Scanadu’s Scout ‘tricorder’ reached its fundraising goal in two hours and doubled it in five, making it the fastest campaign of its size to reach its goal on Indiegogo. Read more »
Swivl, a motion-tracking, iPhone-compatible camera dock that enables individuals to easily video record themselves, has raised $500,000 from venture capital firm Grishin Robotics. Read more »
Life sciences venture firm InCube Ventures has launched an equity crowdfunding site for biomedical technology companies at all stages. Read more »
Gawker has just taken checkbook journalism to a whole new level — asking the public to help buy a video tape that is likely to bring down the mayor of a major city. Read more at paidContent »
Investment platform Healthfundr aims to give health entrepreneurs another funding option while opening up health technology investing to a larger pool of people. Read more »
When the NPR show Planet Money wanted to put together a project about the economic life-cycle of a T-shirt, Kickstarter seemed like the natural approach — and it showed how much crowdfunding has in common with public media. Read more at paidContent »
The inspiring story of a young girl who wanted to build a video game, and raised more than $20,000 on Kickstarter to do so, quickly turned sour after her mother turned out to be a successful entrepreneur. Read more »
With Kickstarter-backed projects like Pebble making a splash at last week’s CES, we thought it was a good time to revisit our conversation with Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen on the role of crowdfunding and creativity. Read more »
The future of energy technology can come from surprising places: algae, hot rocks, fireflies and crowdfunding? Here’s a round up of stories this month that show off 6 technologies that could shape the future of energy. Read more »
With more than a dozen projects raising more than $1 million (some in less than a day), 2012 was a banner year for Kickstarter. Here are GigaOM’s favorite campaigns from the worlds of connected devices, open-source technology and publishing. Read more »
Kickstarter is not a store, but many people who back technology, design and game projects sometimes think that way, which can be a problem when projects gets delayed. Here’s my suggestion for how to fix this issue. Read more »
For every high point of 2012, there were also a few forehead-slapping moments. From Apple Maps to HP’s Autonomy to the Facebook IPO, here’s the best of the worst. Read more »
Y Combinator-backed Crowdtilt on Wednesday announced the beta launch of its API that will enable third parties, from vacation sites, online retailers and startups looking for capital, to use the startup’s group payments capabilities. Read more »
Pave, a New York-based startup, on Wednesday said it’s piloting its crowdfunding platform that matches up students and other young people pursuing new careers with established professionals who invest money and time in exchange for a share of future earnings. Read more »
Christie Street is trying to be the Kickstarter for hardware products. The new site gives inventors a thorough review and doesn’t approve projects that aren’t viable. It also provides protections for backers, who can even buy insurance to get their money back if a project fails. Read more »
Kickstarter rival Indiegogo is expanding its international presence by offering support for foreign currencies and languages and providing new localized sites in the UK, Canada, France and Germany. It’s way to stay ahead of Kickstarter, which is also expanding globally. Read more »
Kickstarter is off to a solid start after launching internationally for the first time in the U.K. a month ago. The crowd-funding platform has raised $3.3 million in pledges for more than 400 projects. Read more »
For all its cheerleaders, the crowdfunding industry inspires plenty of doubters too, who say the filed has too many pitfalls. Ryan Caldbeck, of CircleUp, doesn’t completely disagree, but says most of them can be overcome. Read more »
The explosive growth of crowdfunding projects is turning lots of assumptions about business and creativity upside down. But nowhere is that change more apparent than in Germany, where Indiegogo founder Danae Ringelmann says the huge popularity of crowdfunding is even challenging the country’s conception of itself. Read more »
New products aren’t the only ones to benefit from the amazing fan-funding power of crowdfunding web services. Failed and long-gone creators are also using them to show that, online, a project proposal is never over until it’s over. Read more at paidContent »
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Kickstarter launched its UK site Wednesday with about 200 projects, part of a larger planned international expansion. Now U.K. creators can begin using Kickstarter to fund their creative projects. Read more »
VCs would love to invest in your game, as long as you know how to answer their questions correctly. This excerpt is from Wagner James Au’s “Game Design Secrets” (Wiley) now available in paperback and ebook. Read more »
Kickstarter is opening up to UK projects, marking the first time it will accept projects outside the US. The new projects will launch on Oct. 31 and will be accompanied by an updated international shipping system. Read more »
Indiegogo, which is considering letting users of its platform give equity for funding, reckons the change will mostly benefit small businesses who want to raise cash from potential local customers Read more »
Crowdfunding site uses Amazon S3, Heroku and other cloud services to keep its costs low. San Francisco-based LoudSauce aims to give voice to small groups and organizations that don’t have SuperPACs to call their own, according to co-founder Colin Mutchler. Read more »
A company that aims to release ebooks into the Creative Commons through crowdfunding has had to halt operations after Amazon Payments withdrew support for crowdfunding payments. Kickstarter, which also uses Amazon Payments, remains unaffected for now. Read more at paidContent »
Crowdfunding has grown from a $33 million market to a $128 million market in the past two years and is expected to reach $500 million in 2012. While it won’t completely replace more traditional fund-raising methods, it’s nonetheless an important space to watch, with plenty of opportunities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In a world overcrowded with posts, pokes, texts and tweets, the best way to connect with a customer could be entirely analog. Crowdtilt co-founder James Beshara talks about how his startup sent out 1,000 handwritten thank you notes, and why he’d do it again. Read more »
A journalist from Michigan has raised funding through Kickstarter for a project that will see him travel across the U.S. interviewing people about the election. Could that be an alternative model for financing investigative or in-depth reporting by journalists as newspapers continue to cut back? Read more »
Penny Arcade, a webcomic publisher and event producer, is trying to use Kickstarter to finance its web operations for a year so it can replace traditional banner advertising with a reader-centric model. Could traditional publishers learn something from this crowdfunding experiment? Read more »
After a long gestation period, crowd investment platform Seedrs has finally opened its doors — allowing British startups to use its platform to pitch for early stage funding. And so far things appear to be going well. Read more »
Comedian Louis CK, who made $1 million selling downloads of a show through his website, has sold $4.5-million in tickets to a new tour in 48 hours. He and musician Amanda Palmer show that for content creators, building a community is more important than ever. Read more »
As more banks flirt with social media, StockTwits rolls out a redesigned website that makes it easier for investors to follow the information and people connected to the companies they care about. Read more »
Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is pulling back the curtain on the data behind the site. The New York-based startup announced today that it has launched Kickstarter Stats, a page tracking the progress of all of the projects on the site, updated daily and sorted by category. Read more »
After a recent story highlighted how Kickstarter made it harder to find failed projects, Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler explains. It’s about showcasing current projects that can be funded. Also, creators were asking for their projects to get de-indexed from web searches because they ranked high. Read more »
But hidden in the headlines about the JOBS Act is the creation of an entirely new class of capital that could be far more valuable to startups: customer capital. Instead of raising capital from VCs, entrepreneurs can reach out to customers directly. Read more »
A little more than half of the projects on Kickstarter fail. But understanding those failures can help others avoid the same fate. So, I spoke to one of the founders of a failed project to understand what lessons others might be able to learn. Read more »
Kickstarter is not just a startup– it’s part of an important shift away from the industrial manufacturing era & toward the maker economy. In this wide-ranging interview, founder Perry Chen talks about how society is reaching a new ‘bursting point of creativity,’ & where Kickstarter goes from here. Read more »
For the past couple of decades, venture capitalists have had the upper hand. They’ve had the funding and most of the power in the startup ecosystem. But, said venture capitalist Fred Wilson, as that balance of power shifts, VCs need to rethink their role. Read more »
