The crowdfunding world was abuzz this past week. After an amazing start to their month of February, Kickstarter announced that they are on track to distribute more funds in 2012 than the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This is undeniably great news for the industry at large, but it got me thinking: What does this mean for the role of government in a future where crowdfunding has really taken off?

Daily Crowdsource is pleased to announce the newest member of its growing Crowd Leaders team, Jonathan Moyal. Jonathan is currently Founder of Luck Ant, a crowdfunding platform for small businesses that helps consumers improve the stores they love.

Once upon a time, interacting with artificial intelligence was pure science fiction: something only handsome crime fighters and fictional spacemen got to do.

Today, we interact with virtual actors so often that we barely notice them. But while these virtual personas are seemingly everywhere, they are not very lifelike and hardly ever as cool as their sci-fi ancestors (for the record I preferred HAL to KITT). There is always a point when you realize your new paperclip friend isn’t really listening to you at all, and the relationship goes downhill. Luckily for those of us who spend too much time in front of a computer, crowdsourcing may soon be able to make these virtual actors much more human.

It is striking how legislation on investing is almost 180 degrees around in Europe, compared to the United States. The need for an investor’s license makes crowdinvesting in the USA a very long shot. However, the regulatory burden in Europe is no less, the absence of the need for the full crowd to get their paper is the light at the end of the tunnel for legal Crowdfunding for businesses.

Daily Crowdsource is pleased to announce our newest member of our growing Crowd Leaders team, Tom Vroemen, Director of the Dutch, debt-based-crowdfunding platform CrowdAboutNow.

With this podcast, we return to the basic ideas behind crowdsourcing and see if we can find a unified basis for the different aspects of crowdwork.

We’ve all been there. You finish volume 13 of your favorite manga about a young girl coming of age with the assistance of her talking cat, who falls in love with a boy that’s also a dragon, all while saving the world from a dragon that’s also a talking cat. You go online to order volume 14 but for some reason, Amazon doesn’t stock it. You trawl the Internet looking for another vendor. Several sleepless nights later you find it on a Japanese website. You are overjoyed until you realize the whole site is in Japanese and you can’t figure out how to order the book. With no way to quickly and cheaply have the website translated, you reconcile yourself to learning Japanese after all.

I've been watching various bits and pieces of news come across the wire that deal with the Crowdfunding Bill currently in front Congress. Several of them claim to present all you need to know and present a bright future for the Bill. I thought it would be worthwhile for the community to have a deeper picture of the Bill to understand where it is and what they might do if they are interested in seeing it become law.

“Content is King!”

We hear it all the time at practically every marketing and social media conference across the globe. However, the statement is fundamentally hollow. It insinuates that content of any kind at any level of quality is all your brand needs. It is a fairly ridiculous statement when you think about it. It's just another catchy buzz-worthy statement that has caught on, and I will be the first to admit that I have heard the words come out of my own mouth many times.

The Super Bowl is a big deal to football fans, but the TV ads accompanying the on-field action can deliver anticipation and entertainment value far surpassing the game itself.  What’s especially exciting for those of us involved with crowdsourcing is that so many big-name brands in 2012 – ranging from Doritos to Chevy and now The Dannon Company  – will be trotting out Super Bowl ads developed via crowdsourcing.