Cambrian House is a very interesting idea – “crowdsourced software”, as they call it: “It’s like Open Source, but with Money!”
Their goal is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to both receive as well as filter business ideas, code, and creative content (more specifically products need to be ‘realized’ over the Internet/web).
How Cambrian House works is particularly intriguing. They use “the crowd” to receive and filter ideas (through Digg like ranking), to build the worthwhile products, and then Cambrian House actually sells the products using their “secret sauce” Chameleon to help them.
Community members that help contribute to profitable products get paid based on royalty points. The more you contribute, the more royalty points you earn (different values are given to different tasks in the development process).
The Cambrian House site is pretty cool – check out the People and History page (nice use of Flash). These guys are also generally crazy, as identified by their sending 1000 pizzas to Google. Well, to be fair, I guess I’ll just let the wisdom of the crowds decide on that one.
