Aren’t sure where the Dali’s displayed? Having problems placing a Picasso? Want to know where the Van Gogh goes? Well, bad puns aside, Invertebra wants to help build a community of people that are happy to tell you.

The basic idea behind ‘Art-a-Track’ is to be a social network in which people could search for a specific artwork and learn where it is being displayed right now, for how long and where is it going next.

Much discussion has been happening and Invertebra is still interested in your feedback. From the curious to the collectors, if you can lend a hand with this project, go check out Art-a-Track.

Eight days a week

This weeks post is coming in a little later than expected for crashtacular reasons that I’m not even going to blog about. Many a fist was shaken.

This week we also welcome back Todd from Thailand and Gord from Cuba. I’ve been doing my best to keep their hats and seats warm while they’re gone, it’s been an absolute blast. I’ve been glad to help, but really looking forward to ‘finding my own’ here at CH.

In the mean time, check out this weeks reconstituted IdeaWarz, I’m going to go read about this feature built into most software called “Saving”. Gah.

Until next week: Share your ideas. Give us your artfully tasteful feedback… Take a look through Cambrian House Bazaar and Forums for projects to assist in…

And… May the Best Idea… WIN!

Next time you see a take a penny, leave a penny tray, leave a penny, but make sure you drop a buck or two in the tray labeled “Blind Kids” also. If only there was an easier way to pay-it-forward while burning our hard earned cash. Well, thanks to some refined ingenuity, we welcome ShopWisely.

Chrischen wants to make it easy to support charities while you shop. In contrast to many other fund raising schemes, his site, ShopWisely won’t charge any fees!

For the online shopper who wants to make the most out of their money, ShopWisely is a nonprofit service that allows online shoppers to support other nonprofits by shopping online.. Unlike most “give while you shop” sites our product (service) routes 100% of the proceeds and releases all financial information to the public.

Chrischen is second time lucky with this idea - his first attempt at IdeaWarz wasn’t so successful. A lot of work has been done on this idea in the meantime, and a ShopWisely toolbar is in the works.

If you’d like to offer insight, or lend a hand in this fundraising shopping site, give Chrischen a shout.

Lights, camera, achtung!

So while Gord is lapping up the rays down in Cuba, he’s handed the big shoes over to Bob to handle the blog in the meantime. That was right about the time that Bob started growing new pimples, losing more hair and referring to himself in the third person. Here’s my crack at IdeaWarz, phew, it ain’t easy being G.

Until next week: Share your ideas. Give us your gnarly and snarly feedback… Take a look through Cambrian House Bazaar and Forums for projects to assist in…

And… May the Best Idea… WIN!

I love kicking back on Sundays to reflect upon the week that passed.
Note, however, this isn’t a typical Sunday for two reasons:

1) I had an incredibly awesome week… Not to say most weeks aren’t awesome, but a lot happened in the world of crowdsourcing and my brain’s been filled with new ideas.

And,

2) Today is the Super Bowl Sunday. It’s my duty to sit on the couch and watch men run amuck in tight spandex.

So before I hop in the car to drive to suburbs (ugg) for traditional Super Bowl BBQ festivities, I thought I would share some interesting crowdsourcing-related links from this week:

1) Crowdsourcing a better Gmail.
Gina (Lifehacker) presented at Web Directions North in Vancouver this week about the Better Gmail firefox extension and community who helped created it. Now, I might argue this is more OpenSource than Crowdsourcing - but the story is cool and so are the slides. After all, who doesn’t want a better Gmail?

2) CoverSourcing Part Duex.
The design duo at Cambrian House submitted some book cover designs for the crowd’s consideration to Random House UK’s CoverSourcing competition. The winning design will grace the cover of Jeff Howe’s upcoming book: Crowdsourcing - How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

See their designs here, find and vote for them here, and submit your own here.

