Hiya all,

This afternoon Tim O’Reilly officially kicked off the beginning of the Web 2.0 Expo with a great key note talking about the state of the web, and what we should be ready for in the future.

Tim’s first point, which I whole heartedly agree with, is that this is just the beginning of a new phase of the web. We are only just beginning to figure out how to harness and collaborate the intelligence of the world. Of course this raises some interesting new issues regarding copyrights, intellectual property, and ownership of data.

Tim then sat down with Jeff Bezos of Amazon and had a great one-on-one. After hearing Bezos talk, I’ve got to hand it to Amazon. They are one of the most forward thinking companies of our time with the work on web services.

The story behind Amazon web services is that to become one of the premier shopping experiences on the web, Amazon had to work through some pretty hairy issues. Things like uptime, reliability, web hosting, scalability, bandwidth management all had to be tackled and on a massive scale.

After working out the kinks themselves, they figured a lot of other companies would benefit from their infrastructure and learnings. So they created APIs around all their services, and offered these up to the rest of the world. Brilliant stuff and definitely ahead of their time.

Rounding out the key note, John Battelle interviewed Mena Trott (Six Apart), Joe Kraus (JotSpot, Exite), and Jay Adelson (Digg) on what it was like being an entrepreneur in today’s world. I thought the most interesting question asked to the group was what their greatest mistakes were when they started their companies.

Mena regretted getting too excited every time a potential partner courted them. They would get distracted from what they were doing, start making decisions that favored the dynamics of their new potential partner, only to have things fall through at the last minute. Lesson learned - stay focused and don’t jump through hoops for every potential partner that comes by.

Jay thought that at times Digg has been too reactionary to things going on the in blogosphere. Instead of jumping at every comment or criticism thrown their way, they should just keep their cool and ignore a lot of the buzz (good and bad) that comes with the kind of success Digg has seen.

Joe’s regretted not putting their business model into beta at the same time as their product. This cost them 6 months in cash, with no feedback on whether their business model would fly. Joe strongly recommends companies test their business models at the same time as their products.

After Joe, there were a few startups who pitched their product ideas, and Kevin Lynch of Amazon gave a demo of Apollo (is anyone sold on this product?). Apollo seems interesting but it seems like a solution looking for a problem.

After that, it was down to the tiki-bar to serve beer to thirsty conference attendees. Overall, very good content so far. More later today.

Hiya all,

This week we made a big announcement down here at Web 2.0 Expo. We announced to the world that going forward, we would be sharing ownership of Cambrian House with our community. We are very excited by this announcement, and can think of no better way to share our success with those most responsible - you.

If you are already a member, login to Cambrian House, go to your profile, and click ‘claim your stock’ (under the badge on the right hand side).

Not a member yet? No problem. Simply go to:

www.cambrianhouse.com

and click Register.

Many thanks to our community members. We love you, appreciate you, and are grateful for having you as partners.

Sincerely,

The Cambrian House Team

Twitter feels the TWiT effect

Popular TV, radio and podcast host, Leo Laporte, was one of the first and most vocal supporters of the microblogging success Twitter.com. However, after expressing concern over branding issues and confusion of Twitter with his podcast This Week in Tech (TWiT), Leo has jumped ship and taken his microblogging to rival service, Jaiku. Will he bring his thousands of Twitter followers with him? Will people ultimately prefer the stark simplicity of Twitter or the more powerful, and complicated, Jaiku?

Shift happens

A very interesting short video presentation on the nature of demographic and technological shifts around the world. It raises a lot of issues and questions that anybody founding a business should ponder long and hard. The world we live in is very different than it was 10 years ago, and in another 10 years it will be even more changed.

Google launches free 411

First free Wifi for the San Francisco area, now free 411 service (accessed via a toll-free number). Google has been described as the ultimate money making engine, and that is at least in part due to their reliance on ad revenue rather than subscription or customer usage fees.

Should bloggers observe a code of conduct?

After the recent death threats made against popular blogger Kathy Sierra the blogosphere has been abuzz with discussion over bullying, freedom of speech, and what to do when the mean kids take it too far. Tim O’Reilly responded by suggesting a Blogger Code of Conduct, and sparked a second round of vigorous debate. Be sure to check out the responses listed in the trackbacks at the bottom of the page.

Postful.com converts email to snail mail

Google ran an April Fool’s joke suggesting they were adding an option to have your email sent as a physical letter, now a few short days later, it seems you can do just that using Postful.com.

