M&A – warning, good news. RocketHub, Kickstarter, other crowd-funding sites fuel entrepreneurs. While studying abroad in Ghana in 2006, Meghan Sebold often roamed local textile markets and marveled at the surplus of colorfully patterned fabrics that were left unwanted. After she returned home to San Francisco, her thoughts kept drifting back to the faint but enduring idea of producing a clothing line that used textiles and talent from the West African country. She had few concrete plans on how to start a business — and even less money. Then, a chance encounter at a seminar in New York with the founders of start-up RocketHub, a crowd-funding website, stirred her hopes.
At the urging and guidance of Brian Meece and Vladimir Vukicevic, Sebold wrote at length about the business idea on RocketHub.com, accompanied by a video, and asked for direct financial contributions from family, friends, and friends of friends. Her modest goal of raising $4,000 was achieved in about two weeks. A few dollars here and a couple of hundred bucks there can add up quickly. Keeping donors in the loop. Mad and unusal collection on Fiverr by editors_picks.
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23 Online Tools and Virtual Services to Help Your Business. To help you to be more productive (and stress-free) during this new era of "crowdsourcing," I put together a list of 23 websites and services that let you harness the power of the crowd, or otherwise help people more effectively work together through the Internet. Most of these are hubs that brings a wide variety of people together from around the world with some sort of value to exchange. It's amazing to see how this has been done in matching freelance service providers, and now business funding from multiple donors online. What's also interesting is to see how specialized a lot of these sites are. It used to be that Elance and Guru were the only two places to go to hire people. So here are 23 virtual platforms and tools that are gaining in popularity and also stand out for their uniqueness, ideas they provoke, or just plain being cool.
Elance, Guru, and Odesk - These are the 3 old favorites for finding contractors that still got it.