The Business Experiment is rather novel. Take a distributed bunch of people communicating through an internet site, assume that they’re all reasonably intelligent but not necessarily skilled in any one business disciple, assume The Wisdom of Crowds and see if anything coherent comes out. Boot-strapped and open to volunteers. I like. I wouldn’t throw any money at it, but I like.
And how about a peer-to-peer production site, for the sale of hand-made items? Etsy.com lets you open a store to list your hand-made items, you conduct business privately between yourself and the buyer (so you PayPal each other or send cheques or something), and then you can rate your seller (so no one gets to cheat).
Since there are no credit card transactions the site has a lower overhead and it can charge substantially less than eBay. Neat. Kyran and I have toyed with such a business model, it’s cool to see someone actually doing it ‘in the flesh’.
These came via here and here, with the second linking to The Atomizing Hand a very cool (though rather long) Spring 2005 powerpoint on the economics of peer production.