A facilitator for commerce moved more money around than a national arts grant system. SHOCK HORROR. In other news the sky is blue and water is fucking wet.
This is why I’ve been working with more and more creators and entrepreneurs on crowdfunding campaigns and why, after I gave big co’s a chance to get onboard a fantastic “Camilla” project and they all got shy about it, we’ll be hitting Kickstarter with something REALLY SPECIAL.
The “d” in d’Errico stands for D-I-Y. You know it!
Infographic: Kickstarter Dominates Indie Innovation
Like YouTube, Facebook, or blogging platforms, it’s almost hard to believe there was an Internet without Kickstarter, which may be the greatest testament to its success. In 2009, the site generated about $23 million for its projects—an impressive figure by all accounts—but in 2012, Kickstarter pulled in roughly 10 times that, leapfrogging the grant budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. You can find all those facts and many more in this masterful infographic created for Fast Company by Catalogtree:
See the full story and infographic here.
And check out Fast Company’s feature story on Kickstarter here.
Kickstarter isn’t endless videos of cute kittens that suck up your time when you should be working… That’s for sure. I don’t think KS is going to not be “cool” for a very long time. Now if only creatives use it & other crowdfunding to fully change the rules of the game instead of propping up the old & tired existing gate keepers to various industries. We have the power now. The *consumer* has the power now.
Articles
If these movies were made back in the day…
Yessss
I have no words to express how much I love these.
The greatest things I have seen in such a long time…
Joi Ito’s Principles:
Joi Ito of MIT Media Lab:
Ito: There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:
1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
5. You want to have good compasses not maps.
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.
We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.
Some of my favorite authors include…
Personal favorite authors: William Gibson – Cory Doctorow – Bruce Sterling – Samuel R. Delany – Neal Stephenson
Seriously half of my book collection alone consists of work by them.
YES.
Flocations: visual-based flight search service
Flocations, for those that haven’t used it yet, is a visual-based flight search service that lets users seek and find flights, hotels and prices using a map-based layout. The site automatically detects a user’s location based on their IP address (though this can be changed) and, using its ‘price slider’, it then shows potential routes that can be taken within a designated budget. (via Flocations raises $570,000 to enhance its travel discovery service for Asia with new features – The Next Web)
Brooklyn Internets are GO!
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This is just awesome and exactly where 3D printing should be going.
Teenage Engineering Make CAD Files Available to 3D Print Replacement Parts
Teenage Engineering not only make one of the sexiest synthesizers but also get the prize for being the first electronics company to offer their replacement parts as downloadable 3D Printed files.
This is the first company that I have seen so far that offer replacement parts to be 3D Printed by their consumers. This is an incredibly smart move as it takes away the need for them to warehouse and distribute replacement parts. It also means that their fans have an opportunity to modify and customize aspects of their synthesizers.
We work hard to make our OP-1 users happy with free OS updates and added functionality. But sometimes we fail. As some have noted, the shipping cost of the OP-1 accessories is very high. This is because we can’t find a good delivery service for small items. Meanwhile, we have decided to put all CAD files of the parts in our library section for you to download. The files are provided in both STEP and STL format. Just download the files and 3D print as many as you want. Next fail is the OP-1 manual update. We are almost there…we promise it will be ready sometime next week. Thank you all for your patience, we promise to work even harder in the future to make you happy.Teenage OP-1 “fail” TeamThe parts are now available on Shapeways if you need to 3D Print replacement parts for your OP-1 synthesizer.
Teenage Engineering, we LOVE you….
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Preparing for Wednesday’s iOS6 launch: we’ve got 27 cities online and we’re ready to serve up Lumatic-style public transit directions to Apple Maps users. Bring it!
Rafer sez:
Going-for-broke time, boys and girls. Download and rate! Pots broken, ships burned, 18 months of effort comes down to this week.Again, download and rate!
Go Lumatic Go!
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Christian Bale was in Aurora today visiting victims of Friday’s movie theater shooting.
Didn’t go on behalf of Warner Bros. Didn’t go for press. Just went. Class act.
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It’s always interesting to me which networks these guys choose. Why Pinterest, for example, which has fewer users than Tumblr and Foursquare? Why Pandora and not Spotify? I wonder what goes into the decision making.