Friday, May 16, 2008

Spot Us: Crowdfunded Journalism

Spot Us is a non-profit organization that encourages community-funded journalism. Spot Us was chosen as a winner this week in the Knight News Challenge, taking home a $340,000 grant/prize.

Whats the scoop? With a focus on the community level, journalists and local residents will pitch stories, while Spot Us will seek funding from the crowd for potential stories. If enough funding is raised for a particular story, a journalist will be hired to cover the issue.

More information can be found at www.digidave.org

Carrotmob.org: Green Crowdsourcing

I just watched the 10 minute video at the Carrotmob website and I was truly impressed at the creativity of this crowdsourcing effort. What do they do? Well, it's a mouthful, but here goes. Carrotmob organizes a swarm of consumers on some random morning to go shopping at a store that has agreed to put a specified portion of every purchase towards becoming a more environmentally-friendly store ( 22% of revenues towards greening the store in this case). Carrotmobbers purchased about $9k worth of product, enabling the participating business to totally redo their lighting system and make some upgrades to their refrigeration units. As well, the carrotmobbers donated 366 pounds of food to the SF Food Bank.

This is an interesting concept, it would be nice to see it fly.

Knewsroom: Turning on a Dime

I noticed the other day that Kluster, a crowdsourcing-based start-up, changed its business model. The new service from Kluster, called Knewsroom, is an crowdsourced - you guessed it- news service. Members submit topics and the crowd "invests" in what topic or story they feel is most newsworthy. If a story you invest in is featured in the next day's edition, you will earn Knewsroom currency based on the size of your original investment. If you create original content and the crowd deems it worthy, you can get paid $150 on a Mastercard debit card. The problem I see, very early on, is that the crowd seems to be investing heavily in the stories with the most votes. For instance, a story on ABC had 19 votes and a story on XYZ had 2 votes yesterday late in the voting day. With such a commanding lead by ABC, why even bother voting for XYZ?

I found a video on Crowdsourcethis.com that features Kluster founder, Ben Kaufmann. He seems pretty open about the fact that Kluster burned through $1m in 7 weeks, requiring them to change the business model.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Cambrianhouse: A Crowdsourcing Foreclosure

Interesting couple of days.

1. The Godfather of the crowdsourcing movement, Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine, made an appeal to the crowd on May 12th via his Crowdsourcing.com blog. It seems the writer responsible for coining the term crowdsourcing is having some trouble getting the crowd involved in/commenting on his blog. It seems that Jeff made an offer to get published in his book back in January. The original post yielded only four comments. His May 12th post yielded the same.

2. Yesterday, Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch pushed Cambrian House into the deep end with his post, When Crowdsourcing Fails: Cambrian House Headed to the Deadpool. It seems that $7.5m wasn't enough to keep the CambrianHouse from going into foreclosure.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Crowdfunding - A Movement?

Crowdfunding (n.) - describes the collective donation of funds, usually via the Internet, by a group of people united by a common cause.

Is Crowdfunding really a "movement" or is it just a creative way to introduce, market, and fund a new business via the Internet? Better yet, does crowdfunding present a viable funding method for someone with a business idea and limited capital to go out and virally market a low-cost, web-based prospectus (i.e. a 3 page website that asks for money). Is it just easier to put together a quick website, come up with a YouTube video, and ask the crowd for $50 for an annual membership? Have we become that lazy in the wake of the 2nd dotcom bust?

Is crowdfunding a viable alternative to traditional VC funding? Is it merely an opportunity for all the dreamers and schemers to toss some ideas on a digital cocktail napkin and test out their ideas? Will it become a viable playing field for Scam 2.0? I mean, come on, we have people trying to crowdfund bums onto the Forbes 500 who are raising more money than some of the "legit" crowdfunding outfits out there.

Is crowdfunding just a re-packaged tipping point methodology that focuses on dipping into members wallets as opposed to a collective effort to create, market and manage new and exciting technologies and products? Do we really need to call this a movement?

I do know this - I am not that interested in the academic aspects of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, crowdmanaging, wisdom of crowds, etc. - all of that can be left to Jeff Howe and the social media marketers of the world. I like to track how these "projects" work. I like bookmarking them after I have read about them on Springwise or in Wired. I like to see what media outlets pick up the stories. I like to see some journalist in Scotland use his platform to goad the crowd into buying a football club. I like to go to the Cambrian House website and see what kind of punctuation has been used in the latest round of "idears" on the site.

I am a crowd troll.