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.
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, [...]
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.
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.
You want to know what Spigit is? Read my last post about Kluster and imagine a more powerful, enterprise version of the service.
A friend of mine asked recently whether this crowdsourcing stuff works; if I could point to a single product that had resulted from “crowdsourcing”. The answer is yes and no. It depends on [...]
Similar in philosophy to Sellaband.com though more complex and powerful, Slice The Pie creates a marketplace for the trading, promoting, financing, and finding of new bands.
What you can do:
As a FAN: essentially start a label with a portfolio of acts (albeit, owning just a portion of those acts); get paid to review music, finance new [...]
Itsourmovie.com is another example of a new way to finance movies (or anything really). Similar in concept to A Swarm of Angels — though, it seems, much more likely to produce something of quality — It’s Our Movie begins with a script and director (Alex Jovy, nominated for an oscar for a short film) and [...]
