kickstarter.com – funding for creative projects

[Sheila]

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

Each and every project is the independent creation of someone like you. Projects are big and small, serious and whimsical, traditional and experimental. They’re inspiring, entertaining and unbelievably diverse. We hope you agree... Welcome to Kickstarter!

http://www.kickstarter.com/

[Sheila]

Inventor's Project Funded Online Hits $1 Million Milestone

Good News Network
12 Feb 12

Kickstarter, a website designed to fund creative projects through the support of small online donations, crowned its first millionaire this week: Casey Hopkins, an engineer based in Portland, Ore.

It all started when Hopkins got fed up with the iPhone docks he kept buying in stores.

So he designed his own — one made of aircraft-grade aluminum that wouldn't move around when you took your iPhone out of it. He shot a video of some prototypes, put it on Kickstarter, and asked for help raising $75,000 to get his project off the ground.

"Then it just exploded across the Internet," he says. "We hit that $75,000 goal in eight hours."

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/11/146738...-a-millionaire

The Youtube he made for Kickstarter –

[stan]

his website is interesting

http://www.elevationlab.com/

[Sheila]

Funding frenzy! iPhone watch nets $1 million on Kickstarter

mashable.com
by Chris Taylor
Mashable
12 Apr 12

Remember when the Pebble, the watch that talks to your iPhone or Android device via an array of open-source apps, was asking for a mere $100,000 on crowdfunding site Kickstarter?

Well, actually, the Pebble is officially still only asking for $100,000 on Kickstarter. But the Internet has responded with a loud chorus of “shut up and take my money!”

The Pebble’s funding hit $500,000 Wednesday evening. It reached $1 million in investment, just 28 hours after the Kickstarter launched.

By midnight Friday ET, the hot little e-paper wristwatch had blasted past the $1.5 million mark.

There are 35 days remaining in the Kickstarter.

Not bad for a device nobody has actually tested in the wild yet.
….

Meanwhile, the celebration is only beginning at Pebble Technology in Palo Alto. “We popped a bottle of champagne at $200k, because we missed the $100k milestone,” founder Eric Migicovsky told Mashable.

At this rate, he’ll be on caviar and oysters by day 35.


http://nhne-pulse.org/pebble-smartwatch/

[stan]

the Pebble

[Sheila]

Press Democrat
by Robert Digitale
15 Apr 12

….The 3-year-old website [Kickstarter] made news last month when 87,000 backers pledged $3.3 million for San Francisco's Double Fine Productions to launch a new video game.

The uninitiated might now be asking: Why in the world would people give money to a business?

The answer seems to be that pledgers back the projects and people they believe in. In so doing, they get to play a small role in helping bring forth new music, art, entertainment and food products.

And depending on the level of their pledges, backers can receive rewards ranging from T-shirts to albums to personal concerts or gatherings with artists.

“It's somewhere at the intersection of commerce and patronage,” said Kickstarter spokesman Justin Kazmark. In the process, he said, artists and business people are brought closer to their audiences and customers.

One local Kickstarter project belongs to Sondra Bernstein, owner of the Girl & the Fig restaurant in Sonoma.

Bernstein has until May 18 to raise $30,000 to help convert a warehouse on Schellville Road into “suite d,” a space for classes, winetastings and other events. By noon Friday she had received $6,400 from 35 backers.

Those who pledge to her project can receive such rewards as private cooking classes, an invitation to a preview party or, for a $1,000 pledge, a multi-course dinner with wine for 10.

“You're going to be a first-in-line friend of our restaurant forever,” she said.

Other companies offer microfinancing or crowdsourcing opportunities for both charities and businesses. But Kickstarter claims to offer the largest funding program for creative projects in the world.

Based in New York City, the privately held company has received $185 million in pledges and posted more than 20,000 projects.

Those seeking funding get their own web page where they put up a video to give their pitch to potential backers. Projects don't qualify if they fail to fit in one of the allowed creative categories. As such, a proposal to start a bank would be a “no go,” Kazmark said.

A key rule is that no money changes hands unless enough pledges come in on deadline to meet the announced goal. The project's creator sets both the financial goal and the deadline.

About 44 percent of the projects reach their goals, Kazmark said. But about 85 percent of the total pledges — or nearly $160 million — have gone to successful projects.

For its services, Kickstarter receives 5 percent from the successful projects. Amazon Payments, which handles the pledges, takes another 3-5 percent.

Those who create projects say the backers' involvement at times is reminiscent of an old-fashioned barn raising. Kickstarter, they said, has become a way for the masses to engage in patronage for as little as $1.
….

Kickstarter is becoming a place that business people and artists turn to when they can't get small business loans or grants.
….

Sebastopol photographer Penny Wolin has received funding for past exhibitions from the National Endowment for the Arts and from various museums.