3) Crowdsourcing Panel at WebGuild’s Web 2.0 Expo.
Cambrian House’s own CEO Michael Sikorsky joined Jeremiah Owyang, Aaron Strout and Anil Rathi to discuss the validity of crowdsourcing and the how-to’s.

Fact is, some people hate the crowdsourcing model, others don’t understand it quite yet, and some think it’s truly the future of business (ie: making your company’s walls more porous so thoughts and insights from the masses can flow and filter through your business). Check out a great overview of the panel here.

For anyone set to take the stage at a conference in the near future, read this excellent post from Jeremiah Owyang about how to successfully moderate a panel.

4) The TwitterBowl - Rate today’s Super Bowl ads using Twitter
Another thumbs up to Jeremiah for this community initiative to rate super bowl ads. Sign up and put on your opinionated hat.

Have a great week!
-jasmine

Jeff Howe’s upcoming crowdsourcing book is naked and needs a superfly outfit before it hits the Red Carpet later this year.

His publisher, Random House UK has set out to “coversource” the UK version of the book. So if you’re a Photoshop Pro or a Doodling Diva submit your design and see if the crowd’s votes bubble it up to the top of the crop!

What’s at stake? The chance to see your design hit book store shelves (won’t your mom be proud!) and £500 ($1000ish US).

What are they looking for? You can find the creative brief here.

Why would they release creative control to the crowds? Posing an open call to amateur and veteran designers alike, then allowing the masses to vote on the best will help Random House UK (and Jeff) ensure the book’s look will appeal to a wide market.

After all, it’ll be 100s, 1000s or tens of thousands of potential consumers that choose the design, not a select few people ’round a table in London. Which is pretty cool, I must say.

So - go get your creative juices flowing! If you’d like to collaborate with other Cambrian House members, let us know if we can do anything to support you.

To vote on designs, go here

Jeff: we’re here to support you in this busy time as you round the corner to the finish line. We can’t wait for the book. Good luck!

I read Tara Hunt’s Please Stop Crowdsourcing Me blog post this morning over a holiday-inspired coffee and baileys.

What Tara had to say about crowdsourcing:

“I’ve been a long opponent to the term ‘Crowdsourcing’ as it invokes the image of an unpaid group of volunteers giving ideas for free while a corporation rakes in endless profits from them.”

It made me think about my goals for the year 2008.
At the top of my list now: Educate the world about the true meaning of the word “crowdsource.”

It drives me up the wall when people like Tara blacklist the term as if it’s a naughty word. As if crowdsourcing is when corporations lure consumers into their worlds with promises of better products and more transparency - only to suck consumers’ hearts and minds dry… But that’s not the case.

Crowdsourcing is not about loving you then leaving you.

It’s about making your business practices transparent and the walls of your office porous. It’s about creating ways to engage consumers, listen to them, act on their feedback and reward them with more than a one-time pat on the back. There are loads of fantastic examples of crowdsourcing at its best, which Tara neglects to highlight.

I really respect Tara’s work - but as a community evangelist, I don’t understand why she wouldn’t be helping create a list of crowdsourcing best practices. After all, crowds are communities. They need to be inspired, engaged, educated, entertained… Members need to see value in their contributions. If they feel “used and abused” they won’t return.

Some awesome examples of crowdsourcing:

1. Threadless — crowdsources designs, but the designers gain fame and make cash… sounds like reciprocity to me!
2. InnoCentive — Companies pose problems to the community and members who solve problems earn cash rewards
3. Sell-a-Band — wanna-be rock stars get to source the crowd for funding and votes… they gain fame, cut an album and create a built-in fan base
4. iStockPhoto — iStock sources stock photography from its community members - in return, they network with other photographers and make money off the images they sell
5. Adobe’s developer community — I want to throw this in because there isn’t always a monetary reward, nor do their community members gain fame, but they engage developers in a 24/7 conversation about their products and the entire company listens

Shameless plug: We provide tools for anyone using our crowdsourcing platform to reward contributors who help them polish an idea or build a business using our crowdsourcing model. Over $60,000 has exchanged hands between members in Cambrian House in the past 6 months.

