Ten Thousand Projects Financed

Ten Thousand Projects Financed In 2011, the year of Kickstarter's second birthday, the crowdfunding site recorded nearly 11,836 successfully funded projects (about 44% of all the projects submitted) with more than $99 million pledged. The year showed phenomenal growth over the previous one when 3,910 successful projects were launched with $27 million pledged. Kickstarter is already the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. The majority of projects on Kickstarter are cr...

Type a startup movie

Type a startup movie A free website where you can make a movie sounds like an oxymoron for an entrepreneur. Movies cost a fortune, right? Wrong. Go to xtranormal.com and find out how you can type a movie. Do ask to see mine yet, but I'm working on it. If you plan what you want to say, you can do it in minutes, then upload it to your website, YouTube or send it to your contacts. There is a more sophisticated version for business that you can use when you've mastered the free version. It'...

Raising finance meets brand marketing

Raising finance meets brand marketing Profunder.com, the brainchild of Jessica Jackley, co-founder of kiva.org, it the tip of a silver-lined iceberg. Crowdfunding is a significant way to go for people who want to start a business. Crowdfunding is using the Internet to pitch your project to a mass audience, or just your friends and family. Raising money for your startup can be a huge and often unsuccessful effort. Crowdfunding, crowd finance or raising crowd capital can be a much mor...

Small Business 77%–Corporations 25%

Whom Does America Trust? In a recent Pew survey (March 11-21, 2010), most Americans (71%) said they trusted small business. Almost the opposite was true for big business–64% did not trust them. And Banks? A mere 22% of us trusted them! Congress was down there at the bottom, too, and Federal Government only rated a 25% positive rating. I wonder what this says to you entrepreneurs? You have everything going for you. But it is easy to lose a reputation, so you should guard it jealously, b...

Mindshare: seeking customer attention

In the information age, presence in the minds of customers is becoming more important than being present physically. Access to goods and services can take place by many different means and through  multiple channels. Grabbing mindshare, or engendering repute and purveying knowledge has hence become critical to business success. Mindshare, or seeking a share of the space available in someone's head is like being heard over the cacophony of a busy Manhattan street. The message has to be striking;...

TechnoServe: hand up not handout

The latest story from TechnoServe is about Peet's Coffee buying coffee from Rwanda. TechnoServe programs focus on developing entrepreneurs, building businesses and industries, and improving the business environment. Partnering with Peet's they are working on developing a vibrant coffee industry in war-ravaged Rwanda. Peet's have announced that they will sell a special blend of the Rwandan coffees in their 191 cafés and online this summer (2009). Business Week (May 4, 2009) has an article abo...

Gestures and natural language to operate my laptop?

The popularity of the Wii game console that can sense gestures and voices may it seems, be the way of human/computer interaction by as soon as next year. Microsoft and HP are advanced already. HP plans to incorporate more gesture features into its TouchSmart PCs later this year. The TouchSmart tx2z Tablet PC can already do some amazing touch screen gesture recongnition. A system that can recognize human gestures could provide a new way for people with physical disabilities to interact with co...

Convergence in Business

Nothing ever stays the same. However much we want life to go on as normal, it never does. Business forecasting is often soothsaying as much as science, no matter how hard management science tries to prove the opposite. Using scientific research-based principles to improve an organization's ability to make rational business management decisions may be a useful discipline, but on its own spells trouble. The Neuromarketing Blog is published and authored by Roger Dooley. It is well worth followin...