Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 09/05/07

Cambrian House enables entrepreneurs to get ideas off the ground

By Mark Gibbs

I had a really good idea: I wanted to take video cameras and run their output through image processing software to find faces. Next I wanted to determine whether those faces were pointing in the direction of the camera and count them. The purpose of the system is to evaluate consumer attention in the real world.

If you have a crowd of people in an environment with something to look at (a hoarding, a poster, whatever) it is hugely valuable to know if they are looking at it and for how long.

I found a software development kit that would do the analysis (created by the Fraunhofer Institute and, well, I came to a halt. My programming skills are not up to serious development and while I could learn enough to at least create a prototype I am busy, busy, busy.

On top of that, friends who have the requisite skills are also busy and engaging some unknown programmer is a risky proposition and a great way to empty one’s pockets. So the project went on the back burner for the last six months or so.

Today, I’m going to post the idea on Cambrian House, a novel service that uses crowdsourcing to evaluate ideas and potentially take them on to be realized as a business.

There, done. I opened a free account and submitted the idea. Once that was done Cambrian offered me the opportunity to auto-post it to various blogging services and provided a code fragment for me to post to Gibbsblog (Network World uses Drupal which isn’t one of Cambrian’s supported blogs).

I was rather disappointed by the look of the code fragment – rather clunky. While it is easy enough to clean it up it seems remiss of Cambrian to overlook such a great marketing tool.

There’s a lot to the way the Cambrian House systems works.

You are awarded points for your involvement and new ideas are presented to the community as a competition each week and a prize of $100 Cambros (Cambrian’s internal currency) is awarded to the idea the community likes most.

Ideas generate feedback if they are good and that may lead to a market test. “A market test usually consists of a brochure website (home, how it works, faq, contact), pay-per-click advertising (i.e. Google AdWords) and website analytics (i.e. Google Analytics). How many people are searching for your idea right now? How many visit your site? Do they ask for more info? Would they pre-order your product? In short: if there's an appetite, invest further. If the market isn't interested, cut it. It may seem harsh, but it works.”

So, if you want to continue with the idea then you can engage with other community members and use your Cambros to pay for other’s work and services or give them royalty points in the business (you can also earn Cambros by working on other people’s projects).

I’m still figuring out where the value lies in this service but at a minimum it is a great way to exercise ideas that you have but don’t have a broader forum for evaluating them.

Cambrian also provides a developer API so that you can perform operations on the Cambrian system from applications. The documentation is rather thin at present but Cambrian is planning to improve it.

As and when something happens with my idea I’ll let you know. In the meantime, check it out and give me your feedback. And if you are a VC, let’s talk – I know I have a killer idea.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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