New Crowdsourcing Launch: AskYourUsers.com Uses LinkedIn To Help You Find People For Microconsulting Projects. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding have been two of the biggest trends to effect how businesses — especially small businesses and sole traders — raise money, with sites like Kickstarter.com and in the UK Funding Circle attracting a attention for being a great way of getting backing for projects or business ideas bypassing the traditional and expensive world of bank loans in the process.
Now a site is launching that gives this model an additional twist: AskYourUsers.com is a simple service that helps you find people for microconsulting projects lasting no more than 15 minutes — and it uses your LinkedIn network to help you find them. From the demo that I have seen, the service is basically that simple, but it works very smoothly, and definitely solves a need — one that Amelia Dunne and her co-founder, Chris Bumgardner, essentially stumbled on unintentionally: Then AskYourUsers does the rest.
Dunne says that she believes this might be the first to use LinkedIn to help find people. Oh and P.S. Funding Circle, a Kickstarter for SMBs, Picks Up $16M From Index, Union Square Ventures. Some great news for small business owners, and perhaps a sign of more crowdsourced funding coming to the U.S.: the UK-based Funding Circle — a kind of Kickstarter for lending to smaller enterprises — has just announced that it has raised a $16 million round to further build up its business of enabling non-bank lending to small enterprises. The investment included participation from existing investor Index Ventures as well as new investor Union Square Ventures — a sign of how Funding Circle may have its sights set on taking advantage of new crowdfunding laws and expanding to the U.S.
This Series B round takes the total raised by Funding Circle to $21 million. Funding Circle has made some impressive strides since launching in the UK 18 months ago: it’s facilitated lending to 670 small businesses in the UK, with funds totaling £28 million ($45 million), representing annual growth of over 400 percent. Crowdfunding - Angel Investing Private Equity and Crowd funding by Microventures. With JOBS Act Becoming Law, Crowdfunding Platforms Look To Create Self-Regulatory Body.
Today, President Obama signs the JOBS Act into law, legalizing crowdfunding in startups by non-accredited investors, so that anyone and their mother can invest. The new law stipulates that entrepreneurs can now raise money from any and all, however, startups are limited to $1 million per year, and must stick to portals approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission. What’s more, the legislation dispenses with the 500-shareholder rule, which put a limit on the number of shareholders a company was allowed before registering with the SEC (and going public). The new law gives high-growth companies a longer grace period, or on-ramp, leading up to IPOs, and lifts some of the one-size-fits all regulation that likely has been hampering the IPO market. While this is a big win for startups, it puts significant pressure on the crowdfunding market to self-regulate — which is risky.
The group aims to create principles to: What do you think? More on CAPS here. Change.org Hits 10 Million Members, Now The “Fastest-Growing Social Action Platform On The Web” Change.org launched in 2007 as a social networking site for non-profits. Today, the site looks quite a bit different and has morphed into a petition platform that wants to empower activists around the world through what it calls “people-powered campaigns.” While the site only grew rather slowly in its early years, it’s on a tear now. According to Change.org’s own data, the site just passed 10 million users and is now growing by 2 million members per month. That’s quite a difference from last October, when the site was only growing by about 300,000 members per month. After a few pivots (it was once a blog network, too), the site now almost exclusively focuses on petitions.
While most of the campaigns on the site are initiated by individuals and small non-profits and are available for free, the site makes its revenue through running sponsored campaigns for large organizations like Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, and Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong foundation. :::: Crowd Funding World ::::