10 tips for writing the ultimate landing page

Hiya all,

This week sees some real heavy weights going at it in the Friendly Giant Tournament. Way too early to call a winner at this point in the tourney (look how close some of these matchups were!). Here are the numbers:

* the numbers in brackets = percentage of votes

Best of luck to all of you advancing to RND2 and thanks to all those who participated in RND1.

Don’t wait till next Wednesday. Vote now for RND2.

May the best idea win!

Special thanks again to the good people at 42squared.com for their financial support of the Friendly Gient Tournament.
These guys are are ninjas when it comes to web development and Agile software development techniques.

Hi all,

We are working on a new system to rewards Glory Points (GP) to community members who do amazing things like tell friends about Cambrian House, submit code fixes for bugs (thank you cybercerberus), and link to our blogs.

In the mean time, if you see someone deserving glory, or you yourself have done something great (like scrollinondubs hooking MJ up with some great meetings) tell us about it here in the forum and let us heap glory upon thee.

Last week MJ, Jasmine, and myself were invited by Professors Andrew McAfee, Karim Lakhani, and Peter Coles of the Harvard Business School, to do a case study on the merits of using prediction markets for IdeaWarz.

Prediction markets are something we have considered in the past, though for a variety of reasons were never completely comfortable with.

Here is what Harvard’s best and brightest had to say on the subject.

What are prediction markets?

A prediction market is a vehicle for placing bets on the outcome of certain events. For example, people use prediction markets to bet on who is going to win the next Super Bowl.

While prediction markets like Tradesports.com do brisk business betting on sporting events, they have also recently become hot in business circles. They’re being used by companies like HP and Google internally to determine things like product release dates and how many Gmail subscribers are likely to sign-up in a given month.

The case for prediction markets

At beginning the discussion, Professor McAfee polled the class and asked who thought prediction markets made sense for Cambrian House’s IdeaWarz.
Here is how the students voted:

Just the day before, Bo Cowgill of Google, gave a good presentation on how they were using prediction markets internally to help determine new product launch dates. It was no surprise that after hearing Google’s success with prediction markets internally, the students thought IdeaWarz would benefit from them as well.

Most students liked the fact that prediction markets caused people to make their best predictions. If they guessed right, they would be rewarded. Wrong and they would be left with nothing. That feeling of really having some skin in the game, much like the stock market, meant prediction markets should lead to better results than simple voting.

Others liked the increased granularity prediction markets provided. Instead of half the ideas being eliminated each round of the tournament, good ideas could hang around until the end.

Overall, students thought prediction markets would give an accurate depiction of which ideas were best in the community.

The case against prediction markets

Shifting gears, Professor McAfee asked those students who weren’t fans to explain why.

Top of the list was increased complexity. Prediction markets are more complicated than simple American Idol style voting. People need to be knowledgeable on terms like: bid, ask, quantity, and volume.

Another difficultly would be in defining the trigger points for the market itself. What would be the event that decides whether the contract becomes true or not? We could ask community members to buy contracts based on ideas that return the highest profit - but at the end of the month, with out any confirming data, this is just a guess. It is neither true nor false.

Another student commented that in the absence of an independent event, the market would become self-fulfilling. People buying the contracts on the market would themselves decide the outcome. For a prediction market to work, the event deciding the outcome needs to be independent of the voting. Otherwise all you have is a crowd rewarding itself for acting as a herd. It was this last comment that I found most insightful, and the biggest knock against using prediction markets for IdeaWarz.

Near the end of the discussion, Professor McAfee polled the class one last time to see if their thoughts had changed:

Not surprisingly, many who previously liked prediction markets were now not so sure.

Critical thinking

What I found most valuable about this experience was having an independent group apply critical thinking to the questions and issues we faced. MJ and I had talked a lot about prediction markets over the year, but were not able to fully articulate our unease until these students provided us with striking insight in areas we missed before. It was an honor and a privilege to have access such a collection brains.

We would sincerely like to thank the Harvard Business School and their faculty, Professor McAffe, and Lakhani for hosting us for the week.

This is one crowd we would love to tap again.

Hi all,

This week I wanted to call out and say thanks to someone who has been an amazing community member over the last couple of months:

cybercerberus

Last week cybercerberus went above and beyhond the call of duty when he actually accessed track (our community bug web site) downloaded our code, and fixed several bugs.

cybercerberus has been an awesome community member and we are grateful and thankful to have him as part of our team.

Thank-you Cyber for all your hard work and dedication to the community. It’s appreciated.

