The Glif; or, How to create a hit product with no money down
The Coinnovative singularity has arrived. The culmination of the concepts at the core of this rarely updated site have been demonstrated by the hugely successful Glif project.
Archive | Crowdfunding
The Power of Crowdfunding: Diaspora
The largest Kickstarter project ever: 4 soon-to-be grads from NYU posted a project to fund their internships for the summer with a request for $10K to build the beginnings of an open-source, distributed Facebook.
March Crowdsourcing Odds and Ends
CloudFab now in Open Beta CloudFab recently launched into open beta, so you can now access their network of 3D printers. Just upload an STL file (a standard CAD file type) with a few instructions and specifications as to the printing process you are looking for and you will quickly get back quotes from shops […]
Crowds come in many flavors
As Nicholas Carr recently pointed out and as I have mentioned before, there is no one type of “crowd”. He lays out 6 categories: social production, averaging, data mine, networking, transactional, and event. Each of these “crowds” (and there are surely others) has its own unique characteristics and its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Some […]
Need money for your project? Crowdfunding comes of age with Kickstarter
I put the idea on the back-burner and, thankfully, Kickstarter read my mind and began working on what they launched a few months ago which is an almost perfect manifestation of what I had envisioned.
CoInnovative Roundup: 3 Odds and Ends to check out
Innocentive used for non-profit challenges: An interesting addendum to my previous post (Part 6 of The Series), about 20% of Innocentive’s portfolio of projects are aimed towards solving non-profit challenges. Further, they recognize the possibility of pairing this crowd-problem solving with crowdfunding: someone decides to champion a particular problem and, using the Innocentive platform, raises […]
Part 2: Crowdfunding, Investing and Donation 2.0
Extremely cool and definitely effective, Crowdfunding is a viable application of these principles. Of course it is: it’s been going on for centuries via investing in companies and projects — but now it’s so much easier and transparent of a process. No longer focused on commercial enterprises, any enterprise in need of funds can connect the long tail of people interested in a particular topic, play, artist, film, event, political candidate, even a niche knitting and crocheting site to bring together small amounts of money to raise what is needed. Raising money from fans to record an album, for example, would have been prohibitively difficult in the past, but now a band can easily offer free downloads, take payment, show progress, and keep fans abreast of developments.
Part 1: Figuring out crowdsourcing: What does it mean? What’s working? What isn’t?
I lack a specific definition or term for what I have been writing about here — mainly because there isn’t one. “Crowdsourcing” comes close, but it is a bit constraining in that it connotes outsourcing work to the crowd, which is only part of the story. Thus, in light of that, I will be posting a series covering the various aspects of whatever the hell this is that I am talking about with examples of each portion in action. It will by no means be exhaustive, but it should provide a good overview of some interesting orgs that are leveraging these principles.
