But that’s not it at all.

It is the ambition and the vision of the entrepreneur that forms the dream, it is constraints and limitations that force us to be creative in order to realize our dreams.

When starting small, executing our dreams, constraints are the things that force us to be even more creative.

Still don’t believe? Here’s an example: where established and large corporations would scale back projects, small startups push harder, add more and even expand projects because of the ambition and vision (and well, being able to scale back projects is quite a luxury, truth be told).

In our experience, when faced with the constraints of tight deadlines and tighter resources, we were not only creative about the things we were trying to accomplish, but also the way we accomplished those things.

The point? The creativity of our vision isn’t the only creativity that matters - the creativity of our design and execution also matters. Moreover, by being constrained, the latter type of creativity becomes more and more important.

A true story: Return of the King

The making of the final chapter in the Lord of the Rings movies - the Return of the King - is a fine example of creativity loving constraints.

Movie making has very real constraints. During the production of The Return of the King, it became apparent that time was running out. Movie posters had been printed. Press releases released. The world was waiting on baited breath for exciting conclusion to the Lord of the Rings saga.

Instead of responding to the pressure by reducing scope, Peter added more. Right up till the very end new music was being added, new special effects were being shot, more CGI development occurred, everything was increasing in scope.

They pushed so hard those final days that when Peter went to see the grand opening of the movie in Wellington, he had yet to see the movie in its entirety from beginning to end in one sitting.

Return of the King went on to win 11 Academy awards that year and was hailed by critics and fans around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made. They not executed a very creative vision, but they were all the more creative in the execution in order to realize an otherwise unfilmable movie.

Give your self a constraint

So if you are spinning your wheels, and not making any progress on the creativity side, have someone impose a real constraint on you. You may find your creativity flourishes!

Agree? Disagree? Share your opinions, advice and stories.