Best-selling author completes first global equity-based Crowdfunding campaign via Symbid

Utrecht, 12/19/2011 – Martijn Arets, author of the book "Brand Expedition, a 5-­‐month journey visiting Europe's most inspiring brands", has collected € 20,000 in investments from the general public, via investment platform Symbid. The investments will be used to translate the successful Dutch version of the book in English and bring it on the international market. Arets used Symbid's investment platform to reach the general public. Special about this transaction is that all investor actually become shareholders in the company of Arets.

Arets needed 2 months to reach his capital goal. In total, 171 investors, domestic and foreign, responded to the call. The English translation of the book is expected in February 2012 and will be available on the website (as EBook or hardcopy) of the author and via regular channels. The translation will gain familiarity with a unique promotional action, in which 1000 fans from 15 countries read a chapter from the book in front of the webcam making it the first read out loud book in the world on YouTube. Arets is very pleased with the result: "The past two months I have not only gained the necessary investment, but also an additional chapter to the story, overwhelming media attention and 171 Brand Expedition ambassadors.“


The investment platform Symbid demonstrates with this transaction that its approach to finance entrepreneurs and businesses works, says CEO, Korstiaan Zandvliet. "With this first successful financing, we proved that the platform works! We would therefore like to congratulate Martijn and all investors with this fantastic result."


About Symbid
Symbid is the first investment platform where investors can directly invest from as little as € 20,-­‐ in the equity of start-­‐ups or existing businesses. Any entrepreneur is able to achieve growth or to raise capital via Symbid. Symbid recently reached the finals of the Shell Live Wire Award and is among the most innovative companies in the Netherlands.


About Martijn Arets and Brand Expedition
From Brand Expedition Martijn advises and inspires people and organisations in the areas of brand, strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, new business models and social media. He does this through presentations, brainstorming sessions and consultancy. His book Brand Expedition was recently nominated by Sprout for the title of ABN AMRO Business Book of the Year.
For more information
www.symbid.com www.brand-­‐expedition.eu 

Best-selling author completes first global equity-based Crowdfunding campaign via Symbid

PRESS RELEASE: IDEAME, THE FIRST REGIONAL CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM OF LATIN

After a successful debut in Argentina and Chile, IDEAME lands in Mexico
Mexico, November 23, 2011 – IDEAME (www.idea.me) launches its platform for the  Mexican market becoming the first crowdfunding platform operating across different countries in Latin America.

IDEAME is a Latin American crowdfunding company for creative and artistic talent in the region. The fundamental goal of IDEAME is to provide financial support for creative and artistic Latin American talent in all their expressions turning their ideas into reality on a global stage. “Our platform seeks to secure financing for creative projects in Latin America in a variety of areas, including music, cinema, visual arts, design, fashion, innovation and technology. Since our launch in August, we have seen several projects that successfully reached their funding goals in Argentina and Chile. It is a very positive sign for the rest of the region.” highlights Sebastian Uchitel, CEO of IDEAME.

“The landing of our platform into Mexico is part of our strategy to become the main regional player in Latin America. Mexico presents an amazing talent pool. Besides, social networking and electronic commerce have grown significantly over the last years within the country”.
How it Works?
The mechanism is simple: the "creator" of a project presents his initiative with the economic objective needed to raise and pursue it, within a specified period. The public works financially in exchange for various prizes, rewards or experiences depending on the amount of collaboration. If the project meets the economic objective within the stipulated period, the creator gets the funding for the project, develops, and delivers the promised rewards. Failure to achieve its economic goal, the money is returned to those who contributed.

Who trust us?

The company has secured the support of a group of investors of notable prestige with a solid track record in online and creative throughout the region. “Among the investors are Eduardo Costantini Jr. (who served as executive director of the MALBA Museum for five years, cofounder of MUBI and president of Costa Films), Boris Hirmas Said (vice chairman of Yellow Pepper and a member of the Latin American Committee of the Tate Museum in London) and Wenceslao Casares (founder of Patagon and Bling Nation), just to name a few of the most prominent investors,” added Mariano Suarez Battan, the renowned entrepreneur who sold his company Three Melons to Playdom/Disney in 2010 and one of the cofounders of IDEAME.“There is an extraordinary pool of creative and innovative talent in Latin America which faces obstacles to find funding. IDEAME will fill that void by providing the necessary resources for those artists to turn their dreams into reality, and we think it’s a great initiative,” said Boris Hirmas Said, Vice-Chairman of IDEAME.

