I went searching for the “product in 72 hours” results from the TED conference that I blogged about last week. Here’s what I found:

There’s a note buried in the TED site:

Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen (”OverThere” — the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game “of social awareness” collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.

User “klusterbot” has some photos up on Flickr that show the game-in-progress.

Where’s the finished information? The blog posts? The reviews from participants?

Interestingly, nothing on the Kluster press page.

Note to self: if I send out a huge press release with all the hype machine behind me, announcing a product launch on a certain date and time, make sure my PR staff is goes to the mattresses to make sure that the information gets out to the public. Otherwise I’ve wasted a lot of PR karma for my next launch.

From Read/Write Web this morning:

Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.

*cough* been there, done that. Doing it again in Portland in a few months. I think what this shows is that Andrew Hyde’s Startup Weekend model — get a bunch of smart people in a room, give them a challenge, set them loose — has legs and strikes the right chord in people.

I’ll be really interested to hear what Kluster comes up with. Operationally, I’m interested to hear how you can “launch” a physical product – not a website – in 72 hours. There will be a lot of interesting (yet minor) dissimilarities with Startup Weekend. It will be good to compare and contrast.