Kickstarter

Founded in 2009, Kickstarter is an online fundraising platform for creative projects. Musicians, designers, filmmakers, and other artists craft a short pitch, usually a video, post it on the site, and set a fundraising target and a time frame. Contributors are more like donors than investors, since they earn no return or equity, though they are promised rewards (a copy of the CD, dinner with the artist). If the project meets its goal, Kickstarter, a for-profit company, takes a 5 percent cut and the creator gets the rest. If it falls short, no money changes hands.

Kickstarter has emerged as a legitimate option for financing independent films. So far, the company has raised more than $21 million from nearly 240,000 backers for 2,443 films, according to co-founder Yancey Strickler. He says six films have crossed the $100,000 mark.

Read more at Business Week.

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet

1) An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started.

2) You can’t keep your books all in one place.
You can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. The way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out.

3) Notes in the margins help you think.
It’s not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original — a separate notebook is ridiculous.

4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
It’s just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental.

5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.
When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

Read more at Wired

Money? There's an app for that

Attempts to turn mobile phones into digital wallets gather pace. Square, a start-up... wants to undercut the credit-card processing fees charged to small businesses and to make it easy for them to accept digital payments.. Google was expected to unveil plans to test its own mobile-payment service.

Both geeks and moneymen know that persuading more Americans to use their phones as mobile wallets will not be easy. A survey by Javelin Strategy & Research published last year found that only 19% of Americans were interested in using some form of contactless payment. Those who think mobile wallets’ time has come point out that more and more tech firms are embracing Near-Field Communication (NFC), a wireless connectivity technology that allows phones with embedded NFC chips to make payments when “waved” near an in-store terminal.

Read more at The Economist

The data revolution

Last year people stored enough data to fill 60,000 Libraries of Congress. The world’s 4 billion mobile-phone users (12% of whom own smartphones) have turned themselves into data-streams. YouTube claims to receive 24 hours of video every minute. Manufacturers have embedded 30m sensors into their products, converting mute bits of metal into data-generating nodes in the internet of things. The number of smartphones is increasing by 20% a year and the number of sensors by 30%.

Companies that can harness big data will trample data-incompetents. Data equity, to coin a phrase, will become as important as brand equity. In the 1980s and 1990s retailers such as Walmart used their mastery of retailing data to launch the “big-box” revolution (huge out-of-town stores with ultra-low prices). Today’s big data will provide the raw material for further revolutions.

Read more at The Economist

Small Papers Lead the Way on Paywalls

The University of Missouri School of Journalism recently interviewed hundreds of daily newspaper publishers and found that 46 percent of papers with a circulation under 25,000 per week say they charge for at least some of their online content. By contrast, only a quarter (24 percent) of newspapers with a circulation of more than 25,000 charge for any content. If one of those is your hometown rag, don't get complacent just yet. A third (35 percent) of the papers that don’t currently charge say they have plans to do so, and another 50 percent “may begin charging at some point.” (Fifteen percent of those polled say that they had no plans to put up any sort of paywall.)

Read more at AdWeek.

New Business Model in Vogue at Condé Nast

From 2007 through 2009, Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker saw about $500 million in revenue disappear, a 30% decline, and posted a loss in 2009. In response, Condé Nast closed magazines, trimmed its famously large budgets and re-examined almost every tenet of its business. To pursue new areas of growth, Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications Inc., has set aside $500 million to invest in digital properties.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Content-Focused iPad Apps Value Form Over Function

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

Read more here.