Cool Thing Of The Day: Venture Capital Gets Social

I just read about an interesting project on a really interesting site, and more than either one alone, the combination of the two inspired me to post.

First, I'll tell you about the site. It's called Kickstarter, and it's founded upon a few core principles.


Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands.
Project creators inspire people to open their wallets by offering smart, fun, and tangible rewards (products, benefits, and experiences).
Kickstarter projects are efforts by real people to do something they love, something fun, or at least something of note. These stories unfold through blog posts, pics, and videos as people bring their ideas to life.

Oh, and one last one -- Project creators keep 100% ownership. So, in addition to "disintermediating" the venture capital model, Kickstarter also turns the model on its head.

The second piece is the project I just read about -- Diaspora. The project creators describe their idea for an open-source, distributed, privacy-aware social networking application like this:

We are four talented young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute trying to raise money so we can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data.

Even if it goes nowhere (which, considering the fact that they exceeded their $10,000 funding goal by, oh, a little more than $190,000), it's refreshing to see a bunch of (really young) social web programmers making the point that online social sharing and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive -- and then backing that point up with some hard work.

View more information here:
http://www.joindiaspora.com/

http://neilperkin.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d4dc653ef013480ecb248970c-500wi