CrowdsourceThis.com | All Things Crowdsourcing

Kluster switched directions today and launched Knewsroom.

“our product is not nearly as cool as our process, lets ditch the product and make the processes our business” founder Ben Kaufman said in a video he posted to YouTube. “Seven weeks in and a million dollars down the drain, we know what works,”

Kluster launched 6 weeks ago at TED to tones of fanfare as community members crowdsourced a game in 72 hours. Its interesting to see such a huge change in only 6 weeks. The cluster platform can be used by different companies, where it can be used for to make crowdsource amongst employees, partners, and customers. Apparently for several company’s have already partnered with Kluster and will be announcements in coming months.

Knewsroom, is a daily “paper” users submit new topics and stories each day and then members invest in them using a currency called “watts”. Once the “Paper is published” members get paid out based on their investments, users actually get a % of advertising revenue. If an original story you create makes it to the fount page you get paid $150. Klusters also have a new partnership with Master Card which allows members to spend their hard earn cash thought their new debit card.

you have 16 hours left to invest and create content for this new project.

Tonight VenCorps new splash site went live, the site dose not provide much information as of yet.

Retrieved from the site:

What is Community Powered Capital?
VenCorps is a network of founders, funders and facilitators focused on discovering, funding and growing startups.

About Us
VenCorps brings together the power of collaborative innovation and venture capital. VenCorps taps into the global community to discover, fund and grow Internet and mobile startups. VenCorps connects entrepreneurs, investors and facilitators together in a community of shared interest: startup success.

VenCorps is a program of Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. Winners of the VenCorps Startup Showdowns will receive funds anchored by Spencer Trask along with founders, funders and facilitators.

I wonder how much of the TechCrunch stuff will blow over?

Jeff Howes new book on Crowdsourcing is due out in July 29. Jeff says

The most salient, witty or astute remarks will be published as an appendix in the final chapter of the book.

So check out Jeff blog and get reading.

Post

Today TechCrunch reported that Cambrian House (a leader in crowdsourcing) has been sold to Spencer Trask and will form a new company called VenCorps.

Sources inside Cambrian House have denied that the company has been sold and point to a New York Times article, about the company that points out the opposites. With more information on VenCorps coming soon.

So who would you trust the New York Times or TechCrunch?

Update: Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch admits to reporting unconfirmed info:

Erick Schonfeld
May 12th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Cambrian House confirmed most of this post. It wouldn’t comment on the price of the asset sale.

I know for a fact that they were trying to raise more funding, couldn’t, tried to sell the whole company, couldn’t, and finally settled for what they could with the asset sale. I also know the price Spencer Trask was willing to pay kept going down.

I can’t get into my sourcing. Suffice it to say, when I called Cambrian House, the details panned out.

NOT IMPRESSED!

Update 2:

Post by Cambrian Houses CEO Michael Sikorsky (MJ)

Michael Sikorsky (CEO - Cambrian House)
May 12th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Erick:
Indeed, our model failed. We’ve spent many hours reflecting on it, and, I’d be happy to share our learning’s in detail with anyone keen on the crowdsourcing space.
But, in short: we became a destination people loved to bookmark more than they loved to actively visit (our traffic pattern was scarily VC-ish). The limiting reagent in the startup equation is not ideas, but amazing founding teams.
A key assumption for us, which proved out NOT true: given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find (crowdsource) a team willing to execute it OR we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas – this is where our model fell short.
What we learned: it would have been better to back great teams with horrible ideas because most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select community members. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse.
Hence: the wisdom of crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down. Trying to find people willing or capable to take on the offspring (our outputs) of the CH model was hard and/or incredibly time consuming.
For clarity of your story, and perhaps, just pride for my team and my investors:
- You missed http://mob4hire.com in your original post. Paul and his team launched this completely using the CH platform.
- The team and community at CH are top-notch. I’d be proud to follow them anywhere.
- We were and are still able to attract investment (this you just have wrong). However, we believed the model was off (once you have this feeling in your stomach you don’t take on additional capital until you’ve figured it out).
- Fire-sale of our IP - two points: #1) We haven’t sold our IP – we still own it – and the IP of the portfolio companies. #2) Erick – you know as well as I we won’t comment on the deal specifics. However, I believe deeply this was the right move for the community.
- The ‘rebirth’ with VenCorps goes to fix the failures I identified above. With VenCorps, the ideas don’t matter anywhere as much as the teams do.
- I’m bullish crowdsourcing but how/what you can apply it to is still under-test.
- Deadpool – yes, our original model can clearly be put to rest. However, the same can’t be said for the company.
Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House

Thanks for clearing things up.

updated info on VenCorp here

Do you want to designs video games? Want to get your feet wet, but just not sure how? How about collecting royalties on a game you helped create?

