December 2, 2013 @ 10:22 am By Charles Luzar  |  

A new method of capital raising that is gaining increasing interest is crowdfunding. Generally, the term “crowdfunding” is used to describe a form of capital raising whereby groups of people pool money, typically comprised of very small individual contributions, to support an effort by others… Read More

November 30, 2013 @ 1:54 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

This week, online security analysis site ThreatPost outlined a security vulnerability in popular web development framework Ruby On Rails. According to ThreatPost, the vulnerability still affects as many as 2,000 web sites. The threat could allow hackers to log in as Sites using an old… Read More

November 30, 2013 @ 1:40 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Black Friday has become an annual shopping phenomenon where consumers take to stores in droves seeking deals from the world’s largest retailers. Similarly, Cyber Monday was launched as an answer to Black Friday to encourage shoppers to buy Christmas gifts online. In light of this,… Read More

November 30, 2013 @ 1:11 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

The competent operation of the crowdfunding platform or portal is essential for the prevention of fraud in equity crowdfunding. Based on my experience with the ASSOB platform we have learned that it is very unlikely that fraudsters would be bothered jumping through all the hoops… Read More

November 30, 2013 @ 12:35 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Lend Academy’s Peter Renton shared stats from Lending Club and Prosper for the month of November. It should be no surprise that Lending Club continues to grow, issuing $280 million in new loans in the month of November. They issued just short of $100 million… Read More

November 30, 2013 @ 12:05 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

UK alternative energy crowdfunding platform Abundance shared the preceding trailer on their blog this week. The trailer is for an upcoming documentary called Transforming Finance. The film is sponsored by The Finance Innovation Lab and aims to “inspire a financial system that sustains people and planet.”… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 12:37 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Kickstarter and similar crowdfunding platforms are becoming the go-to way for proving a market for a hardware product. Today, we want to share four campaigns that are raising huge sums of money on Kickstarter. Some are in familiar verticals, like 3D printing and smartwatches, while… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 11:21 am By Charles Luzar  |  

I was feeling a little festive yesterday and didn’t get to a roundup, so we’re making up for it today with a big roundup of things we’ve found throughout the week. My turkey coma has thankfully worn off. Forbes | Britain’s Crowdfunders Plot World Domination… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 10:56 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Crowdfinance 2013 is a crowdfunding event slated to take place on December 17th at Thomson Reuters’ Conference Center in Midtown Manhattan. The event will cover crowdfunding as a whole with a focus on the crowdinvesting models of equity- and lending-based crowdfunding. Crowdfinance 2013 will feature a… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 10:44 am By Charles Luzar  |  

“Black Friday” is the term given to the Friday after Thanksgiving. It’s the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season and the day that many retailers go from being “in the red” to “in the black” for the first time all year. It’s also become… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 10:07 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Planetary Resources famously raised over $1.5 million for the ARKYD satellite on Kickstarter. The project plans to eventually launch a publicly-accessible space telescope that will allow anyone to take a picture from space. The campaign hit a handful of stretch goals after raising well over… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 9:48 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Argo Medical Technologoies Ltd. raised $1.28 million on OurCrowd in a round that ended earlier this year. The raise was to fund further development of their medical device, the ReWalk, which acts as a mechanized exoskeleton and allows paraplegics to walk again. The health benefits… Read More

November 29, 2013 @ 9:38 am By Charles Luzar  |  

IgnitionDeck is an increasingly-popular Wordpress plugin aimed at powering crowdfunding campaigns. For prices starting at $79, crowdfunders can buy a license for IgnitionDeck and crowdfund on their own Wordpress-powered standalone web site, skipping the traditional success fees of popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. IgnitionDeck is… Read More

November 27, 2013 @ 11:39 am By Charles Luzar  |  

In an article published to Architizer yesterday, author Karen Wong interviews Kickstarter co-founder Charles Adler on a variety of subjects. One interesting question she asks early in the interview involves the question of why he left Kickstarter after helping to build the company into a… Read More

November 27, 2013 @ 11:00 am By Charles Luzar  |  

A state senator in Alabama is proposing a crowdfunding exemption at the state level that aims to allow Alabama entrepreneurs to crowdfund from Alabama investors. Senator Arthur Orr (R-Decatur) has proposed the bill. State Securities Commissioner Joseph Borg is cited by Senator Orr as being… Read More

November 27, 2013 @ 9:51 am By Charles Luzar  |  

The crowdfunding campaign for Play-i is in its final hours. The campaign launched seeking $250,000 to fund and prove a market for an interactive, cost-effective set of robots – named Bo and Yana – that would aid in teaching young children the basics of programming…. Read More

November 26, 2013 @ 11:58 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Soon-to-be Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler knows a thing or two about crowdfunding. Recently he took to Quora to answer the following question: what are common elements among unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns? See his answer below… Read Quote of Yancey Strickler’s answer to Unsuccessful Kickstarter projects, what… Read More

November 26, 2013 @ 11:23 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Could crowdfunding help to provide a better way to treat certain forms of cancer? This is the amazing question at the core of a crowdfunding campaign that aims to raise $500,000 in funding to complete a study aimed at providing a treatment for cancer that… Read More

November 26, 2013 @ 10:41 am By Charles Luzar  |  

One Spark is a huge event in the city of Jacksonville that was forged from a series of coffee shop discussions by three friends in 2011. It seems Elton Rivas, Dennis Eusebio, and Varick Rosete may have created an awesome, crowdfunding-powered monster. The event is expected to… Read More

November 26, 2013 @ 10:22 am By Charles Luzar  |  

The University of California, Berkeley, Nesta and the University of Cambridge have teamed up and plan to execute a benchmarking survey to capture the size, transaction volume and growth of the alternative finance market in the UK. The team behind the upcoming report is asking… Read More