On Monday, February 26 Cambrian House hosted our first Cambrian Lounge event. Check out the video below!!

We hope to use it as a launching pad for further networking events that will bring together people from the business, tech and investment communities to support entrepreneurial spirit, network, talk shop, and pitch and grow ideas.

The first event was held in our home town of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We invited Don Tapscott, best selling author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, to speak to members of Calgary’s tech and business community.

It gave us a chance to tell Calgarians about Cambrian House, and get them excited about crowdsourcing. Moving forward, our goal is to host Cambrian Lounge events all over the place and invite our community members to drive the topic, speakers, etc. But, one step at a time, as they say… We’ll keep you in the know, I promise.

Don provided loads of information about Web 2.0 and why traditional businesses need to accept the reality that consumers are taking on a more active role; and that opening up to the crowd beyond your building’s four walls can result in major successes.

As he believes in the freedom of information in our collaborative world, we’ve made the entire presentation available. Check it out (it’s 83 minutes, but we’ve provided a breakdown below for ease). Be sure to pick up the book too.

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If you have difficulties playing the video, please try playing a copy hosted on Google Video, or contact us.

 Don Tapscott Presentation - Audio Only: Download
 Don Tapscott Presentation - iPod Large: Download
 Don Tapscott Presentation - iPod Small: Download

Cambrian House Forges towards Vision “2.0”

Steve Jobs says Apple set out to make a dent in the universe. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. 3M’s mission is to solve unsolved problems.

So when you’re trying to change the world with your business, what’s the right balance of vision and humility? At Cambrian House, we have to ask ourselves this question while we work with you to build a crowdsourcing community that will attempt to reshape the business landscape as we know it by harnessing the Wisdom and Participation of Crowds.

It’s a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), but we’re willing to swallow the hairball for it. And we’re prepared to get a little red in the face once in a while along the way… Reid Hoffman, chairman and president of products for LinkedIn once said “if you’re not embarrassed about your first release, then you launched too late.”

As Cambrian House releases the first in a long list of new features to our community, we know we’re going to feel the growing pains. The pain of assumptions, the pain of bruised egos when you point out bugs we accidentally overlooked at 2am when the Red Bull stock was low… But we’d rather release fast and release often to give the community what YOU need to work together on your own world-changing ideas. We can spit polish as we go along with your feedback.

Many of our updates are “under the hood” changes that will make the process of submitting ideas, networking with other members, working on ventures and hosting projects simpler and smoother. Other changes are more noticeable, like pages that reflect our vision and crowdsource model. We invite you to look through the changes and give us your feedback!

What’s new?

Coming Soon:

…We believe that these are steps in the right direction to becoming the Home of Crowdsourcing.
Check out the changes, then stand on your soap box and tell us what you think: The good, the bad, the ugly, and the brilliant.

Hi all,

Today is a good day Canada’s leading Mentor Capitalist, Sean Wise, has agreed to join our board of advisors.

Sean is the Managing Director of Toronto-based venture capital consultancy Wise Mentor Capital and is a national columnist on entrepreneurship for the Globe and Mail.

When it comes to startups and entrepreneurialism - Sean is in the know. Over the last seven years, he has lectured at more than 90 Bootcamps for CEOs and CFOs looking to raise financing for their businesses. He has spoken at numerous financing forums and industry conferences on both sides of the border. Wise also began working with the CBC as their industry advisor and online host for the networks #1 new show, Dragons’ Den.

In short we are extremely lucky and proud to have Sean join us as an advisor. Welcome aboard Sean!

[Update:] Check out Sean’s announcement of his role with Cambrian House in his blog, Wise Words.

We know that everyone is talking about us (don’t know who? Check out the list), but we’ve been waiting for our next-door/oil baron neighbor to talk about us too. Well, that time is finally here! Our local newspaper printed an article on Getting Ahead in Technology today and we are prominently featured in it!

Tamara Gignac wrote a great article about what it is like to work in the techonology sector in the middle of an oil-boom. She touches on many of the things that make working in this city unique. Calgary is a very young city, it is a wealthy city thanks to our oil & gas sector and there is amazing stuff going on here. We are happy to be in a place where some may consider the technology sector to be the odd man out. It feels that much more rewarding when our neighbors take time out of their day to notice us!

From a Cambrian House community idea to a very fun mini-game, GWABS continues its unstoppable march onto your desktop. The first taste of the GWABS feeding frenzy is here, download it now from the GWABS project page. The mini-game is a fast-paced, single player game that will get your feeding reflexes in shape for the full-on desktop to desktop battles you will encounter in the final version of GWABS.

Team GWABS would like to thank the community for their continued support and patience. We’re hard at work, and you are going to love the results.

It looks like Crowdsourcing will continue to garner media attention this year. The London Financial Times recently featured Cambrian House in an article that details the role of our community, using TechGuy and his JumbleLunch idea (currently in market test) as an example.

“The thing I like to talk about,” says Mr Sikorsky, “is that we have a chance to become the world’s first billion-person company.”

Also mentioned were other companies, including InnoCentive and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which operate using alternative models of crowdsourcing. It’s an interesting discussion, definitely worth checking out.

The full Financial Times article requires a subscription to view, but never fear! We have it as a PDF document for our community’s enjoyment. Give it a read, and then go submit an idea of your own!

Update: The article has been picked up by The Economist’s Executive Briefing, in partnership with the Harvard School of Business! Now you can access the full text of the article online here.

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!

Giddy up! Our Feeding Google Video has the front page of digg! Our logs show the video has been viewed 3000 times in the last hour.

Here’s what some of the diggers are saying:

‘Google was unaware while being distracted by a 1000 free pizzas Cambrianhouse.com had ninjas enter the google building to steal valuable information and servers.’

Wow. Ok back to work. Only three days left till launch.

We love you for digging us MaxS.

The CH Team

By now you should have seen the preview for Feeding Google – the much anticipated documentary about the quest to give props to our favourite search engine using pizza. (If you haven’t seen the preview, check it out now!) It’s got everything: action (in the form of tasers and rubber bullets), comedy, and drama (damn you sous-chefs!) It even has the happiest girl to ever eat pizza.

After much anticipation, and for your viewing pleasure, we’re proud to present this summer’s biggest blockbuster, Feeding Google.

Prepare…to…be…full.

The cover story of Business2.0 Magazine touts a list of the 50 people who matter now. Listed above tech and communication giants like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is YOU. In their words,

“Why You Matter: They’ve long said the customer is always right. But they never really meant it. Now they have no choice. You — or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you — continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest. You do it on websites like Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube, via podcasts and SMS polling, and on millions of self-published blogs. In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience… You constructed open-source and are its customer and its caretaker. None of this should be a surprise, since it was you — your crazy passions and hobbies and obsessions — that built out the Web in the first place.”

Every time we read something like this, we get the warm and fuzzies. Our business model is structured around the fact that you, the community of users, matter. You will always be #1 to us.