Perry

Hewitt

Tag: crowdfunding

  • Friday 5 — 3.20.2015

    Friday 5 — 3.20.2015

    payments-in-messenger

    1. Facebook introduced new friend-to-friend payments on Facebook Messenger. Now friends can split a lunch check, or settle a wager right in a chat. And, for now, zero fees.
    2. Google Code shut down and moved nearly a thousand of its open source projects to GitHub. Here are a few important ways GitHub got it right where others failed.
    3. Should news media drop costly native apps in favor of mobile web? Monday Note makes the case that a mobile site, lightweight and focused on a small feature set, can satisfy most use cases.
    4. We’re generating an ever-larger stream of data, and that data is increasingly accessed by our connected devices to serve up relevant experiences. Many layers of data — identity, financial, etc. — combine to shape and enhance our daily activities in the Age of Context.
    5. Crowdfunding platforms provide an outsized opportunity for entrepreneurs and innovators. $529 million was pledged in 2014 on Kickstarter alone. Here are 9 tips for building a successful project on Kickstarter.


    Weekend fun:     When you read this, I will be flying back after Harvard Men’s Basketball readily defeated UNC in the first round of March Madness. Unless, you know, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight is right. Sports not your thing? How about a Star Wars-themed drone instead?

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 10.31.2014

    Friday 5 — 10.31.2014

    comms mobile chart

    1. Benedict Evans demonstrates how mobile is eating the world. It’s worth reading for the astonishing growth metrics, like 80% of all adults in the world owning smartphones by 2020. One larger point is that tech is rapidly moving beyond the tech sector to transform all industries. And for now, that starts mobile first.
    2. Product managers are critical in the software industry — and this discipline is spreading as every company develops a software capability. We need more ways to educate people into becoming product managers, as well as to provide ongoing professional development opportunities.
    3. Reddit added a crowdfunding capability to allow community members to raise money and support causes they care about. Already an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, Redddit is expanding the suite of services that keep community members happy and engaged on the site.
    4. Google now surfaces a sitelinks search box to branded search results — a box that allows you to search a website directly from the Google results page. Here’s how you can disable it.
    5. MOOC 1.0 has emerged from its first hype cycle a little worse for wear. How can we ensure that next generation MOOCs will deliver effective and compelling online learning? Here’s a great roundup of lessons to be learned from other online experiences from commerce to social networking.

    Weekend fun: Dancing with drones? Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 5.30.2014

    Friday 5 — 5.30.2014

    duolingo coursera growth

    1. Mary Meeker released her annual, comprehensive internet trends report. Lots of stats reinforce the enormous potential in mobile, like room for growth in global smartphone adoption, and opportunity in mobile advertising. She notes that the education industry is at an “inflection point,” with increasingly global user bases (particularly for duolingo above) and the rise of personalized, online education from MOOC to app.
    2. Amazon and Hachette are embroiled in an escalating battle, which has led to Amazon, in some cases, refusing to sell or discount Hachette books — see this useful explainer. In highly related news, a Harvard Business Review article outlines four strategies suppliers can use to capture value from powerful platform owners.
    3. Does our addiction to tweets, Buzzfeed slideshows, tl;dr summaries, and explainers mean that we no longer devote focused time to explore primary sources? This opinion piece offers one worrisome take on our facile faking of cultural literacy.
    4. What does Apple buying sub-par headphone company and high-margin lifestyle brand Beats mean (apart from the fact that Dr. Dre is now linked to Steve Jobs by far fewer than six degrees of separation)? Explore some theories here.
    5. We’ve discovered the ideal recipe for crowdfunding $2M on Kickstarter in less than 48 hours. Mix a heady dose of nostalgia with an accessible and compelling cause, and then add in cultural icon LeVar Burton.

    Weekend fun: The bad news: otters at the Smithsonian National Zoo may well have more enrichment activities than you do at your desk. The good news: it’s pretty awesome to watch.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 3.7.2014

    Friday 5 — 3.7.2014

    1. Getty Images made 35 million images available for free in a move that should send shockwaves through the stock photo business. In an era of rampant copyright infringement, this move seems to imply that defending the photos was a bit like, well, tilting at windmills. Nieman Lab offers some thoughtful insights about the canny brand, data, and advertising rationale behind the move.
    2. Kickstarter has raised a billion dollars to date to crowdfund creative projects. Worth noting that it’s a really long tail: the dollars reflect only a few massive hits and many, many small projects.
    3. What if newspaper front pages were populated by the stories their readers share the most? Newswhip, a tech company that specializes in measuring realtime content for newsrooms, found out and illustrated the results. Fun fact: readers of the Daily Mail and The Guardian would choose the same front-page story.
    4. Yahoo is continuing its spending spree with its acquisition of Vizify, a platform that pulls together a person’s social media posts in an engaging, visual format. Vizify can bring graphics and visual elements to enhance other acquisitions, like Tumblr.
    5. Online quizzes have been around for ages, with the occasional new implementation that captures people’s attention. BuzzFeed has managed to reinvigorate the genre with a highly visual treatment and a simple backend interface for the editors creating the quizzes. A good reminder that the best editorial idea can die on the vine without frictionless technology to support it.

    Weekend fun: It’s March already — which means SXSW, springtime, and less than a month until Game of Thrones is back on the air. And now you can experience the show’s goriest demises through the magic of eight-bit. (with thanks to Katie Hammer and Becky Wickel for feeding my #GoT addiction)

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 08.09.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users toward deeper content (and perhaps directing their eyes toward the ads). Big opportunity for publishers of high-value, evergreen content.
    2. 72% of U.S. online adults now use social networks, according to Pew. Breakdowns include slightly more women than men, and Hispanics represented more than African-Americans more than white, non-Hispanic. Retailers take note: adoption rates for adults 65 and older have tripled over the past four years.
    3. A good example of how great content strategy combined with optimizing an existing technology can yield significant returns: Zach Seward on Quartz’s email strategy just as their daily brief expands to weekends.
    4. Boston’s Here and Now covered Silicon Valley-funded Watsi, a startup crowdfunding medical care. This approach raises ethical questions, as well as potential positive implications for nonprofits looking to put a face on unrestricted giving.
    5. In yet another take on mobile, visual storytelling, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen launched the Mixbit video app for iOS. There’s a collaborative element to the storytelling and some solid UX to make recording and editing less daunting.

  • Crowdfunding models in media

    Small business lending statistics take no account of Kickstarter and crowdfunding; [Andrew] Sullivan’s experiment with The Dish has so startled traditional media that people are only beginning to understand how potent, powerful and perfect a model it might be – that is, when people pay something for content they value because they understand that everything costs something.

    – Zachary Karabell in The Atlantic on The Kickstarter Economy How Technology Turns Us All into Bankers. Perhaps “backers” is a better term than “bankers” – the new transparency into the layers of businesses allows people to see and determine for themselves where the value lies, and put their money there.