Also, props to Andy Doan, Cambrian House community member who is crowdsourcing his business “FilmRiot.” Thanks to feedback from the crowd and work they’ve done to support him, Andy left his job on an automotive assembly line and has become President of his own company - and is raising his first round of financing. I’m sure the “crowd” feels really good about helping him achieve his goals.

For the next IdeaWarz, Cambrian House is asking our community to review previously submitted mobile app ideas. Google’s ANDROID Developer Challenge combined with the capabilities of the ANDROID platform itself might make 2008 the year cellphone applications finally match consumer’s expectations.

A Bitter J2ME Developer

One of my endeavors before starting at Cambrian House was exploration of MMORPG for (cutting edge at the time) J2ME MIDP 2.0 mobiles.

An important facet of the game would have been GPS location detection, with physical location granting you tactical advantage over your opponents. Imagine a game where combatants regularly met face-to-face in the real world, as they battled online! Would online battle quickly translate into fisticuffs in real life? Inquiring Gordons needed to know!

Alas, hungry Gordons needed to eat, and the last time I worked on the game was December 2005. Had I kept developing the location based game on this emerging platform, where would I be today, 2 years later?

Nowhere. There is no market.

Mobile Carriers Stifle Innovation

While the appearance of mobiles supporting J2ME MIDP 2.0 has flourished, the market is effectively locked down by carriers, both by making it impractical to install 3rd party J2ME apps directly from websites, and denying J2ME access to location based data.

While my game was already designed to operate within the confines of J2ME, the platform itself does not enable the types of applications people intuitively expect from today’s mobiles. Applications written specifically for any given mobile’s built-in operating system can meet these needs, but then the user is still dependent on the carrier for permission to run the app.

Killer J2ME apps have never taken off because:

• Awkward to install (if not occasionally impossible due to carrier restrictions).
• Limited demand. The public does not know what a mobile Java app is, how to find them, or how to install them.
• Fragmented market. Each carrier directs app seekers to its own walled-off marketplace.

Mobiles lack sufficient J2ME support because:

• There is no killer app driving consumer demand for this support.
• User freedom on mobiles competes with paying carriers for ring-tones and platform specific applications.

How manufacturers and mobile carriers might restrict ANDROID is not yet clear. Once again we may end up with crippled phones, but at least the chicken-and-egg problem is about to be solved.

Importance of ANDROID

At the discretion of the user, ANDROID grants full control over the mobile device. There is no distinction between bundled apps, and third party applications. These ANDROID mobiles could mirror the unrestricted software ecosystem found in the world of PC/Mac/Linux desktop software… if carriers don’t cripple the ANDROID mobiles.

Why ANDROID Might Survive Intact

Ever heard of the “gPhone”? You shouldn’t have since its only a label the press tacked on to ANDROID before it was officially announced. There’s no “gPhone” yet, but any phone built on top of the ANDROID stack could reasonably referred to as a gPhone… assuming the full stack is implemented.

Any consumer today looking for J2ME support on their next mobile can’t just look for the word “Java” on the device’s spec sheet. Unless a customer cross-checks developer pages against carrier restrictions, the meaning of Java support is not really clear. You might need to hack your phone to run your Java app. Who expects that?

But a customer will likely be approaching a gPhone will a particular killer app in mind. Google is awarding $10 million in prizes for the best ANDROID applications. In the hands of a larger company, one can imagine $10 million not going to far. To garage developers, start-ups and the open source community, $10 million is a heck of a good incentive. When gPhones appear mid-2008, expect some very compelling 3rd party apps to be already be available.

It’s those applications which will be attracting customers to the gPhone, not the platform itself. And any mobile manufacturer or carrier who keeps their gPhone from running those 3rd party apps will be quickly outed as not offering a true gPhone at all. What would you call an iPhone which couldn’t sync with iTunes? A suckPhone.

