In February 2008, a challenge was issued by Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF), “Shoot and edit a short sci-fi movie, in 48 hours.”

“No problem!” responded Cambrian House staff, knowing we’d wrap in a couple hours, and spend the rest of the weekend frolicking in the snow.

We had all seen Michael Bay movies… how hard could it be?

Desired Effects:

Achieved Effects:

Is it the cinematic masterpiece we were hoping for? Well we did manage one significant accomplishment… Countdown to Destruction is 172 minutes shorter than Pearl Harbor!

Who is responsible for this movie, you wonder? Well that depends on whether you liked it or not.

SC Entertainment’s Blaise Kolodychuk first assisted, then cajoled and finally grabbed the camera and directed our staff through various abuses of Cambrian House property. (Thanks Blaise!)

Countdown to Destruction Credits
Todd Courtnage as “Todd”
Bob Clark as “Bob”
Cameron Falkenhagen as “Captain”
Gordon McDowell as “Keyboard Operator Alpha”
Blaise Kolodychuk as “Engineer Kolodychuk”
Sarah Blue as “Doctor Blue”
Romulax Admiral Kathyxon Bletarrax Marf as himself
Sound and music by Cameron Falkenhagen
Written by Blaise Kolodychuk and Gordon McDowell

Countdown to Destruction is released under a Creative Commons Attirbution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

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,

One question I get a lot from people when they first join Cambrian House is how to get started. While there is no one way to kick-start your venture, I thought I would share Christine’s top 10 list.

#1. Submit your idea

How do you know whether your idea is any good? Or if it has ever been done before? Once you’ve submitted your idea, community members will be able to give you some good critical feedback. They can tell you whether it’s any good, and possibly even show you ways to improve it.

#2. Refine your idea

Under My Profile/Ideas, click Refine this idea further. Here you can add an elevator pitch and logo. Even your own commercial or video. This gives your idea more prominence in the community and qualifies it as a potential contender for the monthly IdeaWarz tournament where you can win money to start your business.

#3. Promote your idea

We believe that you shouldn’t become emotionally attached to any one idea. Test, don’t guess. Get as much feedback on your idea as you can before investing more time/money into it. Invite your friends and family to review your idea and give you feedback. Plus the more people who rank your idea, the more chances you’ll have to get into the next IdeaWarz tournament.

Just go to: invite your friends and add the URL of your idea into the message body.

#4. Convert your idea into a business

Once you’re ready to start executing your idea, you’ll need somewhere to work on it. Under My Profile/Ideas, click turn this idea into a business. This will create an instance of your very own wiki, forums and code version repository.

#5. Tag your business

Tags are one word keywords that describe your business. This is how members will find your business when they’re looking for opportunities to work on other projects. Tag your business with useful keywords so members can find it.

#6. What is your business plan? (Update your wiki)

Your wiki is your online collaboration space. Start by creating a new page outlining your business plan so that other members can get an idea what you’re up to. Consider answering questions like:

• what’s new about what you’re doing?
• what do you understand about your business that other companies just don’t get?
• how will you make $$$?
• who are your competitors? (Hint: there is always a competitor)
• what companies would be most likely to buy you?
• why would your business be hard for someone else to duplicate?
• is this idea patentable?
• what might go wrong?
• how will you structure your incentive program? Cash? Royalty Points?

#7. Fill the job jar

Need a logo? How about help designing your web site? You can ask for help by clicking on the Jobs tab when editing your idea. Soon we will have compensation models in place to help you describe what’s in it for them. Until then be really nice.

#8. Introduce yourself

Before people will rally to your cause, you need to tell them a little bit about yourself. Who are you? What makes you tick? Mac or PC? You get the idea. You can do this by completing your profile.

#9. Rally the troops

Invite members and friends to work on your business by using the Promote your business link on your business page. Or if you know what sort of skills you are looking for, use the Search under the main navigation bar and invite members by sending them a private message.

#10. Have fun

Here are a few ideas more or less doing many of the things mentioned above.

FilmChamp

Prezzle

Robin Hood Fund

I know there are many more. Be sure to tell us about any other good ideas you see out there in the commmunity.

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

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.

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

Hiya All,

If you are a community member, and you have a blog you would like to share, add a comment to this post and we will add you to our Community member blog roll. This will help drive traffic to your site and expose more people to your thoughts and ideas (buwahahah).

Special thanks to techguy who for whom we super appreciate mention on his blog. Be sure to check out a very interesting article on what it takes to become super rich.

Hiya all,

Our good mate from down under, PsychSplash, is looking to setup a local Cambrian House chapter down under. He is looking to:

• setup informal social get togethers
• organize a conference
• combine forces with others to promote the entrepreneurial concept and dream to local business colleagues
• attract investment
• maybe even a satellite web site geographically targeted

Of course PsychSplash has the full support of Cambrian House and we are keen to help him get things going.

So if you are keen on joining Psych’s crusade, send him a note and join the discussion here in the forums. Let him know a there are a few good mate’s looking to have a few cool ones and throw a few shrimp on the barbee (sorry I couldn’t resist

Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?