Despite the begrudging sentiment that the UK gets to see 007 weeks before I do, I still find it fascinating that Coke Zero has utilized the opportunity to engage their crowd in an unforgettable experience with staggering results.

Are you a hawkeyed defender of intellectual property? Do you hate getting swindled by yet another terrible knockoff of an otherwise fine product? Does the sight of shysters videotaping movies in the theater give you the heebie-jeebies? BrandBounty wants you!

Last week I was discussing the similarity crowdfunding projects have to the original Facebook games, with the Daily Crowdsource staff. Remember when your pre-timeline facebook page was filled with requests to join your fellow friends tackling angry mobsters & crop farming? The success of Facebook games took off through the tactic of encouraging participants to invite their friends. A brilliant move to grow the game company's audience, but a poor tactic for keeping friends.

As the legalization of equity based crowdfunding in the U.S. is still off in the distance most people don't realize that you can already crowdfund capital for your business - even in America. You can't give away equity in exchange for a donation, but I don't think luring donors with equity is the best approach for the type of demographic crowdfunding targets. If you just need a little capital to get your idea off the ground, a donation-based crowdfunding project can be just the answer.

When Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” as a pun on “outsourcing,” he gave us a useful shorthand that helped explain our field: like outsourcing, but with a crowd. Simple. Plus, in the business world, outsourcing was seen as a great success story, making lots of money for lots of companies (including Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s former employer, Bain Capital). The association was helpful and, for the most part, positive.

MycroBust, a graphic design crowdsourcing platform, has just launched a mobile version of its website, making it the first graphic design crowdsource platform to be accessible for its users as well as for its clients over mobile devices.

Crowdfunding giant, GoFundMe, recently expanded their partnership program allowing outside organizations to create branded campaigns for their own community. The member network program is the latest in a string of upgrades and announcements that's helped lift payment volume from $2 million to $3 million per month in the last quarter.

Chaordix and the UK KPMG have just announced a new strategic alliance to provide a new crowdsourced market intelligence service to companies in the UK. Called Crowd Connection, the new service will be powered by Chaordix’s Crowd Intelligence, a technology that generates data which provides market insights to its clients using the power of crowdsourcing.

I'm noticing a growing trend: many people are rushing into crowdfunding to finance their projects without fully understanding the numerous challenges that await them. It's as if they're going out for their first skydive, but they don't bother to take a skydiving lesson or get a few practice jumps in. They just close their eyes and hope it all works out.

And then they realize they forgot the parachute.

I don’t have an answer to this question. I would love it if some of our international readers can debate this in the comments section. It's an important question for crowdfunding websites when making plans for international expansion, but it’s also a really interesting question in general. Is crowdfunding cultural? Would it work as well in China as it does in the U.S.? Are the Latin countries of the Mediterranean as open to the concept as their Anglo-Saxon neighbors? Do countries that celebrate individualism crowdfund better than those that celebrate the group? Or is it the other way around?