About IDEAME

The fundamental goal of IDEAME is to provide financial support for creative and artistic Latin American talent in all their expressions turning their ideas into reality on a global stage. IDEAME allows creators and artists to share their ideas with an online community, providing those members with the opportunity to take an active role in the development and execution of various projects and initiatives all on one platform. For more information, visit www.idea.me or send an e-mail to prensa@idea.me

PRESS RELEASE: IDEAME, THE FIRST REGIONAL CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM OF LATIN

Edit Huddle: The Crowd as Editor

By Rachel Hyman, head of marketing at Edit Huddle

Blog Errors are a Problem


Think about your favorite blogs, whether they’re political, tech, or news blogs. If they publish frequently, chances are their posts have errors — something is misspelled, the grammar is wonky, or there’s a broken link. Even at blogs with attentive editors, mistakes slip through. Thing is, even if you’re not an out-and-out grammar Nazi, those irritating errors suck. They’re distracting. They make the blogger and the blog look bad, and they attract a flood of commenters who seem to thrive on pointing out errors, detracting from more substantial conversation.
Bloggers, rightfully, are more focused on generating and disseminating quality content than they are on catching every single trivial error. Blog readers want to read clear, error-free posts and the grand majority of them look to the comment section for something more meaningful than “You spelled ‘accidentally’ wrong. Again.” So what’s the solution?

That’s where Edit Huddle comes in. Edit Huddle is a tool that lets blog readers flag particular errors, sending that information to bloggers via a clean dashboard. The tool seamlessly integrates with blogs, allowing authors to fix their posts directly from the dashboard. The tool itself is simple and unobtrusive for blog readers to use: they simply highlight the section of text that contains the error, select the type of mistake it is, and the information is sent directly to the blogger.
Why use Edit Huddle?

Everyone on the Edit Huddle team is a huge blog reader, and we all get frustrated over errors, especially when the comment section gets inundated with people more concerned with pointing out mistakes than with having a productive discussion. Our founder, Imran Ahmad, noticed that many commenters on his favorite blogs were highlighting the same errors, but that there was no easy way to directly contact the blogger. Unsatisfied with the idea of sticking his correction in the comment section and calling it a day, Imran realized that he could harness the power of the crowd to make corrections, improving the blog experience for readers and writers alike.

We believe that there’s a large market of blog readers who would avail themselves of the Edit Huddle tool — much larger than self-proclaimed grammar Nazis who take to the comment section upon spotting errors. See, for instance, this comment from a recent Thought Catalog article:

Thought Catalog posts about 65 times a week. That’s a lot. They also don’t have a stringent editing process, and typos crop up all the time. See the reply by ‘Guest’ up there? 18 people agreed with that commenter. Those are all people who have picked up on the fact that Thought Catalog has recurrent errors, and they’re all potentially people who would use the Edit Huddle tool, even if they wouldn’t comment like Max did.

The crowd is so essential to Edit Huddle because they, the blog readers, are the ones spotting the errors and flagging them to be sent to the blogger. Edit Huddle is literally unimaginable without the scores of readers — the silent majority — who want to read high-quality, professional content and are engaged enough with the blogs they visit to conceivably submit corrections. 

As we move the startup along, we consider not only the bloggers who would put the tool on their site, but also the blog readers whose corrections are paramount to the success of Edit Huddle. We always keep in mind that even if we pitch Edit Huddle to bloggers, the blog readers are our users as well. The feedback of these blog readers has already been incredibly useful. For instance, we’ve been playing around with where on a blog post to put the “Corrections” button that enables users to submit errors, according to the different comments we’ve gotten. Because the crowd is the one submitting the errors, we’re intent on making the process as simple and nonintrusive for them as possible.

History + Progress

Edit Huddle was conceived at the Chicago SocialDevCamp Hackathon. We were one of the winners at that competition, which only pushed us to work harder. We soon competed in Chicago Startup Weekend and gained some incredible traction in an intense 54 hours. We contacted over 1,200 bloggers and got a 17% response rate. We found that 85% of survey respondents would use the Edit Huddle Tool, and 40% would pay $1.99 for it. We also got nince influential bloggers to agree to beta testing, which means the Edit Huddle tool will first be rolled out in front of a total 80,000 readers. “This is something we would definitely use on our website,” said Seth Kravitz, co-founder of the Chicago entrepreneurial site Technori. “I love the simplicity of your implementation." After buckling down for two and a half days, we were declared one of the winners at Chicago Startup Weekend.

Since Startup Weekend, we’ve been working around the clock to ensure the success of Edit Huddle. Right now, we’re focusing on a Wordpress plugin, and we plan to extend seamless integration to a multitude of other blog platforms. We’ve also been connecting to Chicago entrepreneurs, readying beta testing, and launching our new website. Beta testing will start shortly; expect to hear about a full launch soon.

Get in Touch

Please check out our new website and sign up for an invite. You can also connect with us on Facebook and Twitter. We love hearing from people who are into startups, entrepreneurship, technology, crowdsourcing, and above all bloggers and blog readers! Email press@edithuddle.com to get in touch.

Edit Huddle: The Crowd as Editor

PR: "Brand Expedition goes to stock market"

“English edition will conquer the world”

Utrecht – In order to translate his successful book 'Brand Expedition, an expedition to Europe's most inspiring brands', Martijn Arets will, in the next 8 weeks, use crowdfunding in order to sell 1000 stocks of his book.

Last Monday, he used an old cargo bike to visit the place where the big boys play – or rather, sell their own stocks: Beursplein 5 in Amsterdam, near the Beurs van Berlage. Using a fun guerilla action, he created attention for his own shares. Investors, besides the standard share of 20% of the book- project, will get free books, access to exclusive presentations and Skype advice sessions of brand consultant Arets.

