Crowdfunding Grows Up

It’s been an interesting few weeks for crowdfunding. Octopus Raft gave some enraged backers a salutary lesson in what exactly crowdfunding was. Perhaps more importantly it showed what crowdfunding wasn’t, or at least not yet. Funding using this model does not equal investment. Don’t expect a return proportional to the amount you put in when your darling pet project is acquired by some industry behemoth. Expect to get exactly what you were told you would receive when you funded the project.

Still, some investing maxims can be applied to crowdfunded projects. If it looks to good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. The ongoing fuss over GoBe from HealthBe proves this.

Over to David Ahn, writing on imedicalapps.com –

Therein lies the problem with crowd-funding platforms such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter. There is little or no accountability when it comes to these projects.

More troubling, Indiegogo allows for flexible funding campaigns, which delivers your money to the project owners at the time of initial pledge, even if the campaign does not meet its goal. While the GoBe project far surpassed its goal, all initial investors would have been out of their money even if the project did not reach resolution.

As such, all $630k that has been contributed to GoBe is non-refundable at this time, and users are not able to re-gather their money unless the project owner permits.

Always read the small print, although in this brave new world that may not be enough. Indiegogo’s response to Pando showing evidence of what might well be fraud seems to have been to delete their anti-fraud guarantee.

Rich White Guys Update

‘one used to be a dude, one’s super small, one’s hyper-smart’

This is how Rich White Guy Elon Musk described his information security team in some sort of weird attack on satire / defence of humourlessness.

At around the same time one of the Koch brothers took to the editorial pages in the Wall Street Journal to explain what a hard time Rich White Guys were having right now.

Steve Jobs, one of the greatest Rich White Guys ever displayed a rather poor choice of words in a 2010 email which featured a bullet point “2011: Holy War with Google”. Them’s fightin’ words alright.

Winning

Read Before You Write

NPR pulled a rather magnificent April Fools’ prank on the stream-twits. These are the people who don’t actually read anything that appears in their Facebook stream apart from the headline, but immediately crack their knuckles and get stuck into posting comments. On the article they haven’t read.

Games

‘The Guilt Of The Video-Game Millionaires‘

But for many of these young game-maker millionaires, who created their work out of a passion for play rather than prospecting, the wealth and attention can be jarring. In February, Dong Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, a recent iOS game that had inexplicably risen to the top of the App Store charts, stopped selling his game even though it earned him an estimated fifty thousand dollars a day.

The Internet Of Slang

Gawker has banned it. “We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not Buzzfeed writers or Reddit commenters.” Zing! Take that, Buzzfeed writers.

Meanwhile, the-toast.net offers some suggestions for even more Internet slang. Carrie Jewett’s tongue may be slightly in her cheek.

Totally Confused, Weekend Longreads Edition

The Dead Zoo Gang, The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan, The Corporate PR Industry’s Sneaky War On Internet Activism, The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons and an Excerpt from the Winds of Winter.