Spigit launched into beta in mid-July to offer up a startup simulation game to help entrepreneurs showcase new ideas and innovations and in the process connect with a network of professionals. Spigit seems to have blended a multiply player online simulation game
with a social network while aimed at creating a new company. Spigit can act as a testing ground for new ideas by helping to predict if they will succeed or fail with less invested.
Spigit is said to have developed a technology that measures and quantifies interactions on group platforms to extract wisdom from crowds. The spigit simulation game which is made up of three phases (incubation, innovation and emergence) narrows the field of ideas and winners are added to a virtual stock market and traded like real companies. By creating a reputation profile for every user, the spigit community is able to create an environment filled with metrics to help find good ideas and good users. Spigit already has 30+ startups leveraging the consumer facing platform and plans to offer an enterprise edition for companies looking to uncover employees with good ideas.
My only hesitation with the consumer edition of spigit is that fact that idea contributors may be giving away their ideas without any protection since spigit cannot offer any special patent protection at this time for new ideas. It is clearly posted on the site:
"It is strongly suggested that you only post ideas, new products, services or companies when you are comfortable with publicly contributing them. This strongly applies if your idea pertains to delivering a technology, product or service that you expect to deliver commercially."
So if you are going to contribute an idea involving new technology you may want to patent it first - which might defeat the purpose of using spigit to vet out new ideas in the first place. Nonetheless, I think spigit is an interesting concept and hope it helps bubble up some good ideas.
Spigit CEO Paul Pluschkell and CTO Padmanabh Dabke presented at the recent session at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit (August 1, 2007) which was captured on video (shown below).
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