So what is brick link?
I know people but individual Lego pieces from it, but where do they come from? Are they secondhand? Official from Lego? Are they all authentic?
Is it a store or a user run thing?
All official LEGO unless the seller is scamming you (never happened to me and I've never come across a story of it happening to anyone).
Site started by AFOL who passed away and family continued site until recently bought by a rich entrepreneur AFOL.
Site houses sellers/stores, pretty much like how eBay works except no bidding. Just sold at set prices that the stores choose.
It's often referred to some affectionately as "cracklink" due to it's addictive nature.
Review of the next lego ideas set 21110 'research institute' (by the author herself)
http://alatarielatelier.blogspot.se/p/blog-page_26.html?m=1
Looks good. It's not screaming, "must buy!", but I feel it embraces the vision of LEGO Ideas.
My understanding of Cuusoo, now LEGO Ideas, is it was to crowdsource new ideas to the LEGO community and to filter those ideas based on the community's feedback. It wasn't to get licensed products to market or sell large volumes of sets (although business-wise, the idea would have to be viable enough to sell enough sets to not lose money).
- Generate interest in LEGO from people that normally don't buy LEGO or play with LEGO. (expand market).
- Have sets created that normally would not get made. i.e. LEGO normally wouldn't commit resources to doing the initial designing and research some or most of the projects on LEGO Ideas.
So essentially LEGO Ideas handles the initial designing and research via crowdsourcing, and allows LEGO fans to have their idea created as an official LEGO set (and get some of the profits). Win/win for all parties IMO.
