11 min funding

What are you able to finish in 11 minutes?

Most people would probably answer along the lines of grill a nice steak, bake a pan of cookies or play one round of Candy Crush. Not Micheal Armani and David Jones however. They would get their dream funded. 

Called the Micro, their personal 3D-printer smashed its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 and is now well on its way to becoming one of the most interesting projects on the site.

Created by a team in Bethesda, MD, the Micro originally sold for $199 for early birds and his since risen by $100. It’s a tiny printer, to be sure, with a 4.5 cubic-inch build volume and a special internal spool that holds the filament inside the printer’s case. It can build objects 4.5-inches high, which isn’t much but it’s enough to have a bit of fun.

The founders, Michael Armani and David Jones, have done something quite intelligent: they’re building a very bare-bones printer with some very interesting software. However the full success of this campaign this is not because they have a great product. 3D-printers have been around for a good long while now, and if you really wanted one you would have gotten it already. 

Instead, what they do have is a shown a well structured purpose and functional solution. There a few key take-aways from this success story:

• Affordable, consumer printer: Micro keeps repeating and showing this. The product is affordable, making it available for any consumer
• Effortless: It is super-easy to use. The technical problems that may arise for consumers (How do I get blue-prints? How do I hook it up? What programs do I need?) are already explained and solutions provided by the company. This puts the consumer at ease with the product, making it comfortable.
• Power efficient = lower cost: By using more energy efficient components they can produce a better and more efficient product, which in the end lowers cost. 
• Showing of functions: The video clearly shows and highlights different real-life, momentary problems where the product can be put to use. It shows a woman fixing a broken shower curtain, a man printing a prototype for a project, or even just printing a small espresso mug because the last one broke.
• Explaining why they need money: This may be the most important and best part of this video. They explain the project, the funding, and the plans they have for the funds expertly and simply. There is no doubt in my mind, why they are asking for my money, and where the money I contribute is going to end up should I choose to fund them.

In short, an expertly executed project. Please have a look and comment below!

Are you popular? Do you think?

You're the least popular among your gang on friends. You are, its true, it has even been proven.

Don’t believe it? Consider this: the average Facebook user has 245 friends, but the average friend on Facebook has 359 friends. That’s right. The average person on Facebook has fewer friends than their friends do, a phenomenon commonly known as the “Friendship Paradox”. It may be seem to odd to be true, but it is - for nearly everyone.

The friendship paradox as a phenomenon was first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991. One way to think about this is to remember when you first joined Facebook. When you first created a profile, you started out with 0 friends. The quickest way to get friends was to add people who were already on Facebook. And since these people were already using Facebook, they already had a huge lead in friend count. And each time you added a friend, those people got to increase their friend count too! So clearly, it’s not that hard to see why your friends would have more friends than you when you first joined.

Of course, as you invite more friends and make contacts you can certainly overtake people in the friend count. The friendship paradox is not about the time you joined. It’s about this: on average, you will tend to add friends of people who are popular because it’s a social game. This is not a complete explanation but it should give you the idea of why this happens. And in the end, the average Facebook user ends up having fewer friends than their friends do.

Now lets do a practical example: Imagine that A and B are friends, B is friends with everyone, C is friends with B and D, and D is friends with B and C. A has just 1 friend, B has 3 friends, C and D each has 2 friends. Now we will count the friends of friends. A is friends with B who has 3 friends. B is friends with everyone, which makes for 5 friends of friends. Similarly we will find C and D each has 5 friends of friends. If we do some quick calculations we find that the average person A has 2 friends but the average friend of A has 2.25 friends. This is the friendship paradox!

A good example of this is Twitter; users on Twitter in general follow more people than they have followers them selves. This is because people are more likely to follow those who are popular than those who are not.

Thus, over 98% of Twitter users are subject to the friendship paradox. Or are just not popular. Either or. 

Open Source is Business2.0

On Monday, Tesla Motors finally revealed the concept for a high-speed transit system called the Hyperloop. Inventor-entrepreneur-mad-scientist Elon Musk just released an alpha design of his vision for the future of high-speed transit.

The visionary high-speed train would get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minute, and has been described as "a cross between a rail gun, the concord, and an air hockey table." Musk's inspiration for the Hyperloop was borne out of his distaste for another unrealistic, state-of-the-art transit proposals connecting  the two coastal cities. So he created something more in line with current limitations, borrowing heavily from already proven designs.

But the really interesting part of this story is that all the plans are open source. meaning that anyone can use or modify them.

"I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source," Musk wrote on his Twitter feed. Anyone on the project, however, needs to "share philosophical goal of breakthrough tech done fast & w/o wasting money on BS."

Launching this project in an open source model is truly revolutionary, seeing as how intellectual property is one of companies most precious assets. It is usually the game changer in any speculative investor, how is hesitant to invest. Running open source deals this asset right out of the picture, however this does not seem to concern Musk. Nor has it scared any investors away. 

Regardless of whether the project succeeds or not, this marks an important step in innovations, and start-up evolution. As a supporter of most anything crowd sourcing, I personally think open sourcing plans is the way future. A large (but not to often talked about) part of Apples success is their open source policies; major parts of the Mac OS is built on open source programs. Combining open source plans with crowd sourced funding, and the business model of the future emerges. 

I give you Business2.0.

Serving the Hive-mind

Always had a feeling that individualism really doesn't matter? Have you always strived for the greater good of the colony? Want to live life mindlessly serving the almighty hive? Want to be an drone?

The new game Swarm!, currently under development for Google Glass, may soon fulfill all your dreams! Created by Daniel Estrada of the University of Illinois and Jonathan Lawhead of Columbia University, the game will connect Google Glass wearers to a virtual ant colony vying for prizes by solving real-world problems that vex traditional crowdsourcing efforts.

Similar to the pheromone trails laid down by ants, players leave virtual trails on a map as they move about. These behave like real ant trails, fading away with time unless reinforced by other people travelling the same route. Players will also be encouraged to seek out virtual resources to benefit their colony, such as food, and must avoid crossing the trails of other colony members. They can also monopolize a resource pool by taking photos of its real-world location. The photos and location data recorded by Google Glass could then be used to generate a map that anyone could use.

At a larger scale game data collected from Swarm!, and similar crowdsourcing applications, could help city planners optimize a transport system by having fine-grained data about where and when people tend to travel. For example, if the developers wanted to create a map of the locations of every power outlet in an airport, they could reward players with virtual food for every photo of a socket they took.

The team is currently seeking donations for Swarm! to get the project moving. Please check out their video below:

Fans Unlock Pink Floyd

Last Thursday night as an unexpected appeal emerged from Pink Floyd's twitter account:

"Help stream Wish You Were Here 1 million times to unlock Pink Floyd's catalogue on Spotify,"

Consequently, on Friday, June 14th Spotify launched a global campaign to engage Pink Floyd fans around their iconic song “Wish You Were Here” - the deal was once we hit 1 million streams, then the full catalogue would go live. Help was not long in coming. On Monday the target was passed, and the magic and rock legends honored their promises

Pink Floyd are otherwise not known to like the digital age. According to Rolling Stone the band sued their label EMI last year because the label where allowing individual songs to be sold on iTunes, instead of the whole album.

"It's a great day for fans of prog rock, but it's also a great day for younger fans who have yet to be really turned on to the magic of Pink Floyd," said Ken Parks, Spotify's chief content officer. "That's a lot of what this is about: bringing a new generation of fans to one of the biggest and most iconic bands in the world."

It's also a great day for crowdsourcing, since this is one major example of the power behind the digital masses!

Check it out now: http://spoti.fi/pinkFloyd