D-Act on July 8th, 2011: crowd funding. Chinese Microbloggers Rally to Pay Artist’s Tax Bill: $830k Raised in Just 3 Days [Updated] Grow VC Marks One Year Of Its Crowd-funding Platform Launch « Grow VC China. Has China found the future of publishing? Self-publishing: it's exploding in popularity, we all know that, with self-published authors selling millions via Amazon's Kindle, pushing traditionally published authors out of the top spots on new ebook charts, etc etc.
But did you know that self-publishing websites are attracting more than 40% of all China's internet users every month? I didn't, and I am reeling, a little, from the statistic. These aren't Authonomy-esque, publish-and-be-encouraged-by-fellow-writers sorts of sites, though, or even collections of self-published novels. The websites host what is being dubbed "freemium" publishing. Publishing Perspectives has more details: a growing number of self-publishing websites host thousands of free-to-read web serials – anything from historical epics to sci-fi – posted by their authors.
And now freemium publishing is coming to America. Can it really work in the west? Abrahamsen isn't sure. I have to say I'm intrigued. Crowdfunding. If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you might have noticed that the We Are Social team was tweeting about Crowdsourcing Week via @wearesocialsg with the official hashtag #CSW13 this past week.
Crowdsourcing Week claims to be the first international event bringing industry experts, innovators, and participants to discuss crowdsourcing, open innovation and crowdfunding heading. The events span over five days, with 51 presentations, by representatives from 16 countries. We were on the ground live-tweeting for the talks on Day 2 of #CSW13, which saw some of the best minds in the industry coming together at Singapore Management University.
The atmosphere was buzzing with conversation and discussion, as leading industry experts, speakers, and attendees shared their experiences and best practices on crowdsourcing. Here are We Are Social’s top three key takeaways about crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is about harnessing communitiesCrowdsourcing is social with a purposeCrowdsourcing is exploding. Crowdfunding - C2I Ventures. Crowdfunding is an alternate approach to get investments for a start-up.
Wikipedia defines crowdfunding as "an approach to raising the capital required for a new project or enterprise by appealing to a group of people (figuratively, "the crowd") for contributions from one or many. When such an appeal is global it is mass funding. " It's not actually a new idea as it has been developed over the last decade, mainly in the film and music industries. Unlike traditional models which rely on large contributions from one or two institutions, crowdfunding is based on raising small sums from many people. Instead of raising 300,000 EUR from three angels (100,000 EUR each), you collect 10,000 EUR from 30 private investors.
Crowdfunding isn't going to replace venture capital, private equity, debt finance or stock-markets. But What's the Actual Problem? Number of traditional investors interested in start-ups who are looking for money in the range of 50,000 EUR to 500,000 EUR, has decreased rapidly. China crowdfunding.