Caterham Seven

Project Splitwheel brings together gearheads from allover the world and allows them to vote on different concepts to create the world’s first crowdsourced sports car. Caterham Cars, the UK based manufacturer of the Caterham Seven has joined with Project Splitwheel and has agreed to create a prototype and ultimately manufactured in product, with the hope of being in full production by 2011.

“Cars are amongst the most hotly debated topics on the internet and for the first time we are going to channel some of that passion and energy into an exciting high-profile project with a real-world outcome,” says Piers Drake Project Splitwheels creator. “Every petrolhead dreams of running their own sports car company. Project Splitwheel is effectively the world’s first ‘virtual’ car manufacturer and as far as possible we will be asking our members to call the shots, just as if they were running a marque themselves.”

The project is open to anyone regardless of background. Users are able to collaborate on forums, Wiki’s and voting. Users will vote on key design features each week, everything from engine location to leather seats to the name of the car. Along with acting as a liaison with Caterham’s engineering team, Project Splitwheel will also provide guidance and input from automotive industry experts as required.

Project Splitwheel is on the right track, they’ve taken a huge task of designing a car and broke it into very small pieces. These pieces are much easier for the crowd to create and combine into a finished product. My only hope is that we don’t end up with something like The Homer:

You can register on the website now, they’re hoping to start Crowdsourcing this project in the new year.

Take a look

Dragons Den is going into its 3rd season in Canada but originated from a similar show created by Sony in Japan which ran for 3 seasons, other versions have aired in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Netherlands and Finland. Most recently Mark Burnett signed a deal with Sony for the American rights the show will be called The Shark Tank,  and ABC are recently ordered a pilot. Contestants of Dragons Den will pitch their business or idea to the Dragons (businessmen and women looking for businesses to invest in) asking for an investment in exchange for a % of their business. After the pitch the Dragons pick apart the business trying to find out if it’s a good investment for their own money.  Several months back I had the opportunity to sit down with Sean Wise the Business Adviser for CBC hit business reality show Dragons Den but he is better referred to as the “Dragons Keeper”.  Some of you may recognize Sean’s name, is written several books, a regular columnist in the Globe and Mail, and also the CEO of VenCorps.

Sean says his show has real business people with real ideas, unlike Fox’s American Idol, which brings in contestant’s for shock value and amusement. “We don’t know pretend to know what the Dragons will fund, some things we thought they would turn down they have funded and others that we thought were a sure thing they have turned down” says Sean.

This season contesters had the opportunity to pitch their business to the Dragons thought YouTube, and the public could vote on their favorite pitches. Originally the top 10 would be invited to step into the den and pitch to the dragons but the quality was so high that an additional 8 were invited down to pitch their business.

Dragon’s Den is taking advantage of a growing trend in Crowdsourcing, using the crowd to organize the used generated content (the pitches), the crowds votes then bring the best to the top.  This process not only brings the top pitches to the attention of the dragons and also gives the community “ownership” of the show.   As a member of the crowd I want to know if the businesses I voted for were funded by the dragons. I was told that this season is already been a one million dollar deal a first for the show perhaps as one million dollar deal was a pitch that I supported by voting for it.

Dragon’s Den premieres September 29 on CBC television make sure you tune in to see if your favorite pitch made it to the air.

Is there a bit of a tragedy-of-the-commons element to crowdsourcing, to content on YouTube and things like that, where the 80-20 rule–that 80 percent of content is low-quality–governs?
Howe: There’s an antidote to the 80-20 rule, and it’s that the crowd filters itself. I just put up a blog post about Dell IdeaStorm, which is just a modern-day suggestion box.

Dell receives about 9,000 ideas, and some 500,000 people vote on them. And what those votes do is drive the best ideas up to the top. A lot of those ideas suck, but you don’t have to read them, and Dell doesn’t have to take action on them.

The essence of crowdsourcing is to take an overwhelming task, and by breaking it up into little chunks and distributing it to a large number of people, it becomes feasible. The good ideas rise like cream to the surface.

How will crowdsourcing change in the next few years?
Howe: We’re seeing Crowdsourcing 2.0 emerge, a more intelligent form of crowdsourcing. Dell is using it intelligently. But I see a lot of the early adopters getting out of it.

Suddenly, every corporation wants the crowd to create their own ads, and that’s often a disaster. Everyone wants to throw out a shingle and create a social-networking site.

We saw like Wal-Mart try to do this, and it created fake entries about kids who were buying Wal-Mart products. Any of us who track stuff like this thinks, “do you have no one smart in your entire organization? You’re the largest employer in the world.”

And the fact is they probably don’t. So those companies will get out, or they’ll get smart. As crowdsourcing continues to penetrate the mainstream, more companies will use it, but only the smart companies will succeed at it.

What are the best industries for crowdsourcing?
Howe: It has totally transformed stock photography. So the question I pose in my book is, “Is stock photography the canary in the coal mine?” We might be beginning to see this with graphic design. I don’t know yet because I haven’t done the reporting on it, but it’s at least something similar.

You have a lot of people who can do low-end design. You know they can create a logo. They can lay out a Web page, even though they’re not professionals. They’re adequate enough that they can make a supplementary income doing it or do it for fun, which is why photography works: because a lot of people love to take pictures.

Crowdsourcing is also having a big impact in corporate science, through companies such as InnoCentive and YourEncore and, you know, my suspicion is that it will continue to migrate into other fields, especially creative services.

Full article.

Are you ready for the next chapter of Crowdsourcing? Jeff Howe (the man who’s 2006 Wired article coined the word Crowdsourcing) new book is coming out next week: Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. Tthe book follows the crowdsourcing trend and discovers how it is revolutionizing business, internet, and commerce.

