Cambrian House

You can't stumble if you're not in motion
Richard P. Carlton 3M

FAQ

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What is crowdsourcing?
How we describe it...Crowdsourcing harnesses the power of a community, using advanced social media technology and knowledge of crowd behaviour, to collect, evolve and rank ideas and contributions to reveal the strongest performers. Crowdsourcing can shorten time to market for new products, uncover ways to cut costs or improve service levels, and heighten market success for new products or enhancements. Companies, organizations and governments use crowdsourcing technology to most rapidly and economically understand market needs, opportunities and priorities.
How Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article describe it..."Crowdsourcing is the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of a specialized few."
As described by wikipedia..."Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers via the Web in the form of an open call for solutions. Users--also known as the crowd--typically form into online communities based on the Web site, and the crowd submits solutions to the site. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones."
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO talks about crowdsourcing in Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics, 2007 saying.. Peer production is about more than sitting down and having a nice conversation... It's about harnessing a new mode of production to take innovation and wealth creation to new levels.
What happened to Cambrian House's crowdsourcing community?
In May 2008, we transitioned our members to VenCorps. That's right, the Cambrian House community became the VenCorps community with backing by Spencer Trask. After two years of working with members to build a crowdsourcing community that allowed members to collaborate to build ideas and businesses, we wanted members to have the power to fund their startups. It was natural next step to bring commerce to our crowdsourcing community as we always promised we would.
VenCorps will be the first community that enables the crowd to find, filter and fund startups. Cambrian House members are the first people to be invited through the gate, and the first to compete for $50,000 in funding.

VenCorps FAQs
What happened with Greedy Or Needy?
In July 2008, MakeGood Technologies Inc. licensed the Cambrian House's Chaordix™ crowdsourcing platform and acquired our Greedy Or Needy™ charity community. MakeGood's vision for Giving 2.0 will help to grow the GreedyorNeedy community which MakeGood will now manage.
If Cambrian House is out of the community management business, what’s keeping you busy?
We’re still hopping! In fact we’re going full tilt at developing the ventures that emerged from our crowdsourced discoveries over the past two years including the Chaordix™ crowdsourcing platform and Gwabs™. Learn more.