If this sounds interesting then check out Crowded Games.

Crowded Games was launched in 2007 for one reason, to enable the community to design a xbox arcade game called Pond Hockey. Bruno Steppuhn of Zensoft Studios (which developed soft modeling, 3D rendering and multi-player algorithms through various projects) saw the potential of a crowdsourcing game design community and bought Crowded Games in 2007.

“Pond Hockey is new twist on casual games” say Bruno “Its Mario Kart meets no rules hockey, in this funny comedic and chaotic family 4 player hockey game. Its a great game to play as a family or with a bunch of friends.” Pond Hockey is expected to start beta testing next month.

The real jewel is not the game. Its the community game developers. Crowded Games has a community of 50 members with many different backgrounds, from veterans of the game industry to high school students. These members are investing their time into these games for potential royalties down the road. But thats not the most important reason for many members, its the experience and the prestige of creating a new game. Members can win a one year XNA membership each month.

So if you want to get some experience developing games and see your name in the credits, head over to Crowded Games and join the Crowd.

Just a few hours after my last post Jeff posted part 1 of Chapter 6 The Most Universal Quality - Why Diversity Trumps Ability

Jeff Howe’s Book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business came out of story that he wrote for Wired in June 2006 The Rise of Crowdsourcing. His book is set to be released July 29 of this year. You can however read 4 chapters of his book here:

Chapter 2 Rise of the Amateur

Chapter 3 From So Simple a Beginning Part 2

Chapter 4 Faster, Cheaper, Smarter, Easier: Democratizing the Means of Production Part 2

Chapter 5 The Rise and Fall of the Firm: Turning Community into Commerce Part 2

Enjoy

There are certainly a lot of ways to tap the wisdom of crowds, but CrowdChess is really doing some interesting work matching up chess grand master Gawain Jones against the crowd. While I’m an obvious proponent of using the wisdom of crowds, I’m not sure that the wisdom of crowds will work in chess. Chess requires such an all encompassing strategy and there is no one right answer. You have to understand your opponent and their intentions in order to do well. I have a feeling that the crowd won’t be able to do this very well. However, it will definitely be interesting to watch.

Techcrunch also pointed out that this had been done previously:

Crowdsourced chess matches against well-known figures are nothing new. In 1999, MSN Gaming Zone held “Kasparov versus The World”, a four month long chess match that Kasparov called “the greatest game in the history of chess.” The winner? Kasparov, after 62 moves.

A nice logo design is one of the fundamental keys to having a good brand image that people will recognize all over the web. Corporations spend thousands of dollars on internal development teams or major marketing companies to create a nice logo design.

Well, one website called WiLogo is mobilizing the crowds to help with logo creation. They have a pretty streamlined method for getting a group of graphic designers to create over 25 (estimated 50) different logo designs for you. After the crowd has created a bunch of different logo designs, then you get to select which one you like best. A look at some of the logos that have been created with their website is probably the best selling point for the process. Some pretty nice designs in that list.

I also like the way that the site leverages the crowds to know which logo is the best one using people’s votes and comments. Everyone has an opinion and one thing we’ve found with crowds is that they aren’t afraid to share it. This type of feedback on the various logos is great information for someone trying to select the right logo design.

It looks like the price for logo design is over $1000. That seems a little pricey for most people interested in using the system. It does say “Startups, Company founders, call us at +49 281 41 85 414 we have reserved offers for you!” I’m not sure if that means they’ll give startups a discount or not. Sounds like a good idea to me, since startups usually aren’t that interested in forking over $1000 for just a logo.