Jasmine here (CH staffer). I thought I’d write a post to spread some holiday cheer. After all, we’ve had an awesome year and we owe all of our recent successes to you: the community.
There’s nothing like a trip to the Valley to put us in the holiday spirit. Last week, we sponsored a Churchill Club event featuring Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube and Wall Street Journal columnists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Low and behold, many of the event attendees wanted to talk to us!
Why, you ask? They wanted to know more about crowdsourcing and how you (our stellar community members) are involved.
In fact, Megan Smith, Director of Business Development at Google extended an invitation to us to visit them the next day! She was impressed by our Follow the White Laptop campaign (www.followthewhitelaptop.com) and helped hook us up with her colleague Ethan Beard who is also a One Laptop per Child (OLPC) board member (www.laptop.org).
So, there we were at Google on a warm, sunny December day staring in awe at thousands of Googlers dressed in pajamas. Google has theme days, too? Awesome! (I’m not sure if you guys know, but CH has theme Friday: Band T-Shirt Friday, Sequins Friday, Festive Friday…)
Megan and Ethan showed us one of the $100 laptops (we pulled up ch.com and did it ever look good!) and talked with us about our business model. As some of you may know, our hope is to put the White Laptop on the auction block in February to celebrate our one year anniversary and raise funds for OLPC and the Youth for Technology Foundation.
What were some of our other “wins” this year?
Well, we worked with people like Jeff Howe and others to increase awareness about crowdsourcing (check out his blog: www.crowdsourcing.com), attracted some great attention from the media (check out our 2006 media appearances: www.cambrianhouse.com/press-releases/), were invited to Harvard Business School to discuss crowdsourcing (we will be the subjects of a case study in the New Year), and saw thousands of amazing ideas submitted by the community. Some are battling it out in IdeaWarz, others are in market test phase and others are actively being crowdsourced.
Many thanks to all of you for an awesome 2006! Enjoy the holidays and best wishes for the New Year.
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