MIT Entrepreneurship Review: How 'Collaborative Consumption' Is Transforming Startups. Collaborative consumption market places are everywhere: media, car rental, lodging, staffing, textbooks, apparel, custom graphic design and even finance. Netflix shares DVDs among a large subscriber base. ZipCar and GetAround make car sharing easy. Travelers rent a local's apartment for a few days through HomeAway and 9Flats. College students rent textbooks from Chegg. Loosely defined, collaborative consumption is a business model in which shared goods or services are distributed via a market place to a community of users. But these models also have the capacity to increase demand and the total market size by addressing new previously unaddressable segments. Other collaborative consumption manage two sided market places and use the capital efficiency of these models to address larger, cost-conscious populations.
As a result of their transformative nature, collaborative consumption market places are rising to preeminence. 1. 2. 3. However, P2P models are more complex than B2C. The Crowdfunding Revolution | Social Networking Meets Venture Financing. The New Face of Venture Capital, Part 2: Rise of Crowdfunding.
Small-scale production: An atom-based product, developed in bits. Micropatronage Sweet Spot: The micro-price of micropatronage. Kickstartup — Successful fundraising with Kickstarter & the (re)making of Art Space Tokyo. It starts with a book. Art Space Tokyo is a book best described as a guide to some of the hidden galleries and museums in the city. Editor and co-author Ashley Rawlings and I put the book together in 2008. It sold out within a year and was never reprinted. The book is important to us because we put so much work into its production. But it's particularly important to me because over time this project has come to embody much of my ethos towards publishing, printing and the book as an object.
When writing Book in the Age of the iPad,[2] I was largely thinking about Art Space Tokyo. I spent a good chunk of 2009 thinking about the convergence of digital and analog in the publishing world, and this year (2010) I began to speak publicly and publish articles on the subject. In the spring of 2010, a few stars aligned and I was able to buy back the publishing rights to Art Space Tokyo. Once I had obtained the publishing rights, the only question was: How do we fund this? Silkscreening The body block. How Kiva Works. Crowdfunding. Politicians do it. Charities too. And now for-profit entrepreneurs are tapping the Internet to get small amounts of money from lots and lots of supporters. One part social networking and one part capital accumulation, crowdfunding websites seek to harness the enthusiasm--and pocket money--of virtual strangers, promising them a cut of the returns.
Like a homespun IPO, CatwalkGenius.com helps hoi polloi bankroll upstart fashion designers. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than £450,000 ($815,000) to finance--and work full time on--The Age of Stupid, which she hopes will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. People who gave 20... Subscribe Now Get TIME the way you want it One Week Digital Pass — $4.99 Monthly Pay-As-You-Go DIGITAL ACCESS — $2.99 One Year ALL ACCESS — Just $30! Let the Crowd Buy Equity in Private Companies. Entrepreneurs can use peer-to-peer lending sites such as Prosper and LendingClub to obtain loans for their businesses without worrying about breaking securities laws. But they cannot take a similar approach to selling equity in their companies online. Selling interests in the financial returns of a business must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or meet the criteria for exemption from registration, according to rules established about eight decades ago.
Even if the entrepreneurs seeking to raise money by soliciting others online don't care if the money they obtain is a gift, a loan, or an equity investment, those distinctions matter to the SEC. Now the SEC is considering making regulatory changes that would allow entrepreneurs to raise modest amounts of equity through online crowdfunding, according to a recent letter from SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Monitor: Putting your money where your mouse is. WIKIPEDIA, a giant online encyclopedia compiled by volunteers, is the product of the aggregation of lots of people's spare time. An example of “crowdsourcing”, it demonstrates that on the internet, as in the real world, many hands make light work. Can the same approach be applied to money as well as time? That is the idea behind “crowdfunding”, in which lots of small contributions are aggregated online to support artistic or creative ventures.
As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed. Millions of dollars, in increments as small as $5, have poured into efforts that connect artists, musicians, writers and others with people willing to fund their projects. Venture capitalists have also shown an interest by investing in start-ups that facilitate crowdfunding.
There have of course been “tip jars” on web pages for years, and even big sites like Wikipedia ask for donations. With a little cash from my friends.
Grow Venture Community > Seed Funding Startups in The Virtual Silicon Valley.