Sincerely – The Cambrian House Team

You can be the next Justin.tv

Online for only a few weeks, Justin.tv has already become the darling of the tech media. Justin streams his life to the web 24/7, and has already garnered massive media attention. Now, anybody with a helmet cam and a healthy sense of exhibitionism can use Ustream.tv to replicate Justin’s bold endeavor. Or, if you’d rather not think about who is watching you in the bathroom, you can use the technology to stream portions of your day, company events or other moments that you’d like to share immediately with your community.

How to get the attention of a venture capitalist

Who better to tell you how to capture the attention and imagination of a venture capitalist than a famous venture capitalist? The always insightful Guy Kawasaki shares some concrete and very helpful advice to get your company VC dollars.

Hot or Not moves from subscription to advertising for revenue

The popular rating and dating website, Hot or Not recently announced that they were moving away from their original revenue model of user subscriptions and instead shifting towards ad-based revenue. Although the website did quite well with community subscriptions, it will be interesting to see if this new model results in community growth.

The joy/cash curve

Need to set a price for your product or service? Well then, make sure you check out Seth Godin’s Joy/Cash Curve so that you can tailor your customer experience to maximize the joy that the transaction can provide.

Radar.net is a little like Twitter, but with photos

Just about everybody is in love with Twitter these days. It’s smart, simple, fun, woefully addictive - very nearly the “perfect” web service. But I still find myself lamenting that I can’t add photos when updating from my phone. Enter Radar.net, billing itself as a host for “photo conversations.” Currently in beta it requires you to give people a code before they can see your photos, hopefully they will add an option to make your stream public as Twitter does. Tech conferences recently have been Twittered pretty thoroughly, I look forward to actually seeing events on Radar soon.

Start your own mobile network

Sure you can start your own social network with Ning, but as you can see from Twitter (and now Radar), mobile interactivity is sweeping into dominance. Now you can use Sonopia to offer interaction on the go to your community.

Put more power in your PowerPoint

Cambrian House’s original investment pitch was based entirely on a single PowerPoint presentation, so we know the power of the medium. But new research demonstrates that text-heavy slides may actually make it more difficult fo ryour audience to understand and retain your information. Check out this article for tips on how to make your presentation work for you rather than against you.

Page views are a dead metric

AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies are making old metrics like the venerated page view a thing of the past. But what do we measure instead? Compete.com, a statistics tracker similar to Alexa.com, recently introduced their Attention Statistics as a new way to track how many people are really paying attention to your website and other online destinations.

Crowdsourced photo sorting

iStockPhoto introduced crowdsourcing to the stock photography world. Now LikeBetter.com is using crowdsourcing to sort and rank photos. So far it seems to simply feed 2 images at a time in a head-to-head selection, but the technology and concept has some interesting potential applications.

Bon voyage PeteC … you are the official winner of the Reid Hoffman IdeaWarz Tournament with your inspirational idea Wicked Travel Site!

As a creative inventor hailing from Calgary Canada, PeteC thought of this idea after many frustrating hours trying to make travel arrangements on existing web sites. He had a big itch and he wanted it scratched.

The Idea:

Input your current location and it gives you destinations from there.( All the travel websites currently make you pick a destination, what if your not sure where you want to go? Then you need to keep changing destinations. It gets very annoying very fast. )
Input your budget and get a list of destinations from cheapest to most expensive!
Input a list of your requirements: horseback riding, beach, mountain climbing and the site gives you a destination based on your activities or requirements.
Input your city and website gives you a list of destinations fanning out from your location. ( Distance based system, not price. )
Money can be made by advertisers or on a commission basis.

PeteC’s idea is the real thing because it offers people a completely different way of searching for their next holiday destination - one based on budget, with an element of surprise based on whatever deals are available that week.

We also want to congratulate our other finalist Fazza. His idea Donate your change was another favorite battling all the way to the finals. Fazza hails from the beautiful city of Sydney Australia and we look forward to hearing more from him in upcoming tournaments. Good’on ya mate.

As tournament champion, PeteC receives the usually heaping of fame, glory, and legions of adoring fans that comes with winning something as prestigious an IdeaWarz tournament. He also personally receives $1000 in booty, and $9000 in investment towards the development of his idea within the Cambrian House community. He also gets a rippin’ authentic, one of a kind Jessye Cook designed t-shirt.

So there you have it folks. Congrats again PeteC and all the best to our future contestants.

May the best idea win.

Hi all,

Just a heads up we will be announcing the winner of the Reid Hoffman later today, and begin the next IdeaWarz tournament tomorrow. The holidays are playing havoc with travel schedules and this will be the fastest I can get the next tournament going.

Thank you for understanding - May the best idea win!