Hello!

You've landed in the archive of the Cambrian House community. We've kept some pages here for posterity but the community is no longer active. Now we market the technology that made our early crowdsourcing a success.

Can we help you get to Cambrian House the company? – Come on over.

Are you seeking crowdsourcing technology? – Check out Chaordix by Cambrian House.

Thanks for dropping by
The Cambrian House Crew

Close [x]
Cambrian House

A prince who is not himself wise cannot be wisely advised: good advice depends on the shrewdness of the prince who seeks it.
Niccolo Machiavelli

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.

View next idea in this round »

Internet Familiar

migueljds
migueljds is offlineSend a Message to migueljdsAdd migueljds as a FriendSend a Hat Tip to migueljds
  • Submitted by: migueljds
  • Created: Oct 15, 2006, 5:51 am
  • Share on Facebook
  • Promote
 

Join Cambrian House

People

Ideas

Businesses
Connect with talented people. Collaborate on ideas. Realize your vision.
It's free! Like love in the sixties!

The Elevator Pitch

For All Internet users, particularly those who read and/or write blogs who are looking to add a little fun and reward to their online participation the Internet Familiar is a online familiar/pet the lives on your online participation that will grow as you do on the Internet and facilitate lively communities and enrich online relationships. Unlike other offline 'virtual pets' our product promotes connection and interaction with other people, thus forming new connections and relationships and all the benefits the comes from that.

The Idea

How about an a Internet Familiar/Pet? This would be a little customizable creature that sits in your web browser as and extension or something and counts your online participation "brownie points". Whenever you post a comment on someones blog and write a post yourself, or any online participation you take part in, you feed your familiar. You need to make sure your familiar is happy and well fed. This will encourage people to participate more online. Your familiar will also get angry with you for bad behaviour on the Internet. People will be able to see other peoples familiars and participation levels, etc Monetization? Perhaps, sell it to Google... no just kidding :) One could make money by selling brownie points to people to keep their familiar alive while they're on holiday and/or are unable to participate on the internet for some time. One could also buy their familiar toys keep it happy to make up for bad behaviour.

I thought of this idea when I was...

Just thought something needs to be done for people to come out and start participating and contributing online, since so many people just browse around, but don't actually contribute, by adding comments, ratings, reviews or whatever. Even if it's just a 1 line comment on your thoughts, everything contributed adds value to the internet, if not by the valuableness of the content, then by the enrichment of culture and perspectives. By making contribution fun, when people start doing it, they will start realizing it contributing online can not only be fun, but is personally rewarding.


Comments Posted

Hammerstein
Hammerstein Posted: October 18, 2006, 10:29 am

Wayyyyyyyyy too much work for something that has pure novelty value. You would need some sort of browser integration, not to mention website integration and some way of linking the data.

If you created a group of sites, or got sites to participate in your scheme (MSN Passport) you could maybe keep a common database or way of linking behaviour, but I don't believe this is a viable idea.

But.. ideas like that are definitely good.. cos, without people with ideas we would all be pretty boring! Good idea, shame about the difficulty I feel.

migueljds
migueljds Posted: October 19, 2006, 4:08 am

I was thinking an along the terms of a web browser extension/addon, firefox supports them and now internet explorer 7 also supports them.
The website for the product would be just a forum for news, support and feedback managed by community forum admins, and sales of "brownie points" via PayPal or whatever.
I've seen companies, such as the South African company MXIT, that sell credits for small services making lots of money (of course they have a huge user base). I'm not comparing my idea to their thriving business, but there are conceptual similarities in monetization and support that make it easier to manage than one might think.
Anyways, I'll just keep cooking up some more 'bright' ideas, one of them has got to be a winner.

migueljds
migueljds Posted: February 16, 2007, 2:20 pm

Something else I just thought of, inspired by the popular The Sims game.
People could also create their own toys, utilities, clothes, artifacts, whatever and sell them to other people who want to buy them for their familiar.
What does everyone think?

Iskandar
Iskandar Posted: May 26, 2007, 5:08 am

Hello migueljds,
I'm just wondering, is your Internet Familiar/Pet concept is just like http://www.bunnyherolabs.com/

 

Post A Comment

Got something to say?
Log in to post a comment.