Even if the carriers restrict triangulated cell positioning data, Google is citing geotagged WiFi hotspots as an alternative means of gleaning a user’s location. If a gPhone lacks hardware GPS support, it might even be able to request location data from nearby GPS serving gPhones via Bluetooth.

What does ANDROID have to do with Cambrian House?

Because gPhones could potentially run so many mobile applications that can not be supported by J2ME, Cambrian House is reviewing all cell phone idea submissions, and automatically entering any of merit into 2007-11-28’s IdeaWarz.

I’d like Cambrian House community members to take a fresh look at the possibilities offered by tomorrow’s cell phones. Assume they know their own location, have access to all of a modern cellphone’s hardware, and the gPhones can communicate freely with each other.

What would they say and what would they do?

ANDROID Details

Google has summarized ANDROID development features, and I’ve indexed the most important features discussed in their Androidology videos:

Androidology - Part 2 of 3 - Application Lifecycle
Nothing illustrates offering end-user features current phones can not.

Related Articles

Google Android: Initial Impressions and Criticism

On the other hand, the platform seems to be open, so not all is lost. Google is planning to release the SDK under Apache 2.0 license. The current SDK however is not under that license yet. This openness comes however with a few strings attached. Basically, it relies on Java’s security system. You know, the same mechanism that is used by operators and phone vendors to completely lock down J2ME to restrict access to interesting features (e.g. sending SMS, accessing file system, making phone calls, installing applications). I’m not saying that Google will do this but they certainly enable operators and phone vendors to do this for them and are providing all the necessary hooks to make it really easy. This is not surprising since in the current market, operators insist on this, especially in the US. The likely result will be that Android application developers will have to deal with locked down phones just like J2ME developers have to deal with that today.

Not one gPhone, but ‘a thousand’

Four manufacturers in the alliance - Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC - are expected to begin selling phones featuring the new software during the second half of next year. Eight carriers said they will carry the phones, including Sprint and T-Mobile in the United States and China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier by subscribers.

Does the mobile OS matter?

Most mobile device companies, especially the big ones, are terrible at creating integrated hardware-software solutions. They’re hardware companies, not software companies. The mobile operators are little better; they generally understand voice but not data. So you get a three-way traffic jam of OS vendor, hardware company, and operator, none of whom are in a position to architect the whole solution and make mobile data sing. I do think there’s hope for an application platform to establish itself as a standard in the mobile world, but it needs to be structured and managed differently from anything that’s on the market today.

Is Web 2.0 really killing our culture? Is dumbness of crowds leading to our intellectual demise? Some people think so. But I prefer to think that the power of collaboration can lead to amazing results - like sharing information, new discoveries, liberating people and ideas… It’s more than just voting on the funniest cat-playing-the-piano pic or sharing what you’re eating for lunch with a Twitter. To defend Web 2.0, we headed to Vancouver last week to take on the loudest anti-Web 2.0 voice and make our opinions known.

So I made sure to get a good seat at the Wisdom of Crowds panel during VidFest in Vancouver. Like Tyson vs Holyfield, Round One in the battle against good and evil was about to sound off. I was sooo excited.

In one corner: the defender, Cambrian House CEO Michael Sikorsky, tipped the scales as crowd favorite…

In the other corner: the Web 2.0 anti-christ, Andrew Keen was weighing in as a mighty A-hole.

Ding! Dinggg….wha?

To my surprise, no punches were thrown. There were no broken noses or bruised egos to be seen. Come on guys, I wanted my money’s worth!

The loud-mouthed critic of web 2.0 who says we (by “we” I mean people who write blogs, upload videos and create wikipedia entries) are a bunch of bumbling idiots didn’t come into the ring swinging.

After reading his book, blog and manifesto, Cambrian House was prepared to go to battle in the name of crowdsourcing.

We were up against a man who’s been called an internet nazi and who’s been known to detest the rise of the average joe and jane thanks to web 2.0 tools.

