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How Kiva Works

How Kiva Works

Dashboard Everything 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. 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!

Smartphone dating apps link users by proximity - latimes.com Sitting in the stands at Dodger Stadium, Steve Bergmann began checking out nearby women he might hit on. But his eyes weren't scanning the seats — they were fixed on his smartphone. Bergmann tapped into an app that uses GPS to locate prospective dates in the vicinity. He scrolled through photos and profiles till one young woman caught his eye, then shot her an instant message. "She was one of the closest girls in my vicinity, and her picture was pretty cute," said Bergmann, a personal wealth manager. Forget online dating services and their scientific personality tests. About a dozen smartphone apps enable people to connect at sports events, shopping malls and other public places, using the same location-based technology that tells you about a traffic jam ahead or whether there's a sale on jeans at a store you are walking past. Proponents say it's simply a modern answer to that age-old question: Where can I meet someone? Most of these dating apps are free and work about the same way.

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

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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.

Les sites de rencontres en Belgique 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? As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed. There have of course been “tip jars” on web pages for years, and even big sites like Wikipedia ask for donations. Instead, crowdfunding works by raising money for a well-defined project within a specified time limit and with a goal of raising a particular minimum sum (typically around $2,500). Kickstarter lets donors fund art shows, movies, short films, dance, graphic novels and theatre productions. Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter's chief community officer, says the firm accepts about half the projects submitted to it. With a little cash from my friends

Should Facebook Pay You? Or: How To Monetize Friends And Charge People Johan Staël von Holstein doesn't seem to like Mark Zuckerberg. "I have 5,000 friends on Facebook," says the Swedish-born entrepreneur, who lives in Singapore, but was about to board a flight from Barcelona to Germany, and then to Dubai, when we spoke by phone. "I could have had 10,000, but Mark Zuckerberg only lets me have five. I could have sent out an article to all of them, but I can't, because Mark Zuckerberg only lets me send to 20 people. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't let me do mass communication." Staël von Holstein is launching a Facebook competitor out of Singapore called MyCube; it's currently in private beta. I just signed up on the site, and as a result was given 5,000 free "Cubes," a virtual currency on the site worth a total of 50 Singapore dollars, or about $40 American. The difficulty of finding the right word for the way people stand in relation to one another underscores the difficulty MyCube faces. [Top image: Wikimedia commons]

The Crowdfunding Revolution | Social Networking Meets Venture Financing Startup Weekend Lyon | 54h pour créer une startup ! 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. 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. Of late, peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative consumption models are blossoming.

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