Cambrian House, a digital "suggestion box" of sorts that has gleaned international media attention and been dubbed a major name to watch in 2007.

Calgary Herald, Jan 2007

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

Looking to harness the power of your crowd? Find out about Chaordix™ - technology that enables enterprises to get the most out of crowdsourcing.

Ideas

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CrunchTime

Submitted by: migueljds
Created: Apr 18, 2007, 5:04 pm

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The Elevator Pitch

For anyone who is in a crisis situation or might encounter a crisis situation the CrunchTime community is a free to join community website that that will help and guide you in your time of need. Unlike help websites, support forums and other forms of help our product will provide you wth one space and community where you can go to for help and advice for anything that is a crisis and requires an urgent solution.

The Idea

Everyone has times when everything just seems to go wrong and you are frantically running around putting out fires. Wouldn't it be nice to have a support community to lend a helping hand or advice in these crisis situations?

When it comes to crunch time, post your predicament to the CrunchTime community website, along with why it is so urgent, your deadline, how valuable it is to you to get it fixed and why, and the community will band together to help you out in your time of need.

In return, though, you will need to return the favour, if possible, when others in the community cry out for help.

Every time you cry out for help, you will get a mark against your name, and every time you help someone out you get a mark for your name. Those with higher marks' cry for help will ring out the loudest, while the opposite will be true for those with marks against their name.

Monetization: matchmaking fees, every time someone has been helped they pay a certain fee.

The Logo

I thought of this idea when I was...

I'm writing this at 1am. 'nuf said.

Comments Posted

zvikico Posted: April 19, 2007, 12:52 am

Seems to me people don't have time to start looking for communities at this point :-)

migueljds Posted: April 19, 2007, 5:05 am

People try and leave community websites everyday. If the site helps them when they really need it, I think they'll stay with it and even refer more people to it.
There's always space for a good idea and another good great community website. The trick is, not starting it, it's to keep it going.

micco Posted: April 19, 2007, 7:10 am

One of the classic management books, I think it was The Mythical Man Month, points out that adding people to a project at crunch time tends to delay it more, not help. The key is adding people and getting them up to speed before crunch time.

El_Jivaro Posted: April 19, 2007, 8:23 am

I love this idea.

mmarrone Posted: April 19, 2007, 9:42 am

interesting idea

laracee Posted: April 19, 2007, 4:10 pm

There are obviously some projects that would be better suited to this than others, as micco stated, but for certain tasks I think this could really work.

Brenden Posted: April 19, 2007, 8:09 pm

how will you make money?

migueljds Posted: April 20, 2007, 7:19 am

Wow, cool. I got a lot of 2 cents' :) counting... 10 cents!

No, seriously now. I think in those situations where adding more hands to the job doesn't help, good advice from someone who's been there and knows what to do and can give you sound advice, could be extremely helpful. And yes, some situations can be complex to put across in writing, but that's the beauty of the web, submit your plea, in audio, video, or whatever.

In terms of monetization and sustaining the website, that's up for debate, but my idea is either by selling products that someone might need in a crisis situation, direct or via advertising.
If people don't want the website run down by advertising, alternatively the website could make money by commission on problems solved. So the person(s) helping the poor sod who needs help will say how much their services or advice is worth, and the site will get a commission on that amount. Or maybe the community determine how much that problem is worth to solve, the website gets a small margin of that amount and the people who helped solve the problem get the rest.

Any thoughts on that?

Rizal Posted: April 27, 2007, 5:14 pm

how to make money

migueljds Posted: April 28, 2007, 7:19 am

Here's the short and sweet version. Critical problems solved means people willing to pay. CrunchTime being the facilitator and connector will get a commission. Also opportunities for advertising like on any other website, but that will be secondary.

saigon Posted: October 14, 2007, 9:57 pm

how do you intend to invite traffic?
another .2cents =)

saigon Posted: October 14, 2007, 9:58 pm

whats your marketing plan?

Hello!

Ideas