Instead Andrew made a few jabs at bloggers, stating there was a crisis of authority growing as more and more people share their thoughts online, and stated that the public needs to be more media literate.

Maybe he wasn’t having a good day. Maybe someone spiked his coffee, but the keenian gloom we were expecting to rain on our parade of liberating people & ideas using crowdsouring, didn’t.

It seems Andrew just might be misunderstood. It may also be that being a grumpy anti-web 2.0 guy lands him speaking gigs and sells books. Maybe being in Canada softened him up.

But overall his points were valid and we share many of them:

1) Web 2.0 is too altruistic, commerce isn’t taken into consideration. What’s in it for professionals?

Cambrian House believes crowdsourcing = wisdom and participation of crowds + social networking fabric + commerce…

2) There are too many amateurs online and determining credibility is difficult.

We need to define better online reputation systems.

3) Media literacy is crucial.

To ensure there is “meaning” in our online interactions, whether it be creating content or consuming it, we all need to be well informed, read more and engage in conversations with one another.

…

I hope that dancing with the devil doesn’t make us Web 2.0 haters, but considering Cambrian House is setting out to create a platform for participation with commerce embedded in our DNA - it’s no wonder Michael and Andrew didn’t throw down the gloves…

Last week, we invited Hal Josephson (not this Hal… Hal Josephson is one of CH’s advisors) to hang out with us in our Calgary office. Hal is currently President of MediaSense in San Francisco, lives in New Zealand part-time and helps businesses understand and break into the Asian market. He was one of the founders of 3DO, was Vice President of Infotainment World (producers of E3), was behind the movement of community television, and more. To say Hal is awesome is an understatement.

On Thursday, July 19 Hal presented at a Cambrian House “Lunch and Learn” where we ate tasty Thai food and learned about Business Development – and how BizDev differs from, but isn’t mutually exclusive from, PR and Marketing.

Here’s a copy of his PowerPoint, and video of his presentation:

For most start-ups, finding the mentorship and friendship of successful business leaders is tricky. After all, how do you get into the “club” without being a successful business leader yourself? It’s like trying to fit in with the high school quarterback and his buddies when you’re the young, skinny freshman…

Luckily, Cambrian House has a couple things going for us that have helped attract some amazing people like Hal into our world.

1. We believe in crowdsourcing – thus, the wider we cast our net and leverage our networks and our networks’ networks; the more likely we are to meet wonderful people.
2. We hang out with other entrepreneurs - many of whom have worked with other entrepreneurs from a variety of industries: energy, technology, entertainment, etc. so we meet fascinating folks who provide a variety of advice.
3. We believe people invest in people – so when we first meet someone we want to develop a relationship with, we find it best to “get to know them,” and develop friendships and trust first. After all – the best supporters are the ones we can call friends.

Hal is certainly a friend. And, I think his business development tips boil down to a few key points: trust, reputation and reciprocity. After all, people invest in people.

It’s all about the “crowd” at Cambrian House � wisdom of crowds (such as comments, feedback and filtering of ideas) and participation of crowds (such as finding the perfect team of people to help launch an idea into reality). IdeaWarz is Cambrian House’s poster child of “wisdom of crowds” because top ideas as ranked by community members immediately gain entry into the competition and winning ideas get to bask in fame and fortune. This week we chose to turn up the number of winners by creating weekly mini-tournaments and a quarterly tournament that’ll have Mark Burnett wishing he’d thought of it (well, maybe not quite).

How it works:

1. You submit an idea to Cambrian House.
2. Each Wednesday at Noon, voting starts. Community members vote on all ideas submitted the previous week.
3. Wednesday at Noon the following week, the top idea as rated by the crowds is awarded $100 Cambros (C$100) and secures a spot in the IdeaWarz Tournament of Champions.

Submit your idea and see what the crowd thinks.
May the best idea win!

No wait, I still have questions…

Holy cow batman, my idea is in this week’s voting - what do I do now?

