I’m proud to announce kluster + klusterlab’s latest creation…   www.quirky.com

The concept behind quirky has been a long time coming.

For those of you who have been around since kluster’s original launch back at TED in 2008, you’ll see that quirky brings our dream of being able to bring people’s product ideas out of heads and onto shelves.

We are committing to the unpossible…   bringing one brand new product from sketch to store every few days.

Technically, we are not going fully live for about a week or so… but we thought we’d let our “friends & family” in to get a head start… if you guys aren’t in that class that by now… after all we’ve been through…. not sure what to call you.

For being a faithful klusterfck reader… here’s a coupon code to use for a free product idea submission… this code will expire in 48 hours from time of this post.   coupon code:    FCKRDR

The above is the simple sentiment which kluster was founded upon….   being able to harness the collaborative power of a large group in order to get real stuff done & made.

Today, we’re excited to see the first product (that we know of) that went through the kluster platform for at least part of it’s development launch worldwide.

We launched Kluster about 13 months ago, and one of the first projects that went up there was the naming of an internet radio.    Countless people poured their names, and comments into the project and within just a few days we had collectively come to the consensus that “Livio” was where it was at.

This little project early on not only affirmed our belief in kluster’s platform and process, but also the power of you guys as a community.  (oh, and it may or may not have been the root of the idea for our beloved namethis.com)

Today, the Livio launches as the first and only internet radio box with dedicated support for Pandora– oh, and their sexy little thumbs up/thumbs down control.

Did I mention it’s beautiful?

Congratulations to Jake & the Livio Team on a remarkable job, and a huge thanks on behalf of the kluster world for letting us have a part.   maybe some of you want to buy one?

Anyhow, in the coming weeks we hope to have many other exciting stories to tell of a product or project going full circle through our platform.     That and— we intend to go back to our roots with a new lab project, dedicated to bringing peoples product ideas… you guessed it-  out of heads, and onto shelves.

Thats all for now… sound off in the comments if you know of other products/projects/companies that have taken the moniker that we bestowed upon it.

Well Done,

ben

Things you’ll see in May:

-A New Kluster.com

-An Elite namethis community

-Giant Butterflies

-Kluster Agency Edition

-Kluster desktop application

-My baby— A new labs project (see business week)

for now— shhhh…. let us work.

Oh, and a super exciting announcement & story of a stellar job done by all of you is coming tmrw am!

-ben

Thank you to all who notified us about the voting issues… it was our asynchronous background process that was failing silently to cause us to miss the fact that votes weren’t sticking.  It’s also why our automated tests ignored the problem and it got pushed into production.

We’ve re-opened the existing projects once again for voting for another 24 hours, and credited the running projects with up to 48 hours.

After some tireless work by team kluster, namethis has been loosed upon the world once more.

You shouldn’t notice anything different… except for the fact that the names pages no longer take an epoch to render.

Go forth and ransack the namespace with traffic.

Do your worst.

It pains us to do so, but we must announce that NameThis will be unavailable for new projects for a short while. Rather than have our users deal with lagging site performance, we felt NameThis needed to be shut down temporarily until we iron out some performance issues.

What does this mean for everyone in the meantime?  It means we’re all sitting tight.  No projects will be decided, and none will be posted until the site can be repaired.  As soon as it is ready, a few things will happen:

1. we’ll be notifying via twitter as usual
2. we’ll contact all of our project owners to let them know their project has been re-opened
3. each project will get a fresh 48 hours
4. some stale projects will be automatically judged

We know this isn’t an ideal situation; if there was any other way to do it, we would.  However, sometimes the best approach is to take a deep breath, relax, regroup, and then go forward and kick some ass with a group of kick-ass people.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.

Dear Loyal, And uhhh…Very Vocal Citizens of NameThis:

Today we are conducting two tests of features which will be incorporated into namethis TwoPointOh.   

1.  Namethis Domains (Project: Sloppy Unicorn):  

It’s been a dream ever since namethis was birthed.   Heres how it works (hopefully)

• Our client chooses to run a “domain name project”, and pays namethis an extra fee.  (currently we are working with .com’s only).
• As name suggestions are submitted, we automatically validate the availability of the domain. 
• If the domain is not available, the suggestion is deleted
• If the domain is available, namethis automatically REGISTERS the domain.
• Once the project closes and winners is chosen, namethis transfers ownership of top three domains to our client free of added charge.
• Should the client want another domain, which did not win… he can choose to purchase that domain within 24 hours of project close, for $30, $10 of which gets rewarded back to the person who suggested the name. 
• Should your name not win, and you want to buy the name you suggested within 24 hours of project close, you can do so for $20.

As always, we look forward to your always-entertaining comment frenzy. 

-Ben

We’ve re-instated blind submissions on namethis

We are going to see how this goes, and appreciate all your feedback along the way.

One Difference Between This Blind Submission Try & The Try Back In September:  We will not display namers at any point in the project…. not during or after.    This will allow us to really watch and track if there is any gaming going on as we build namethis2.

Ladies And Gentlemans,

As of 9pm last night, we have begun development of a new and improved namethis… Taking into consideration all of the feedback coming into namethis2.kluster.com, as well as… our own ideas.

The new namethis will rock, undoubtably and hopefully increase our community experience on namethis, as well as deliver better service to our clients.   

In tandem, kluster has set up a special task force which is browsing our log files and seeking out any potential gaming activity taking place on our properties.   Let this be your warning..

As per Kluster’s Terms & Conditions The following activities are strictly prohibited and will result in immediate suspension and forfeiture of winnings:

• A Single individual having multiple accounts, using aliases/different email addresses.  You know who you are.
• If the name on your kluster account does not match that of the name on your Payoneer card… You are in BIG trouble.   This means you, insane penguin posse, namethat, invisible elves, etc….   We are matching up cards to accounts and anybody with discrepancies will be automatically suspended within 48 hours from this post.
• Managing accounts on behalf of friends/other users.

A huge thank you to Shawnee, and our other community patrollers who are constantly keeping us aware of potential fraud.  We take this very seriously.

We intend to be back with a new namethis in a little while.  We may request your feedback on features/UI as we near our realaunch, So stay tuned.

In the meantime, go name a fancy-ass beef company.

Kluster:

Namethis: