Cambrian House

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Please improve this article if you can. (May 2007)

Cambrian House is a web-based community owned [1] business 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.

Cambrian House has been discussed, primarily in relation to crowdsourcing in a variety of media including: CBC Radio's - The Current [2], The Financial Times[3] and Economist Intelligence Unit [4], in addition to new media such as TechDigest [5] and Mashable [6]

Cambrian House is also the subject of an eponymous Harvard Business case (N9-607-089), which examines and discusses the concept of peer production, the crowdsourcing business model, and the possibility of using prediction markets to estimate market demand for products.

The company has also gained a degree of notoriety for its unconventional promotional efforts, including feeding 1000 pizzas to Google unannounced [7], auctioning a celebrity endorsed laptop for charity [8], and weighing a goat [9]

While it has been speculated that potential weaknesses in the model may include the challenge of convincing users to read and rate a rapidly growing pool of ideas, the relatively low quality of many ideas, the management complexity of distributed development, and the large number of duplicate submissions, these weaknesses have been successfully overcome by other companies including InnoCentive, IStockphoto, and t-shirt design company Threadless.

On May 12, 2008 TechCrunch reported [10] that after repeated attempts to find additional investment capital (on top of the 7.75MM already invested), the assets of Cambrian House were sold to Spencer Trask Ventures for an undisclosed amount. Cambrian House's CEO, Michael Sikorsky, commented that "Indeed, our model failed".

[edit] Launched Businesses

RobinHoodFund- a democratic online charity
Prezzle- a virtual wrapper for online gift certificates
Gwabs- PC based P2P desktop combat game being built in collaboration with Hothead Games
FilmRiot- online community-based service that allows independent producers of media to seek out support and funding from the public
Mob4Hire- Crowdsourcing the testing of mobile phone applications
OGG Tours- Audio tours by GPS, iPhone or iPod
JumbleLunch - Promotes career networking over lunch