brightidea.com

Brightidea.com is a US-based site that pays you to submit ideas. There are three categories, viz, Share, Compete and Develop. The vast majority of members participate in the first category, ie, in sharing bright, quirky, wacky or even silly ideas with other members. The compete section involves you competing against others in competitions on specific ideas, eg, new ideas for hand-held computers with total prize money of US $2,500 - a recent winner was a Chinese girl living and studying in Birmingham, England. The third section called Develop involves the Patent Café Staff on the site helping members to develop their ideas and getting them a patent.

Each member has their own page which contains brief details of the member, a link to any homepage they may have and provision is also made to link to three other web-sites. Members may refer friends and their ideas can also be E-mailed to others. Additional payment is made for successful referrals.

Since Epinions.com was out of operation for several weeks in January for major refurbishment, hoards of people from that site have recently joined Brightidea. Whilst the majority of members are from the US and Canada, there are no geographic restrictions and there are members from numerous other countries including UK, Columbia, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands.

Nice features on the site include tables of members with the most ideas, similar tables of those who have ranked the most contributions, most recent ideas and the ability to view your ideas by the highest ranking, by bucket and by the most recent. Ratings vary from 5 bulbs (a very bright idea) to 1 bulb. You are also able to see who rated your idea and up-to-date information on your earnings.

Categories for Ideas

Categories - also known as buckets - are constantly being added to on the site. Members may suggest new categories and if approved by the Editor they are added. At the present time there are some 18 buckets for ideas. They are:

Arts; Computers; Education; Health; Holidays; Home and Garden; Kids; Living; Miscellaneous; Products; At Work; Recreation; Science; Business and Finance; Sports; Where U Live; Brightidea and Politics.

Very popular buckets include Computers; Health; Home and Garden; Recreation; Sports and Where U Live.

Sub-Categories

Each of the categories or buckets contains a varying number of sub-categories. To illustrate under Arts are the following sub-categories.

Books; Movies; Music; Science Fiction; Classical Music; Art; Craft ideas; Favourite Sitcom - TV Show.

The Computers bucket has a number of sub-categories such as:

Internet; Hardware; Software; Usability; Networking; Websites; Wireless; Devices; Gaming; AOL; Programming; SQL.

Submitting Ideas

To submit an idea to the site you first have to log in with your screen name (user ID) and password. You then basically have two choices you can store your idea in what is called your Clipboard - only you can see this - or submit your idea directly to a specific category and sub-category. If your idea is about food you would go to the Living category and sub-category food. You download your idea, selected keywords, preview and once satisfied submit your idea. There are no restrictions on the number of ideas you may submit.

Payment

You get paid US 3 cents for every one of your bright ideas. You obtain additional payment ranging from US 1 - 3 cents for every rating of your idea by other members. If, say, 40 members rate your idea as very bright, your total earnings for that idea will amount to US $1.23.There is one big disadvantage for non-US members-you must accumulate earnings of US$100 before you can reddem them and you also have to meet the IRS requirements. Who said the British Inland Revenue were bureaucratic-they have nothing on the US IRS!

Overall

This is a fun-site which can be financially quite rewarding. I joined in early December and to date have submitted over 340 ideas. That may seem a lot but there are members who have 400 or even 500 ideas on the site. The sudden surge in members from Epinions has undeniably resulted in some complications. The site is much slower than previously and the quality of the brightidea is very variable to say the least. However, brightidea.com is an interactive site which has considerable appeal and it's not bad, getting paid 3 cents for an idea which may just comprise a paragraph.

Update 21/05

Sadly since I wrote this opinion this reward site has gone from bad to worse. It now only pays one cent per bright idea, the E mailing of members has all but ceased, payments have not been forthcoming, and ideas are increasingly being rejected. There is talk of payments being delayed until the end of June ,meanwhile,many former very active members have ceased contributing to the site.
Even technical "glitches" have multiplied and I have found it virtually impossible to resubmit ideas which have been stored in my clipboard.Just a couple of months ago it was not unusual to see members with 50 bright ideas in a week,now it is hard to find members submitting ten ideas. It looks to me as if the site is on its last legs and I would not recommend ciao. members to join!