“Join the crowd” on Friday meant jumping in on our #FutureChat conversation with The FutureBook.net community about all things crowd-ish — crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, a crowded season of releases and new ideas.
Even as I create this recap, an email has arrived offering “your very own piece of PeerIndex!” (Exclamation point theirs.) The London-based social analytics platform PiQ, the solicitation announces, is “crowdfunding the investment we need” — a £500k goal with £411,720 already pledged, apparently, on a 10-percent equity offering.
In our #FutureChat, we’d touched on Kickstarter, Unbound, Inkshares, IndiGogo, Pubslush, unglue.it…the PeerIndex campaign is being mounted on a site called Seedrs.com. (Which reminds me, yet again, I really have to start spelling my name Portr to be fully hip.) Seedrs describes itself as “an online platform for discovering and investing in great startups.” And it seems to have seeded (seedd?) itself with some £2,583,420 — by far the largest success on its “funded campaigns” page.
And, just as the Risk Warning page on Seedrs.com is a good one to read, the section of Kickstarter’s FAQ called “Accountability” might be a good stop along the way to a big donation to a project. In answer to a couple of questions that arose during #FutureChat — along the lines of “what if somebody crowdfunds a book project and then just runs off with the money?” for example, we read at Kickstarter:
It’s the project creator’s responsibility to complete their project. Kickstarter is not involved in the development of the projects themselves. Kickstarter does not guarantee projects or investigate a creator’s ability to complete their project. On Kickstarter, backers (you!) ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it.
So with that basic message of “funder beware” in mind, let’s run off to Twitter and pick up on some of the comments exchanged Friday in #FutureChat.
Speaking of Kickstarter, Dave Morris, a #PorterMeets alum, came along for the chat and had a quick couple of observations on book projects at that platform:
@Porter_Anderson @thebookseller @TheFutureBook Looking at KS, story ideas that do well seem to be most formulaic “X meets Y”. #FutureChat
— Dave Morris (@MirabilisDave) September 26, 2014
@Porter_Anderson @thebookseller @TheFutureBook Well… if we relied on crowdfunding for restaurants, I’d have to eat Big Macs. Ugh 🙂
— Dave Morris (@MirabilisDave) September 26, 2014
Read the Full Story at The FutureBook
Join us each Friday for a #FutureChat session with The Bookseller’s FutureBook community. We’ll be live on Twitter, at 4 p.m. London time, 11 a.m. New York time, 8 a.m. Los Angeles, 5 p.m. Berlin, 3 p.m. GMT.
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: Crowdsorcery: #FutureChat Recap
Read the full post at: FutureBook.net
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