Cambrian House
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cambrian House is a web-based community that combines the principles of wisdom of crowds and peer production to identify and develop sticky software ideas. The company's stated mission is to discover and commercialize software ideas through the wisdom and participation of crowds.
Anyone can submit a software idea for the crowd to rate. Other users vote on the ideas in an attempt to identify those with the most potential. The best ideas are then selected to be market tested. Contributors whose ideas are selected to be built receive a share of the profits in the form of royalty points if the idea succeeds in the marketplace. Individual contributors can also receive royalty points by completing specific tasks to help develop ideas into products.
To date the company has launched three products: Prezzle [1] - a virtual wrapper for online gift certificates, RobinHoodFund [2]- a democratic online charity, and Gwabs [3] - a PC based P2P desktop combat game.
Cambrian House has been discussed, primarily in relation to crowdsourcing in a variety of media including: CBC Radio's - The Current [[4]], The Financial Times and Economist Intelligence Unit [[5]], in addition to new media such as TechDigest [[6]] and Mashable [[7]]
It is also rumoured that a Harvard Business case is being written on the concept of peer production that examines this phenomenon citing both Cambrian House and Wikipedia as examples.
The company has also gained a degree of notoriety for it's unconventional promotional efforts, including feeding 1000 pizzas to Google unnanounced [8], auctioning a celebrity endorsed laptop for charity [9], and weighing a goat [10]
Critics[weasel words] of the site point to a number of potential weaknesses in the model including the challenge of convincing users to read and rate a rapidly growing pool of ideas, the relatively low quality of many ideas, the added management complexity of a distributed development model, and the large number of duplicate submissions.
