Thursday, September 6, 2012

Crowdfunding Civic Projects

A Kansas City MO based technology company - Neighbor.ly – has developed a crowdfunding tool that allows individuals to support civic projects of their choosing and receive perks in return. For example, the company plans to raise $5,000 in $10/individual contributions to make a neighborhood become eligible for Google's ultra-high-speed fiber-optic project. The tool can also be used to raise matching funds to free up government dollars for large infrastructure projects.

At a time when citizen trust in government is seemingly at a low ebb, crowdfunding reduces the chance that capital projects will be selected for purely political reasons. Those that attract public support go forward, while those that don't must rely on traditional government processes.”

Here is a brief video on Kickstarter, which is a start-up that helps people raise funds through crowd sourcing.


Reference: Chieppo, Charles, Crowdfunding: a New Way to Get Things Done in Government, Governing, September 5, 2012 


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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Start-up Pioneer of Silicon Valley

Stanford educated investor-entrepreneur-philanthropist-intellectual, Peter Thiel, is best known as the founder of PayPal and a hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management. Peter believes that the Unites States has lost its belief in the future, and he is doing everything in his power to steer it in the right direction.

He is pouring his ideas and passion into the Founders Fund, where he is cultivating creative start-ups with utopian ideas to change the world through technology. He draws a clear distinction between technology and globalization. “Technology involves the creation of radically new things that have not existed, and globalization maps to the continual copying of things that already exist.”


Reference: Packer, George, No Death, No Taxes, New Yorker, November 28, 2011
 
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Saturday, August 25, 2012

A Digital Magazine for Social Media Contents

Beautifully designed for iPad and iPhone, Flipboard creates a personalized magazine out of everything being shared with you. Flip through your Facebook newsfeed and Google+ Circles, tweets from your Twitter timeline, photos from Instagram friends, videos from YouTube, and much more.”


Reference: Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine, By Flipboard Inc.
 
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