Raising money from strangers is all the rage these days. It happens online.
Kickstarter is the most well-known "crowdfunder" and Indiegogo (pronounced Indi-go-go) isn't far behind. Do the strangers get their money back if the product doesn't succeed? Good question, for which the answer is: sometimes and mostly no. The answer is blowing in the crowd. Here's our experience.
We were wowed by an Android tablet called "Jolla," which raised over $2.5 million on Indiegogo eight months ago. It was one of the most successful Indiegogo campaigns. We were one of the early bird investors who paid $209 for a fancy-schmancy Android tablet to be delivered in June. It's nearing September and we're still waiting. The latest update says we'll get our tablet by mid-September. The factories in China are still working things out, they say. If, for some reason, we don't get the tablet, Indiegogo's rules say we should contact Jolla, not Indiegogo. In other words, they throw up their digital hands and say "not us; we didn't do it."
These so-called "crowdfunding" methods have been a great deal for companies trying to introduce new products. On Indiegogo, for example, companies get to keep whatever they raised after paying a 9 percent fee, even if they don't reach their funding goal. (If they do reach their goal, the fee is only four percent.)
On Kickstarter, which is the older and larger of the two crowdfunding operations, they have pretty much the same policy -- if you can call it a policy. Over 91,000 projects have been funded by several million people. Whether or not they ever got a refund, a product or a get well card, remains a mystery in the cloud. As you might expect, both funding services get a lot of complaints. We don't want to shock anybody, but scams and scammers do exist.
Starting a successful business is just plain hard, even if you raise the money. Using Kickstarter, for example, a game called Code Hero received $10,000 each from two donors, with hundreds more donations flowing in for a total of $170,954. Code Hero was a game designed to teach children how to program computers. The money vanished quickly into programmer salaries, and years later, investors are still waiting for refunds, which seem unlikely. Some states may provide relief to investors under a deceptive trade practices law, but that's aimed at the company, not Kickstarter. If there are no assets to forfeit, investors are out of luck.
Even success stories require patience. Oculus Rift, makers of a virtual-reality headset, met their $250,000 goal on their first day and quickly raised another $2.4 million. Yet their first headsets won't go on sale until spring of 2016. We hope the customers who ordered products in 2013 have other toys to play with.
The Numbers Report
According to a survey of more than 2,000 people, compulsive Facebook users are prone to update their posts even in the shower, while driving, at funerals and in the ocean. Many others admit to having lied so they could leave a social engagement to check Facebook. There are now 1.49 billion Facebook users. More info on this can be found at StopProcrastinatingApp.com/how-to-block-facebook.
Internuts
-- Google the words "Timeline for Chinese Inventions" to move into lists of timelines put together by Columbia University for many nations and cultures. The Chinese wove silk in 1300 B.C., for example. They invented the folding umbrella in 300 B.C., though it wasn't received in the West until the 1600s. Gunpowder came along around 750 A.D. in China and 1330 in the West. The Chinese had moveable type in the year 1040; the West, 400 years later.
-- TheDanPlan.com. Dan McLaughlin had never played golf when he decided to see if 10,000 hours of practice would turn him into a pro. That's the theory of Anders Ericsson, popularized in the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. That theory maintains it's the number of hours that makes you a musician, an artist, or even a golfer. Dan quit his job, hired a golf coach, and worked on this full time. His handicap went down to 3.1 last November after around 4,200 hours, but it's back up to 5.5 in April, his most recent post.
-- Fiverr.com has dozens of cartoonists who will turn your selfie into a cartoon version for a "fiver" (five dollars). Their examples look great. Several years ago we used MyFaceIcons.com for this. Their service costs around $40, and they did a great job. We use our cartoon portraits in some of our email signatures.
-- OEDILF.com has a limerick dictionary. A woman calling herself Sheila B has over 2,000 limericks on the site. You can browse by topic. We liked the ones in the computer category.
Stand-Up Desk
The Wall Street Journal did a big story on the $3,000 Stir Kinetic M1 stand-up desk, which promises to eliminate the dangers of too much sitting, a habit some say is as bad as smoking. Joy found a free alternative.
Using her desktop computer, Joy made two small stacks of books and put her keyboard on top of them. She made a separate stack for her mouse. She put her monitor on top of a laser printer. Voila! Everything is just the right height and the printer still works. If she gets tired, there's a chair nearby. But the prospect of having to take the monitor off the printer, and remove the books from under the keyboard and mouse, just to make everything the right height again, has kept her standing for months. The $3,000 high-tech version adjusts whenever you feel like sitting-- which is probably too often.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
SundayMonday Business on 08/24/2015