Written by andy on August 25th, 2008
I subscribe to Google Alerts for the terms crowdfund, crowdfunded, and crowdfunding, among other things. The other morning when I awoke I was alerted to an article on crowdfunding from the Sydney Morning Herald.
I checked it out, and noticed a few familiar names on the crowdfunding scene: Sellaband and MyFootballClub. But there were two other companies that I had never heard of: Catwalk Genius and BeerBankRoll. After poking around a bit, it appears that Catwalk Genius plans to use crowdfunding to sponsor fashion designers. A noble cause, but I didn’t learn much more since their website is not currently functional.
The other company, BeerBankRoll is much further developed, and aspires to be a crowdfunded brewery. They have received a fair amount of press around the web, and appear to be steadily signing up people who believe in the idea. As I lurked around the nether regions of the site, I noticed that they are actually located in a suburb of Chicago!
It’s rare to find crowdfunding companies, but even more rare to find one in your own back yard. It was encouraging for me to see that crowdfunding is starting to proliferate in the United States. Hopefully we can catch up to our UK/European brethren soon. I feel like the biggest challenge is education on the concept. Once people grasp the premise they start to feel comfortable with participating.
Written by andy on August 19th, 2008
My friend Charles was browsing around the flashy new website for the Samsung Instinct phone when he stumbled upon this gem. Apparently Samsung forgot that QWERTY keyboards start with the letters Q, W, E, R, T, and Y.
They spent all this money to get the crazy flash interface and overlooked the basics. How could something like this have slipped through the cracks?
To see for yourself:
I would just give you a direct link, but they chose to develop an all flash site, making it impossible. Let’s hope that we never do something like this with Cameesa. If we do, you have my permission to flame me for it.
Written by viktor on August 18th, 2008
On Friday Cameesa was featured in Webware. I’m glad Josh found the idea of crowdfunding interesting. Although he did mention that the selection slim was slim, the article was positive overall. The selection is slim right now, and it’s steadily growing. Hopefully, the next time Josh visits we have a wider selection.
I’d like to thank our initial community for their participation on the site. It’s growing quickly and things are going to become very interesting soon.
Written by viktor on July 6th, 2008
An excellent post from the CEO of Idea Couture, Idris Mootee. I couldn’t agree more on his stance in regards to “management”.
When you build a high performance culture, no one needs to manage anyone. You pick not only smart people but also people that have a passion for success, strong analytic mind and/or creative self expression somewhere deep inside them. They are not managers and not aspire to be one. They are good coaches and leaders. They want to be part of something big, bigger than an individual, meaningful, to make a contribution, and to find fulfillment in what they do. You can only inspire, coach and support them, there’s nothing to manage. If you’re telling me you are actively managing your top people, then these yearnings are often managed out of people in the unrelenting quest for predictable mediocrity or satisfactorily under performance.
This view is one of the main reasons the Cameesa team is a team. We all pull our weight and are passionate about Cameesa. I think if anyone on the team had to manage someone else we’d be in big trouble. But since we are tightly knit group that works synergistically together we keep moving along and improving Cameesa. Not to mention that we all complement each other very well in terms of skill sets.
