November 15, 2013 @ 11:51 am By Charles Luzar  |  

99designs is a San Francisco-based crowdsourcing web site for graphic and web design work. The site boasts a community of over 250,000 participating designers. Many of these participating designers are based in the Philippines, which was just ravaged by Typhoon Haiyan. Now the team at… Read More

November 15, 2013 @ 11:36 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Woodinville, Washington based Technical Illusions is celebrating today after the close of their wildly successful Kickstarter funding round. The company raised $1,052,110 for the castAR, a pair of “augmented reality glasses” that seems to be somewhere between Google Glass and the Oculus Rift. castAR’s projected augmented… Read More

November 14, 2013 @ 1:11 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Pranay and Paul are two high school friends that teamed up to bring The Apollo Technical Pen and Drafting Scale to Kickstarter. To say the effort has been successful would be an understatement, as the campaign has tripled its goal with a month left to go,… Read More

November 14, 2013 @ 12:56 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Ernst & Young is teaming with crowdfunding platform Spacehive and all of London’s 33 local authorities to support local projects. Spacehive just launched to the public after a stint in beta. The platform, which focuses on civic projects, expects to funnel millions of pounds into… Read More

November 14, 2013 @ 12:40 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

In 1931, artist Haddon Sundblom created magazine ads for Coca‑Cola inspired by Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem ‘The night before Christmas’, featuring St Nicholas as a kind, jovial man in a red suit. However, up until then images of Santa Claus had varied throughout different regions and… Read More

November 14, 2013 @ 12:24 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Lending Club has appointed two indivials to their advisory board: Michael S. Barr, law professor at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and at the Brookings Institution, and senior Google executive Jeff Huber. Barr served from 2009-2010 as the U.S. Department… Read More

November 14, 2013 @ 12:11 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

$1.1 million is an ambitious goal no matter what the project, but the developers at Cyan, Inc. set and met this lofty goal for their new game Obduction. Cyan, Inc. is the same company that created Myst back in 1993. Myst was the best-selling PC game in history for… Read More

November 14, 2013 @ 8:25 am By Charles Luzar  |  

RealtyShares has announced the public launch of their accredited-only real estate crowdfunding platform. The site joins a growing cadre of platforms active in the real estate niche including Prodigy Network, Realty Mogul, Fundrise and others. RealtyShares has been in beta, testing the market with five… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 12:36 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Minneapolis-based SmartThings Kickstarted their way to $1.2 million, closing their campaign in September of 2012. Over 5,500 backers pitched in for the home automation system. SmartThings makes it easy to connect the things in your physical world to the Internet. You can monitor, control, automate,… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 12:01 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

The Rolling Jubilee launched last year with hopes of buying and abolishing medical debt for pennies on the dollar. Born from the Occypy Wall Street movement, the organization generated $600,000 in funding through a telethon and variety show, as well as through donations collected through… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 11:34 am By Charles Luzar  |  

At this year’s One Spark Festival in Jacksonville, Florida, a section of the grounds will focus on innovation in education, giving teachers and students alike the chance to compete for a slice of the $300,000 slated to be awarded to participants. One Spark is a… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 11:16 am By Charles Luzar  |  

A recent question on Quora asked respondents what they “hate most about equity-based crowdfunding?” The incindiary question produced some really interesting responses, not the least of which was the most-upvoted response by Gil Silberman. Silberman is a San Francisco-based startup lawyer. His response is as… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 11:03 am By Charles Luzar  |  

The same individual backed over 150 projects. We have been in communication with a number of project owners, all of whom have been duped out of money by this scammer. This scam has been going on for months; one project backer lost over $5000, and… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 10:44 am By Charles Luzar  |  

The Kingom Trust Co., NowStreet and Prosper Marketplace are teaming on a webinar scheduled for 1 PM Eastern this afternoon. The focus of the webinar: P2P lending as a method of investing from tax-free retirement accounts. With high volatility and low interest rates driving retail… Read More

November 13, 2013 @ 10:21 am By Charles Luzar  |  

DonorsChoose is a crowdfunding platform focused on closing a funding gap for teachers and their classrooms in the United States. MakerBot has now teamed with DonorsChoose in order to afford teachers the opportunity to request a crowdfunded “MakerBot Academy Bundle,” which includes a MakerBot Replicator… Read More

November 12, 2013 @ 12:49 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

Light Harmonic has done this crowdfunding thing before. Specifically, they completed a campaign to the tune of $303,000+ on Kickstarter in September of this year for the Geek Out, a digital-to-analog converter for laptops that aimed to pump up the tunes coming out of a… Read More

November 12, 2013 @ 12:25 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

The act of investing on P2P lending sites like Lending Club is generally a very active form of investing. You generally have to seek out notes that make sense for you, which can be time consuming. In a recent blog post entitled “Why I’m Transferring… Read More

November 12, 2013 @ 12:03 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

What did you do when Google killed Google Reader, much to the chagrin of many of the service’s fans? Jacob Cook declared war. Well, not literally. What he did do was begin to work on arkOS, a Linux-based operating system that aims to replace all-knowing… Read More

November 11, 2013 @ 12:05 pm By Charles Luzar  |  

PCMag | Can Crowdfunding Give the Private Space Race a Boost? PCMag takes a look at the private space race in the context of a company called the LiftPort Group. LiftPort raised over $110,000 on Kickstarter to build a prototype with an eye toward building… Read More

November 11, 2013 @ 11:34 am By Charles Luzar  |  

Imagine waving your hand over a certain spot on your car to unlock it, or high fiving a smartphone to share contact details. Sound ridiculous? It’s actually said to be possible now with an implantable NFC chip called the xNT, which is currently crowdfunding on… Read More