But in a struggling economy, she was stumped while searching for financing for her next book and exhibition: “Descendants of Light: American Photographers of Jewish Ancestry.” The work will feature the stories, art and images of 70 photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Robert Frank and Arnold Newman.

Now Wolin is seeking to raise $27,000 by May 2 to help finance her work preparing the book and exhibition. By noon Friday she had raised $8,500 from 82 backers.

Wolin, whose past subjects have included comedian George Burns, actor Charlton Heston, actress Winona Ryder and Oakland Raiders defensive lineman John Matuszak, laughed that she had “fallen down the rabbit hole” in her Kickstarter project.

The experience reminded her of people coming to the aid of someone who's dropped a parcel on the street. But it also brought to mind the salons she has conducted with potential donors who gathered to hear directly from her about a new project they might back.

“It's putting a salon out there to everybody at once,” she said.

Bridget Hayes, owner of Language Truck educational company in Santa Rosa, used Kickstarter to raise $8,451 in December to purchase a small school bus and turn it into a mobile classroom. She plans to travel to neighborhoods, businesses, churches and elsewhere to offer classes in English, Spanish and eventually computers.

“There's a social network that I've created through this process,” Hayes said of Kickstarter.….


http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article...ounty-ventures

[stan]

[Sheila]

wired.com
by Dave Girouard
19 Apr 13

.....
Let’s start with Kickstarter as the obvious crowdfunding example. The company was founded by three guys with no previous finance experience. The target return for investors who back development of new products — from objects to movies — on Kickstarter is … nothing. Backers are instead rewarded with early access or other in-kind rewards.

Given these facts, the idea that crowdfunding could be disruptive to the venture capital industry may have caused uncontrollable giggling in the VC conference rooms of Sand Hill Road. But what skeptics fail to realize is that the motivations of crowdfunding “investors” are different: These are not quant investors looking to maximize financial returns while minimizing risk and volatility.

They don’t want to pour money down the drain, obviously, but their motivations differ substantively from those of traditional financial investors. Crowdfunders and angel investors, while not purely philanthropic, share the common desire to participate and be involved in the creation of something new.

Put another way, it’s more about cause than cash (a phrase I picked up from Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley). And that desire is the disruptive “feature” of crowdfunding. It’s the kind of feature that even Christensen couldn’t have predicted when looking at technology companies of yore.
....

Venture capital firms’ response to crowdfunding is not dissimilar to Ballmer’s response, though in this case it’s more finely veiled. Some of the most prominent VCs proudly admit they’ve outsourced high-risk early-stage consumer investing to angel investors entirely, so what’s not to like about crowdfunding? But it’s a tell-tale sign of disruption when such incumbents focus on their most lucrative customers while disruptors pursue the less desirable ones at the lower end of the market.

In the VC world, this means writing bigger checks for later stage venture deals; they’re increasingly leveraging their brands and reputations to gain access to less risky deals rather than betting on their ability to identify world-changing ideas and teams at a very early stage.

In the crowdfunding world, no company better represents the disruption underway in capital markets than Kickstarter. But there’s more to crowdfunding than just Kickstarter. Besides popular platforms like Indiegogo, there are a growing number of Kickstarter-like companies. Meanwhile, startup-funding companies like AngeList and Funder’s Club are turning everybody (for now, only accredited everybodies) into angel investors.

When the JOBS Act rules are finalized, these online platforms will let virtually anybody become an angel investor.
.....

Perhaps the disruptive feature of participation and involvement isn’t enough to generate a mainstream asset class. We need more.

This is where, I’d argue, investing in people — not just projects and companies — can change the game. Predicting success for a newbie startup is notoriously difficult. But investing in people is one of the only ways to get a risk/return/volatility investment profile that actually works. It’s a model that could also appeal to quant (not just cause) investors as well.
.....

Why is investing in people a safer bet? Because there are clear — and measurable — signals reflecting their accomplishments and hinting at their potential. It’s not unlike the logic used by big companies or universities faced with countless candidates, by recruiting firms and talent agents, and others. By using data and algorithms — in this case, a sophisticated regression model that considers variables like school, area of study, standardized test scores, internships, job offers — we can statistically predict a person’s future income.

Such a model allows a person to “borrow” from his or her future self.

In this way, platforms that crowdfund people assist in allocating capital to individuals who are statistically more likely to do compelling things with that capital. (For us, the model is simple: Backers contribute toward a person’s funding goal and receive in return a small slice of that person’s income for 10 years.)

Making more capital available to more of the world — as long as it’s offered on fair and reasonable terms — seems to be a universal good. In purely economic terms, current crowdfunding returns are considered mere rounding errors in the capital markets of today. But newer, smarter, and more efficient forms of financing will certainly drive lower returns for incumbents.

The real disruption and impact of crowdfunding won’t be understood for a decade or more. We’re only at the beginning. But it’s no longer an indie experiment, either.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/04...arting-people/