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Cambrian House is a new software company getting a little buzz these days for its paid open-source community built on the idea of "crowdsourcing.'' The company is turning to outsiders (the "crowd'') for ideas. They submit the ideas, rank each other's ideas and help build them. Cambrian markets and sells the ideas, and contributors get royalties based on their level contributions.
There are lots of questions, not the least of which is whether the royalties could ever amount to anything meaningful or worthwhile for contributors. So far, ideas range from self-destrucuting credit cards to Citysearch-like portals.
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Meanwhile, Mozilla is making available a developer release of Firefox 2 today. It's for testing purposes. "Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 1,'' the company says.
New features include built-in phishing protection and better support for viewing RSS feeds. Also, Firefox will now resume your browsing session if your computer loses power or Firefox crashes.
From our pespective, this release can't come soon enough. As much as we like Firefox (on both the Mac and PC), it's been annoyingly crash-prone. Word is that the new version is more reliable.
Finally, Mashup Camp is underway at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It's an unconference, meaning the attendees themselves will define the agenda. We can't make it, so if anyone wants to report in on what's happening in the comments, we're all ears.