Nadeem Ashraf

The Rise of Disintermediated Crowdfunding

One Friday morning a few months back, the creators of Lockitron, an innovative deadbolt system controlled by your smartphone, were rejected by the folks over at Kickstarter. The following week, the Lockitron team formed a plan: they would launch Lockitron on their own and try to follow the vision that led to Dalton Caldwell’s success with App.net. When I last checked Lockitron’s progress, they received 14,704 pre-orders totaling $2,278,891—success that propels the company to the ranks of the Pebble Watch, Skallops, and Double Fine.

Is this success typical? Will the next revolution in crowdfunding be disintermediated, open source fundraising?

Crowdfunding is Propelling Social Innovation

Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds — from working conditions and education to community development and health — and that extend and strengthen civil society. Social media and the internet has been a big supporter of social innovation over the past couple of years, witnessing the creation of powerful virtual communities dedicated to a particular cause or initiative.

A Framework for Political Crowdfunding

The recent presidential election in the United States was the most expensive race in history, with Mitt Romney and Barack Obama spending about $1 billion respectively on their efforts to win the White House. While both candidates raised hundreds of millions of...

4 Suggestions for Building User-Generated Content

Every business needs content in order to be found in search, and to differentiate them from the competition. Without quality, helpful content (and lots of it), you’re lost in a school of fish that are all the same color. Who’s going to find you? Who’s going to pick...