When Crowdsourcing Fails: Cambrian House Headed to the Deadpool

Crowdsourcing sounds good in theory—pull together a bunch of smart, motivated individuals from across the Web to create a new product or business—but in practice it is not so easy to pull off. One of the first major casualties of the crowdsourcing movement looks like it will be Cambrian House , the Calgary startup that tries to organize the crowd around creating new ideas for Websites and software products. After unsuccessfully trying to raise a new round of capital, it is our understanding that the startup has negotiated a fire sale of its intellectual property, assets, Website (and whatever community remains after the sale) to Spencer Trask , an old money, New York venture firm that originally backed Thomas Edison . The deal is structured as an asset purchase, after devolving through various stages from initial talk of a new investment to a joint venture to a buyout. The more Spencer Trask looked, the less it offered. Spencer Trask is basically buying the ...