Kluster.com - A step to revolutionize the economics of product development

There has been a lot of hype nowadays around concepts like crowd-sourcing and open-source and user-generated things. Lots of new business are been started and closed everyday trying to grasp this leap of todays way of working. But many of them haven’t achieved great success because business plans for such initiatives are still very difficult to succeed.

There are lots of problems regarding the rewards participation in product development, when in the end, someone is making money out of the ideas generated buy contributors around the globe.

Thats where Kluster gets my consideration and I will explain why. Kluster is a brand new company launched on 18th of February. It is a social network focussed on the development of products (which can be anything, from mp3 players and logos to events) which aims to reward every contribution to projects with some kind of monetary participation of the total value of the project.

More detais of how everything work can be seen in this Techcrunch story on Kluster.

Here is Kluster Demonstration Video in Youtube

I will tell a little bit of my impressions as I (of course) tryed it out.

First, I was amazed by how easy it is to setup everything and to start working on on going projects. The idea is that every project is broken down in phases which have a time stamp and a Reward is good to make complex tasks manageable. If you have an idea (called “spark”) you can contribute right away. If your “Sparks” follows to the next phase you automatically already wins participation on the gains on the end of the project. If you see a “Spark” from someone else, you can them suggest improvents “Amps”, which if are also aproved, you get participation points called “Watts”.

“Watts” are the currency inside of Kluster which can be changed in to Real money like the “Linden dollars” of second Life.

This is where Kluster starts to get real interest and where I think it has its potential. Once you have “watts” and you receive them by contributing to a project or to simply completing your profile you can “Invest” them on the Ideas “Sparks” of others, If there Sparks advance, you also get participation points “watts”. But if they don’t advance, you lose your invested “Watts”. This is a great incentive for people to vote on other ideas, and to vote well, because otherwise, you are using what you invested, your watts, your work hours.

In 45 minutes, I filled my profile, Contributed with “Sparks” for 3 Projects, Invested some “watts” in 3 other “Sparks” and Invited friends to participate and made 2670 “watts”.

Then I questioned my self, how many dollars does one “Watt” gives me?? Maybe some of you can answer this. I just don’t know.

But to finalize this post:

I think Kluster is an amazing experiment in this new world of wikinomics and hope to learn more about it as I try it. Will it survive the real world? Will it empower people to solve more problems? Will companies use it as a tool for developing products?

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a view of my profile page in Kluster

I would love to here some comments here at letsevo so I pass the MIC now. Peace