By Kelly Faircloth 5/14/12 7:45am

Kickstarted

kickstarter

Good God, There Are A Lot of Kickstarter Projects In the Pipeline

Looks like Kickstarter just had a slight hiccup on its path to complete world domination. The Wall Street Journal reports that an April site update introduced a bug exposing the details of unlaunched projects.

The company confessed: “The bug made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name for unlaunched projects. No account or financial data was made accessible.” That means no credit card numbers and no addresses. There’s probably no reason to worry if your graphic novel zombie rom-com reinterpretation of Moll Flanders wasn’t quite ready for primetime, either. Kickstarter estimates that, discounting downloads by the Journal reporter who found the bug, a mere 48 projects were seen.  Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 3:35pm

The Equity of the Crowds

Mr. Kane. (Quora)

As Equity-Based Crowdfunding Heats Up, Hedgeable Promises Free Platform

We’ve discussed before how the JOBS Act will allow anyone–including people who are not accredited investment professionals–to put money into startups via crowdfunding. It’ll be nine months before the SEC releases the final rules, but that doesn’t mean the sector is standing still. Today another player jumped into the fray: Online investment management service Hedgeable has announced that in early 2013, it will launch its own crowdfunding platform–and it’ll be free of charge. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 3/27/12 4:35pm

The Equity of the Crowds

JOBS Act supports via Angel List

The JOBS Act, Which Rolls Back SEC Rules In Order to Help Startups Crowdfund, Passes in the House

Ready your startups, the early stage investing climate is about to go into overdrive. This afternoon, the JOBS Act (or Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act) passed in the House with an overwhelming vote of 380-41. Next, the bill moves to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law.

It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride. The JOBS Act originally passed in the House a few weeks ago with a 390-23 vote a couple weeks ago. The Senate’s version of the bill, called the CROWDFUND Act (or Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure Act), added a number of safeguards for investors and passed last week 73-26. The JOBS Act was then revised to reconcile with the Senate’s bill, which is why the final version had to move back to the House for another vote.  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/22/12 2:04pm

Betabeat Approves A Thing

Kickstumbler

Find Great Kickstarter Projects With Kickstumbler: With Love, From Hype Machine Labs

With two Kickstarter projects breaking the $800,000 barrier in the same day, the mothership of crowdfunding sites is having its moment. We had a hunch this was coming when investors on recent panel about women in venture capital called out, unprompted, to Perry Chen, hoping he might be in the market for funding. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

So like any dutiful Kickstarter devotee, Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin did what he does best, build “apps that allow us to discover and enjoy new things.” Enter Kickstumbler: a site and tool bar that lets you stumble upon projects you might have otherwise missed. “This was made over a few weekends, sometimes, truly instead of sleeping,” Mr. Volodkin told Betabeat by email. It was a labor of love for what his team calls Hype Machine Labs. “It’s a name we use when making something not explicitly related to the core site.” Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 1/02/12 9:18am

The Equity of the Crowds

Sen. Brown.

After Flying Through the House, Crowdfunding Bill Stalls in Senate

Bad news for IndieGoGo and other startups that want to be allowed to solicit up to $1 million in investment from the crowd. The bill that would allow companies to ask openly for investments in installments of just $1,000 or less has slowed down in the Senate over concerns with the protection of small-time investors. The bill, introduced by Massachussetts senator, the Libertarian-leaning Scott Brown, is being targeted by groups like the North American Securities Administrators Association Inc., which says the bill would promote the fleecing of unsavvy investors.

Proponents say social media ensures that scammers will be outed in short order. Read More

By Ben Popper 11/18/11 2:02pm

The crowd behind the crowdfunding

What I Learned Running My First Successful Kickstarter Project

Over the past 32 days my fiancee and I have been running a Kickstarter project. We were trying to raise funds to build a teaching farm on an abandoned lot in Brownsville, Brooklyn. On Tuesday of this week we reached our goal of $23,000 dollars.

I’ve been writing about Kickstarter as a journalist for a while, but using the service myself really changed my perspective on how the company manages to successfully fund an incredible 43 percent of the projects it features on its site.

For a while I was critical of the fact that Kickstarter continued to curate by hand which projects were approved for funding. While the company has seen some incredible growth, at some point it seemed like they would lose their ability to reach web scale. I imagined they would need to take an open approach similar to Etsy if they really wanted to build their business.

But in chatting with our donors, I came to realize this selectivity creates the power of the Kickstarter brand. We received pledges from Australia to Hawaii and back again. A lot of these people had backed a dozen or more projects on Kickstarter. They had diverse interests across music, film, art and food. What they believed in was Kickstarter, and our project was one way of expressing that.  Read More