Crowd Funding
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.
The New Face of Venture Capital, Part 2: Rise of Crowdfunding
This is Part 2 of a presentation I've created to help Limited Partners and entrepreneurs understand the future of successful Venture Capital. Part 1 is here . Part 2 explains why conventional VC networks & outlier identification produce poor returns, and how crowdsourcing/crowdfunding will be used to augment or replace them and to create high-return VC of the future. I have many deeper throughts. Feel free to contact me about them. If you find this useful, feel free to pass the word.
VC-Startups
We're definitely a little freaked out. Happiness mixed with terror. Now, it kind of serves as a springboard for us to start a company. Maybe. Possibly. THIS from the two New Yorkers who designed the Glif, a tripod adapter for the iPhone 4 .
Small-scale production: An atom-based product, developed in bits
Micropatronage Sweet Spot: The micro-price of micropatronage
SETTING the perfect price remains a hard problem in any market. What to charge in order to reap the greatest return at the highest volume for the producer or provider? Consumers and businesses may possess an unknown price sensitivity that results in a small change dramatically improving or worsening sales. Some insights into this sensitivity are afforded by micropatronage (which we explain in " Putting your money where your mouse is "). Kickstarter leads the way in connecting creative projects that need funding with an audience willing to lend its micropatronage dollars. The company released an analysis of the distribution of dollars by contribution size for successfully funded projects over its first $15m or so taken in.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.
Kickstartup — Successful fundraising with Kickstarter & the (re)making of Art Space Tokyo — Craig Mod
How Kiva Works
Follow the story of a Kiva loan through Pedro, a farmer who gets a loan through Kiva.org and transforms his business. How to Use Kiva 1 Make a loan You make a loan on Kiva. All Kiva loans are made possible by our Field Partners, who vet, administer, and disburse each loan.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.
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.
Let the Crowd Buy Equity in Private Companies
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.
P2P Lending
Public-Private Funds for Startups – The India Story How is the startup scene in India – Is it thriving? What kind of companies are making it big? Where are the investments coming from? What is the support structure like? The questions are never-ending, the answers though, are a few and far in-between.