Hi Ho Everyone,

The Calgary blogger community is gettin’ together. Austin Hill and Kempton are hosting a Blogger Dinner with an initial discussion about the possibility of BarCamp Calgary. It’s close to our hearts cause it’s in our hometown.

Event: Calgary Blogger Dinner
Date: Thursday, March 15th, 2007
Time: 7:00pm
Place: East Side Mario’s in Chinook Centre, Ba-da-boom, Ba-da-Bing!

If you’re around and interested in blogging or staring up BarCamp Calgary - Let Kempton know.

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.

PLAY IN PAGE or PLAY IN POPUP

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.

Hiya all,

Gods_Light submitted the first video pitch to the Cambrian House community!

Is it just me or is it more fun to see someone actually pitch their idea to a camera than read the description. I read the text, but when I saw God actually talk about his idea and describe what it did, the problem it solved, and how it could be used it became WAY clearer to me.

Not only that but Gods_Light also created a logo and elevator pitch. We are working on making the elevator pitches show up when you mouse over ideas in IdeaExplorer.

Awesome pitch Gods_Light and all the best with your idea Who Are You?

May the best idea win!

Hiya All,

It’s been a long time coming, but the first release of IdeaForge is up and running. Gone are the days when you had a single text box to describe your idea. Now you can communicate and articulate the vision of your idea like never before. Here are some of the new features found in the forge:

• An elevator pitch – got 30 secs to describe the concept of your idea? No problem that’s where the elevator pitch comes in.
• Your Pitch / Your commercial – use the power of video to communicate what words alone sometimes can’t.
• Your Logo – Start branding your idea today be sharing designs and logo’s .
• Your Slogans – start capturing the meaning of your idea with a few short, powerful, punchy words.

To use IdeaForge, simply login, and edit one of your ideas. Would love your feedback so be sure to email me personally at : jr @ cambrianhouse.com or join us in the forum for discussion.

Special thanks to Peter, David, and Jessye for all their hard work and efforts. We’ve only just begun …

May the best idea win!

Bnet.com, the new business oriented offering from technology news giant Cnet.com, published a crash course in crowdsourcing. Jennifer Alsever has done a solid job of outlining some basic strategies to bring the traditional business crowd up to speed.

There is one major point raised in this article that diverges from Cambrian House’s approach to crowdsourcing. The wisdom of crowds is pitched as a free alternative to consultants or focus groups, rather than as a meeting of equals:

Use these techniques to harness the intelligence of customers that love your business, talk about your business, and better yet, will do free work for your business in today’s increasingly democratic, user-generated, social-networked, marketplace.

At Cambrian House, our crowdsourcing model is based on the belief that the reward should be equal to the value that you add. “Give them stuff” and “give them fame” isn’t enough. Every valuable contribution to a Cambrian House project is rewarded with royalty points, which translate into an ongoing percentage of the profits when the product goes to market.

Some of the things not mentioned in the article that we think are important to think about when considering crowdsourcing for your company are:

1. Transparency - unless you are willing to open the kimono (my favorite cliche) you will not get valuable feedback/data/work from your community. How can they give you what you want if they don’t know where you’re coming from?
2. Passion in your company - you are trying to engage your most passionate users. “If you build it, they will come” is not applicable without passion. A good indication of this is whether your employees/consultants spend every minute possible in your community. Check out our fave blog on this topic for more information!
3. Time - you can’t ignore your community. Every person that contributes to your new crowdsourced model should be given the care and attention you give your employees. If you are not willing to commit the time to them, your community will not commit time to you.

Crowdsourcing is changing the way business is done, and Cambrian House is proud to be the leading edge of the transformation.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. How do you think corporations should approach crowdsourcing?

Hi all,

Due to a record snowfall and numerous yeti attacks this week I am sad to announce that we will be delaying the release of IdeaForge for at least a week. It is not because we are fixing bugs, and making IdeaForge functionality even better.

In the meantime we’ll make final changes to The Forge, while avoiding the white monsters lurking outside our windows.

Sincerely - JR

While all this talk about Ideawarz is going on, check out Techguy in his Ideawarz Golden Axe champion t-shirt. Before you all get jealous and want to forfeit your $10K for a t-shirt, I’m pretty sure Jessye will make sure all winners still get one. I’m sure she’ll even take design suggestions. Glad you like your t-shirt Techguy and congrats on having the best idea in the Golden Axe tournament!

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!

Did everyone have a chance to read the second part of Bruce Livingstone’s essay?

The next three points are: Ask the right questions, Listen, even when it hurts and Change at the right speed for the right reasons. There are excellent comments on the article, so make sure you check it out!

Also, Parker Texas Ranger has just informed us that RHF seems to be trumping Cambrian House’s traffic, hardcore. In a few short weeks, we’ve gone from Techguy (Thanks Techguy!) voting on everyone’s wishes to a whole community that is really involved in the site. We’re excited that people are begining to be as passionate about the Robinhood Fund as we are!