Carbonated carrot juice?

Carbonated carrot juice.

That's the best I could come up with on short notice when Ideas.com founder Sanjay Goel asked me to take a stab at fulfilling the Coca-Cola Company's request for a suggestion as to what might make a healthy new drink for kids.

So if you find carbonated carrot juice at your local grocery any time soon, you'll know three things: 1) who to blame; 2) that I'm $5,000 richer; and, 3) Goel's start-up - one of a handful mining the so-called idea market - has a decent chance of catching on.

Here's how Ideas.com works:

Company A decides it needs help conjuring up a new whatever and is willing to pay a certain sum to see what ideas the hoi polloi might generate. In the Coca-Cola case, we're talking about a healthy children's beverage for $5,000, but there are also $5,000 bounties posted from International Paper for a process to make three-dimensional paper - whatever that means - and from S.C. Johnson to "reduce, prevent, or eliminate germs in the home."

Someone will be awarded the money, so there is a contest element to the scheme.

The site also offers help for thinkers and tinkerers whose brainstorms do not fit neatly into the wish lists posted by those companies that participate as "buyers" on Ideas.com.

"All of these ideas are pent up in people's minds," Goel says, "and until now they've never had a place to channel them."

Big-time companies such as Sears Roebuck and DaimlerChrysler are willing to take a flyer on the unproven Ideas.com model because they are already shelling out huge dollars for offline methods of encouraging innovation. After all, what's five grand to Coca-Cola if carbonated carrot juice turns out to be the coolest thing since chocolate milk?

But that begs the question: Would $5,000 be enough of an incentive - or enough of a reward - to get a serious inventor to part with a genuinely promising idea? Goel believes so, obviously, and he also notes that the buying companies are free to sweeten the deal once they've determined they've got a live one on the line.

Ideas.com intends to make money by charging the buying companies a straight participation fee and also collecting from them a percentage of the bounties paid to suppliers.

It's easy to see how Ideas.com would appeal to budding Edisons.

What's less obvious is how the site can generate enough transaction volume to support a viable business, although the number of companies sprouting up around this concept would suggest others do not share that concern. Among those offering services that are at least somewhat similar to Ideas.com are IdeaExchange, Inc., Ideadollar.com and BrightIdea, Inc.

A word of caution: The Ideas.com site is plastered with legal mumbo-jumbo, which presumably does a better job of protecting the buyers than the sellers.

If you scanned the dot-com obituaries last week you may have seen the death notice for Streamline.com, an online grocer based here in Massachusetts. This columnist read the news with more than his usual professional disdain for a misguided business model, because . . . well, because this particular stinker of a stock was in my personal portfolio.

How could someone who makes a living making fun of B-to-C dot-coms have fallen for such a shaky investment?

This is America, so naturally it wasn't my fault. An analyst for the name-brand brokerage house I entrust with my spare change had predicted Streamline would hit $40 within a year when I bought a small amount at $7 per share back in February.

In other words, I let greed get the better of my best judgment.

Condolences and smug rejoinders should be sent to buzz@nww.com.