Crowdsourcing has already taken hold according to Howe. Communities are coming together to take on jobs that were once preformed by staff. The result online communities like iStockPhoto, Threadless, Crowdspring and Innocentive have flourished. Other “brick and mortar” companies like Dell and Procter and Gamble have launched crowdsourcing sites to capitalize on this trend.

Jeff’s book will look at:

• How four fundamental developments–a renaissance of amateurism, the emergence of open source software movement, the increasing availability of the tools of production, and the rise of vibrant online communities have made crowdsourcing inevitable
• Crowdfunding: The way the crowd’s collective pocketbook is being used to create new ways of financing everything from micro-credit organizations to would-be rock stars

• 10 Rules of Crowdsourcing A roadmap on how to implement the principles of Crowdsourcing into your own enterprise

Open source software revealed a fundamental truth about humans that had gone largely unnoticed until the connectivity of the internet brought it into high relief: labor can be organized more efficiently in the context of community than it can in the context of a corporation.

– Jeff Howe, from the introduction of Crowdsourcing

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he covers the entertainment industry among other subjects. Before coming to Wired he was a senior editor at Inside.com and a writer at the Village Voice. In his fifteen years as a journalist he has traveled around the world working on stories ranging from the impending water crisis in Central Asia to the implications of gene patenting. He has also written for US News & World Report, Time magazine, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.

Cambrian House has entered into a licensing deal with MakeGood a Vancouver based company that specialises in something they call Giving 2.0. Under the deal Cambrian House will supply MakeGood with its Chaordix platform and GreedyorNeedy.com (GoN) in exchange for cash and equity.

GoN was launched in November of 2006 under the name RobinHoodFund offering weekly prizes between $20,000, $1000 and recently $100. Community members would vote on which members wish will be granted one that’s needy (selfless) and greedy (selfish). 

“We’re proud of the GreedyorNeedy community whose members have actively worked to change the way people give online over the last year and a half. MakeGood’s vision for Giving 2.0 will help to grow the GreedyorNeedy community which MakeGood will now manage,” said Shelley Kuipers, President of Cambrian House.

At one point in the development of GoN members were able to donate money to different members wish’s but that system was discontinued.

“Our two visions aligned so well that it was natural to pursue a partnership,” said Richard Goossen, CEO of MakeGood. “We’re eager to bring GreedyorNeedy to the next level of giving.”

As part of this transaction, Shelley Kuipers, President of Cambrian House and Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House, have agreed to join MakeGood as advisors, collaborating as thought leaders in crowdsourcing to assist MakeGood in its business and community strategies. Cambrian House will continue to develop its portfolio companies, including Gwabs, FilmRiot, Prezzle, Knottle, and the Chaordix crowdsourcing platform.

I decided to post a project to see how it works. Hopefully for the next week the community will continue to come up with creative logo designs.  Feel free to check it out and vote on your favorite logo.

I wanted to test NameThis.com out so I made a project to come up with a name for a consumer show for men. I gave a description and a list of things that would be at the show and what names I was not looking for. So the 48 hours process started and I watched, and I noticed that I was getting a lot of Man or Guy names. These were fine but I wanted to try to get people to expand beyond that, so I went looking for a edit description feature and found non, so I had to email the team and they added “Although names with “Man,” “Men,” and “Guy” are good, try to come up with names that do not use those words”. I sorted though the list and invested in names I like, so I could have them at the top of my list. At the end of the round 3 names were selected as the winner. None of which I liked at all. I then lost my list of names I had invested in and had to search for them to sort out which names I liked. My top three names were:

* It’s a Guy Thing
* The Stag Show
* Live, Work, Play : The Modern Man

NameThis.com uses a predictive market platform, which allows users to invest in names to pick a winner. Then the winners are paid out based on which names had the most invested (I assume). As a project owner I was hoping to get access to that information. I would have liked to know who invested (demographic) in which name, how many people invested in which names (%), and I would have liked my votes to have a little bit more power (not all the power) but a little more weight than the average person. After all this is my name and I have to live with it, so I should be able to help pick who gets paid. Information is power so I hope that Kluster opens up the data to project owners soon.

What I love about Kluster so far is that they listened to their community unlike some other crowdsourcing communities. They relies that their community is driving their business and that if they are going to invest in the wisdom of the crowds then they should listen to their crowd.  In a series of blog post Kluster has asked its community what it should do to make its product better, and in a matter of weeks they have take those suggestions and put them into practice.

A great man once said, “Why do we fall, sir? So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up.”
Kluster has taken this to heart, they are not afraid to fall because each time you fall you learn and become stronger.
Keep up the good work and keep on listening.

After just 37 issues of Klusters community driven newspaper has written its own obituary. Knewsroom was plaged with poor quality original articles and less then stellar linked content. The mock Obituary states the cause of death as starvation.

Knewsroom, was a daily “paper” users submitted 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.

The writing was on the wall as Kluster.com removed Knewsroom from its banner this week.

The problem with the internet generation is we don’t care about yesterdays news! We want todays news now. In my opinion where Kluster failed is it was looking backwards and not to the future. The sight should have been a digg and readit model allowing users to promote original content along with link content and then use the investing and revenue sharing method that way.

Klusters third try NameThis is a crowdsourced community which suggests names for companies, using a productive market (hidden) users invest in their favorite names which is used to decided on the top three names. I wonder if this two is headed for failure as the quality of names is just not there. I also wonder if this can be a stand alone product, or if this would be a better product for a company like CrowdSpring.

Kluster is set to release another product in July, we will see if this one can stand on its feet.