Daww, that'll be the second QTM that I'll have missed. I'll be at Reading Festival at least it will be available on ustream afterwards :)

Hey Jess, any idea what time the town meeting will be at on the 26th?

@William: It'll likely be at 6 PM EST... I'll post an update with the final info a bit later in the month.

Could Mitch be available to talk too? I want to know how the Click N Cook is going with the retailers. Is the wholesale price good enough for them to take it on?

Not sure if Mitch will be available, but Ben can answer that question too. I'll add it to the list!

I am slow sometimes, but i thought the tilt was going to be the next best thing since Clinton Fleenor and real hamburger. Can you speak a line or two on what Tilts and what doesn't...... and what the soothsayers are having visions of in the not to far off future, say possibly G5/G6ish ?

@Michael I am sorry to inform you but Clinton Fleenor is a bad Man!

Here's an excerpt from one of Clinton's posts on Aug 6th.

I don't know what others were wanting. But my desire for transparency was for an understanding of the factors the QS considers in evaluation rounds, and an understanding of the factors that led to the selection of a winner.
The new system accomplishes very little of that.

Sure, there will be evaluation...and there is even a list of factors. But, what I wanted to know is (in the terms of the new system) what "factors are worth how many points", and, after a winner is chosen, what is the breakdown of their point total.
Without that detail, the new system is no more transparent to me than the old system.

What are your plans to improve transparency; because I agree with Clinton that the improvements in transparency were little to none. I'd also like to see improved transparency throughout the design phase. There have been a lot of questionable decisions made on some recent products.

Wow. I didn't realize I was sounding so harsh! - ha.

What I was trying to say is that I was hoping the staff would be transparent about the reasons they assigned scores, and that didn't happen with the new system.

I do see that the transparency of showing the scores, and even breaking them down by round, is a huge improvement. And i'm thankful that quirky did that.

I really desire for the quirky process to be predicable...because that would be easy for me. And part of being predictable comes from knowing why the QS chose what they chose, i.e., knowing why they awarded the number of points they did...

But, here's my quandary:
I also really desire for quirky to remain very creative, inspired , and responsive. And the transparency I'm wanting could end up restricting the staff's ability to make those free-wheeling, creative choices I want them to make when they want.

So, do I want the ease of predictability, or the excitement of creativity? Can I have both?

@Ken. Can I have robin egg blue horns? Or copper verdigris green? ha

@Clinton you can have anything you want, I still honor your time stamped tradition of taking bribes:}

Question here? :)

* Please update on the Tape Stamp

* Are you still looking into maybe lowering the submission fee? If so, do you have a time when this might "go live" and how much might it be...

* Could there maybe be a SLOW Q&Q. I was thinking that maybe there could be one round that last about 1 week due to amount of entries. The submission could be in any category and would be free. This would drive more people to Quirky and get us fresh, new creativity. Maybe this would encourage more to be active.

* At the end of the Q&A could you do a drawing of the 300 or so active users for a free submission or product. This could be a tradition for Q&A sessions :)

*Please give a shout out to Kiva if you can :)

These are just thoughts if Ben gets to them great, if he doesn't that's fine :)

Thanks!

Wow, just noticed all my smiley faces, I am very happy today :)

I'd like to know what this means...

The top 25% of the community reacted ideas will then move into the hopper for the staff to evaluate. Ideas that are not in the top 25% based upon community reaction will not be evaluated by our staff. The final score on these ideas will just be a reflection of the community reaction.

Up to 20 Points: based upon Quirky employee & retail partner reaction (votes/ratings that will occur internally):

It seems that 4 submissions outside of the top 25% had a grand total larger than the Community Rating and 2 submissions in the top 25% remained the same. So did the 2 submissions receive a QS score of ZERO or were they not scored by the staff?