Prezzle Pay Day

Prezzle, a crowdsourced project from Cambrian House, has paid it’s first royalties!

I am now the proud owner of 4 royalty points or a 0.27% share of the project. It seems like all I have to do now sit back and let the money roll in.

Interested? Join Cambrian House, or send a free New Year Prezzle.

Redefining Crowdsourcing

The introduction for the original Wired article about crowdsourcing reads:
“Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”

There are three important words in that title: outsourcing, jobs and labor. Each of these words implies that work will be rewarded financially.

If the whole premise of crowdsourcing were to be based on the premise of payment, then discussions of ‘what is crowdsourcing’ would be simple.

Digg would be nothing without it’s an active user community, but it does not pay them so it is not crowdsourcing. Wikipedia relies on volunteers to contribute content but does not pay them so it is not crowdsourcing. Amazon encourages users to write reviews of books but does not pay for them, so it is not crowdsourcing. Nowpublic.com relies on it’s user community to post news stories but does not pay them for contributions, so is not crowdsourcing. All these are examples of great user communities but they are not examples of crowdsourcing.

Mechanical Turk exists to link workers to work and pay them for it. The principle behind the site is to allow someone to post a task which they need someone else to complete. This can be because specialist knowledge is required or because it’s tedious job that someone else will be willing to do for pennies.

Cambrian House is asking for ideas for software that they can produce and sell. They ask the crowd to submit ideas, they ask the crowd to vote on the ideas and they ask the crowd to contribute work towards designing and building the final product. If you are involved in the project you get a royalty payment based on the success of the product.

iStockphoto allows you to upload your artwork, photos and videos so that others can browse and buy your work. Selling uploaded work wasn’t an after thought, it’s why the site was designed - to connect those looking for stock artwork and those looking to sell it.

Threadless is a t-shirt site that only sells designs contributed by users. Designs are uploaded and voted on with winning designs being put into production. The beauty of this being that you know a design is going to sell because the users on the site are also your customers.

The term crowdsourcing may not be around for very long if it’s definition continues to be watered down, or is it time to redefine the term?

This article was prompted by comments at Horse Pig Cow and further discussion at Billions with Zero Knowledge.

IdeaWarz Finalists

The finalists in the first ever Cambrian House Idea Warz Golden Hammer Tournament - and they deserve an award just for surviving a competition with that name(!) - are Film Funder and Spoil My Spouse, both of which looked like very strong contenders from the start.

The winner of the long named contest is going to be announced at the Web2.0 Conference in San Francisco on November 7. So there’s a few more weeks to wait. I wonder if Guy Kawasaki will be passing on the white laptop at the conference.

If you want be one of the contenders in the next lengthy titled competition, sign up at Cambrian House and submit your idea.

Vote for Your Cambrian House Council

I’ve had the honour of being nominated for a seat on the Cambrian House Council.

What is it?

The Council was created to support and represent community members who have questions, feedback, or grievances that need addressing within the Cambrian House community.

And who is it?

The Council will consist of five people. Two will be Cambrian House representatives, and three will be independent community members. Community members will be voted in, and serve fixed terms (typically six months).

Any why should you include me in your voting?

Each member of Cambrian House (join here) has 3 votes to cast for the independent community members. If I was selected for The Council I would continue to report on the events surrounding Cambrian House with the impartiality I have maintained this far. I think the whole ethos behind Cambrian House is inspiring and as an active member of this community I have as much interest in making it work as anyone else.

Read previous comments on Cambrian House and Vote for The Council. A vote for ctrlaltphillipe is vote well cast.

Software for Votes

Both MyDreamApp and Cambrian House Idea Warz have voting closing tonight. It will be interesting to see which of these sites will produce either the most interesting or best selling product. On MyDreamApp they have a panel of judges including Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose who are both dismissing interesting products and voting for run of the mill ideas.

The influence of popular judges on MyDreamApp may skew the voting in this round but unfortunately none of the finalists are looking like creating a ground breaking products as offered. In fact, the top two ideas right now are a live weather desktop and a cookbook.

Conversely over at Idea Warz you can still vote for Spoil-A-Spouse and a Time Machine.

Ideawarz Reincarnated

The reincarnation of IdeaWarz has new home at ideawarz.com.

As has been widely discussed it also has a new tournament structure. The first round of which finishes at the end of October. There are sixteen contenders in this round of the tournament, all of which are paired off so that two are competing against each other, with eight embarking on a journey to Tournament Isle.

Watch the video introducing the contenders, featuring music as contributed by cybercerberus.

Aidan has already voted. Have you?

Go for Gwabs

The Gwabs project at Cambrian House is looking for contributors with the following skills:

• C#/.net developers
• Copywriters
• Graphic artists/designers

Gwablog

There is now a blog over at Gwabs.com. It looks as though it will be an inside view on the design and development of Gwabs including:

• Character and weapon sketches
• Game design notes
• Progress updates
• Playtest invitations and reports

Gwabs is Go!

Another Cambrian House product has passed it’s market test which means that Gwabs is go!

I think there will be a great deal of interest in this project for 3 reasons:

• It’s a cool neat idea.
• It’s the first Cambrian House project that most people will have seen grow from idea to market test to release.
• There is a similar idea being developed by the My Dream App project.

I asked Aidan, the Gwabs team lead, a few extra questions:

How much of a success was the market test for Gwabs? How did you measure it?

That’s a tough question to answer. It’s a combination of traffic flow, pre-orders, uniqueness of the idea and passion within the community and at Cambrian House. And a little secret sauce.

Any info on the secret sauce?

The secret sauce is, naturally, secret. If I told you, someone is bound to kill us both.

Can you give numbers of pre-orders?

Nope. I might tell you if you can get ten people to buy it tho That’ll even earn you some Gwablets to spend on your character when it’s released.

Is it going to be released in October?

Probably November.

When will the first demo version be released!?

When it’s ready. Sorry I can’t be more specific. We’ll need play-testers soon enough, to help ensure game balance.

 

There are already a few tasks available offering Glory Points. These include translating the Gwabs site and helping promote it. But there also some product development tasks:

1-3 GPs for ideas for weapons and power moves - send in a name, description, even a sketch, and explain how it might be used. More GPs will be given for unique and interesting weapons and moves. Pick your favourite 1 and 1 combat game move and then add Gwabs style Anything that makes it into the game will get additional GPs.

1-5 GPs for ideas for characters - names, descriptions, sketches, histories. Make sure and keep in line with the feel for the game. We’ll be posting RP tasks for the actual graphics tasks (i.e. animated sprites we can use in our game), but this is a pre-cursor to that. Anything we use in the game will get an additional GP award.

So there’s plenty of work to be done before we get our hands on Gwabs. In the meantime, why not watch the trailer, pre-order the game, digg Gwabs and get involved.

Michael Sikorsky - Tech Digest Interview

There is a great interview with Michael Sikorsky over at Tech Digest.

“We share the rewards, but also share the risk,” says Sikorsky. “If a project does well, people will be phenomenally overpaid, but if it doesn’t do well, they’ll be phenomenally underpaid!”

There is a great plug for Gwabs and Big Hal, as as new project Robin Hood Fund:

“People post any wish they want, and it costs $5 to do it,” says Sikorsky. “$3-4 of that goes to a central fund, while the rest goes towards running the fund. And people vote on whether you should receive your wish, and every week we go through who has the most votes, and what’s in the fund, and pay as many people as we can.”