In 2010, Arets travelled across Europe in a old Volkswagen T2 camper van and interviewed the CEO's, founders and brand executives of 20 authentic European brands. He captured his experiences in the book Brand Expedition. In order to finance the translation and production, together with Symbid he initiated this crowdfunding campaign.

Arets: “Banks generally aren't in tune with what you do as an entrepreneur. The pro of crowdfunding is that shareholders become immediate ambassadors of your project. Because they share in the profits they're very motived to activate their own network. Investing is possible from €20 and after 7000 sold books after taxes, a break-even of their input is accomplished. In order to sustain the shareholders' interest in the long run, they automatically get a share of 10% in any of the following translations. Currently a Chinese translation is in consideration”.

45 million fans
To immediately put his English translation in the spotlights worldwide, Arets will challenge the fans of the visited brands (45 million on Facebook alone) to read a chapter about 'their' brand in front of a webcam. They will participate in the first online video book ever. Arets hopes that this action connects at least 1000 brand fans and will globally position his story.

Arets proved last year that he has a keen insight in how to use social media to create attention about his expedition and his book: he gathered nearly €1 million of free publicity. One example is a video he made with a secret camera where he, in different bookshops, bought his own books before they were actually on sale. The attention this video got on Twitter and other social media outlets, made sure that his book within a couple of days after the release was available in several bookshops.

Note for the editors: Martijn Arets is available for interviews and press photo's in high resolution are available through request. For more questions please contact him at: martijn@brand-expedition.eu.

Links:
- Youtube channel with video of e.g. ‘stockmarket’, ‘bookstore guerrilla’ and booktrailer
- Flickr channel Brand Expedition with lowres pictures and press photo's

PR: "Brand Expedition goes to stock market"

Beans, recession and crowdfunding

Tired with the City life, constantly surrounded by talk of the "double-dip recession", broke unable even to buy a card for their mother's birthday, and with daily intakes of cheese-on-toast at new all time highs, James Bailey and Tarkan Ahmet decided that the only thing to do, was to 'go it alone'. Armed with a box of highlighters and a MacBook, they went about turning their idea of crowdfunding into reality....6 months on, 223 tins of baked beans down and www.PleaseFund.Us is live.

"PleaseFund.Us is an exciting British startup that will harness social networks and viral marketing to raise money for creative projects in a time when funding for the arts has been drastically cut. We are building an online community that are looking to support new and innovative ideas through a pledge system of financial backing." source: James Bailey - www.PleaseFund.Us Founder.

Creative ideas can be showcased on PleaseFund.Us to a community that is passionate about funding exciting new projects, as well as looking for exclusive and unique pledge rewards. Since its launch on 20th August this year, PleaseFund.Us already has over 4000 followers on Twitter, 1000 likes on facebook, and is already supporting several exciting and innovative projects.

The official launch party is at Cargo nightclub in Shoreditch, London on Wednesday 7th September, starting from 7pm. This marks one of the founder's birthdays and provides an opportunity to network, meet the Community, share a drink with the PleaseFund.Us team and hear 'Enfant' perform some of their new DJ material live.

Twitter: @PleaseFundUs
Facebook: /PleaseFund.Us
Website: www.PleaseFund.Us
E-mail: Hi@PleaseFund.Us

Beans, recession and crowdfunding

$13k in the first 24 hours

Man-child is an independent feature film that explores sports, education, religion, and sex in America through the eyes of a talented 13 year-old basketball player.

The film is the first feature by Koo, who co-wrote, directed, shot and edited the Webby Award-winning web series The West Side. He also runs the independent filmmaking web site NoFilmSchool. The campaign is using a $1-per-frame format on Kickstarter, where every dollar pledged equals one unique frame of the finished film. The script for Man-child was also accepted to IFP's Emerging Narrative Program.

In 2009, the NCAA lowered the age limit on who can be considered an official basketball "prospect" to include 7th graders. While there have been a number of basketball films made about high school, college, or pro athletes, today's recruiting -- legal and illegal -- begins much earlier. It's a fascinating and treacherous world which often leaves big decisions in the hands of little kids.

$13k in the first 24 hours

Sometimes even we are touched by a Crowdfunding project

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1702572248/skana-goddesses-and-more-a-new-show-at-galapagos-n

Vocalist Muriel Louveau and composer Charles Kim produced the CD Skana entirely in cyber space. The concept of staging Skana as a mixed journey with compatible artists who follow the same cyber creative process came as a natural consequence. We are invited to create a live theatrical version joined by dancer Emily Pope Blackman and conceive Skana, Goddesses and More as a co bill event with composer Milica Paranosic. The show is scheduled on 9/27 in NY at Galapagos Art Space. We need financial support to cover the production costs for rehearsals, equipment rental & artist fees. This campaign is vital to launch our
project. This is the first step towards a future multimedia show we aim to develop.

If you want to support this project, click here

Sometimes even we are touched by a Crowdfunding project