Powered by a $342,000 Kickstarter campaign, a “distraction-free” bit of writing technology, the Freewrite, looks a lot like your father’s typewriter. Read More
Fat startup: Eric Ries and his Lean Startup programme go wide
Eric Ries asked for $135,000 on Kickstarter. He got $588,903. That’s not lean. And Ries, a man with a ready sense of humor, cracks up at the suggestion that he’s doing too well to fit into his famous “Lean Startup” gig anymore. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “When you launch a Kickstarter campaign, there’s something great… Read More
Kickstarter issues its annual greeting card
‘Three years ago Rebecca’s project got a pledge from Scott. This year they got married.’ That’s from Kickstarter’s look-back in handkerchieves at 2014. My associate at The Bookseller Charlotte Eyre has ably written up the attractive annual report that Kickstarter creates to regale us with how well things have gone. Her story, Kickstarter publishing projects raised… Read More
Crowdsorcery: #FutureChat recap
“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… Read More
Crowds and empowerment
Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Penguin Books in the UK, FSG in the US) has been with us for decades, but arrived too early to look at questions of what crowds can mean in publishing. And with the advent of the digital dynamic comes the idea — the ideal — of crowd wisdom, of crowd leverage, of crowd… Read More