1. Upload an image relating to your idea- pics say 1,000 words, and can serve as an awesome promo for your idea, or even yourself!
2. Complete your elevator pitch- elevator pitches have been a mainstay in the biz world for a good reason: they explain your idea in an energetic, yet concise manner. Want the crowd to vote for you? They better understand your vision.
3. Promote your idea to the world- share your idea on Facebook, your other fav sites, or e-mail your friends. From the My Ideas page, browse to your idea and click the ‘promote this idea’ link.
4. Keep an eye on your idea during the week, people will be posting comments and asking you questions. The more you engage them in conversation, the more invested they become, and the more polished your idea gets.

How do I vote on ideas?
Just go to the Ideas section on CambrianHouse.com and start exploring ideas, voting on ideas and lending your brilliance by posting comments and feedback.

I didn’t win this week’s voting, now what?
Tweak your idea and re-submit for next week’s voting by clicking the ‘Enter into next voting round’ link on the My Ideas page.

Or convert your idea into a business and get cracking. Not being Top Dog doesn’t mean you can’t connect with other members to make your idea better and commercialize it.

If an idea is not in the current voting round, can I still see it and vote on it?
You can view all ideas by clicking ‘All’ on the Ideas sub-nav bar. You can always leave a comment but can only rate the idea if it is in the current voting round.

Will IdeaWarz (ideawarz.com) still run monthly?
No, ideawarz.com will be the new home of our quarterly IdeaWarz Tournament of Champions.

How will contenders be selected for the Tournament of Champions?
The top idea each week (as determined by total points) secures a spot in the Tournament of Champions.

Why only quarterly?
If you’ve heard of American Idol, think of the Weekly IdeaWarz as auditions and the Tournament of Champions as the actual show where the champion wins BIG!

If you haven’t heard of American Idol…do you live in a cave or something?

Huh…I still don’t get it.
Each week there’s an idea competition with one winner - the idea with the highest total points.

Each quarter, the last 12 winners of the weekly competitions plus a few wildcards hand picked by experts (like celeb judges on American Idol), battle it out in the Tournament of Champions.

Why wildcards? What better way to test the wisdom of crowds then to pin the crowd against a few so-called experts?

Why the change?
Our vision is to be a Web 2.0 community where individuals and businesses can leverage the wisdom and participation of crowds for commerce. So we’re rolling up our sleeves and creating tools to unleash the power of crowdsourcing and make it available to everyone.

Weekly IdeaWarz means the crowd chooses to highlight ideas more frequently, the pace is more exciting, and more ideas get time in the spotlight - giving them the chance to attract team members to take the idea to the next level.

The goal is that we’ll release IdeaWarz as a tool available to members for their own projects/ideas. For example, Prezzle should be able to quickly throw up “PrezzleWarz” so people can select the Prezzle they’d like to see created next.

Hence, wisdom of crowds lets you determine the feature/product/idea that is more enticing to a market BEFORE spending energy and resources to build it.

Have your say by voting today and let us know what you think by leaving a comment!

Hiya all,

This latest release of the website has some new transaction features definitely worth checking out if you are going pro on your idea.

What makes crowdsourcing interesting is that members can compensate one another for each others’ feedback, ideas, work, etc. Wisdom and participation of crowds is worth everything to someone who wants to make their idea come to life, or build a game-changing business.

Reward team members with Cambros

You can now reward team members for working on your business by purchasing and distributing your own Cambros. Cambros can be bought via the My Account tab off of your profile.

1 Cambro = 1 USD. Payments are processed using PayPal (which also supports straight up VISA).

Reward team members with Royalty Points

Some businesses champions might not want to pay Cambros, and some members might prefer being compensated by being guaranteed a slice of the business’ revenue. We’ve designed Royalty Points so you can do just that.

Distribute Cambros and Royalty Points using the Finance tab under your business.

Stay tuned for next week when we release the first version of the Bazaar - your meeting place for exchanging goods and services within the community.