We Want The Funds: A Crowdfunding Update

This week you can help one of Australia's favourite (mostly) non-Australian bands make their new album, help a movie about Kickstarter get funded through Kickstarter and see how crowdfunding can help a nation voice their dissent. This is some serious shit.

Name: Future Of The Left
Project: New album
Current Status: 1025 Pledges, 184% of goal.

Australia loves Future Of The Left, probably because we have exceptional taste and they are one of the (few) true great rock bands to come from the UK in recent years. So, even though they reached their PledgeMusic goal in less than a day, we feel they warrant a mention here.

As well as the fact we want to see them make as much money as possible, we also want you to see their PledgeMusic campaign video. Watch it now and keep watching it til the very end; it is nothing short of completely brilliant.

As far as perks go, they have an EP, a t-shirt, a screen print and the album and you can get various packages featuring those things dependent on your budget. Of course, if you have $16,000 and can get yourself to the UK then you can hang out with the band for a day, where they will likely pepper you with thinly veiled insults and let you beat them at table tennis.

As an aside, frontman Andy “Falco” Falkous has had plenty of twitter talk happening about the whole crowdfunding thing, as you'd expect, so if you're a bit of a nerd about this kind of thing then you might be interested in some of the chatter that has been happening over there.

Communications manager for Aussie crowdfunding service Pozible and Future Of The Left fan Reuben Acciano, engaged in a bit of back and forth about why the company he is a part of is a better platform than the one the band used. Falco wasn't exactly stoked about the push.

@reubenacciano I resent being sold anything, especially in such an instantly prickish way. Trouble someone else.

— future of the left (@shit_rock) May 30, 2013

Name: Jason Cooper and Jay Armitage
Project: Kickstarted: Documenting The Crowdfunding Revolution
Current Status: 183 pledges, 16.4% ($13,934) of $85,000 goal, 23 days remaining

Despite all the swish videos, personal perks and constant updates that crowdfunding encourages, you don't get much of a chance to see the actual real-life people who are behind these campaigns. You don't really feel the full weight of their emotion and their neuroses and just how make-or-break this fundraising is for them.

Kickstarted: Documenting The Crowdfunding Revolution comes at a perfect time. People are frequently making large amounts of money through their campaigns; it's new and we don't know how long it is going to last for. This could potentially be a very interesting piece of work not only now, but as future generations look at the early stages of what is still considered by many to be a very unique way of getting a project off the ground.

In other crowdfunding news this week:

-          GoFundMe – a platform that encourages small, personal campaigns – has bought the domain name crowdfunding.com for a reported $170,000.

-          Supporters of Turkish protestors have raised $75,000 in order to get an ad in the New York Times.

-          Microsoft have started a crowdfunding platform… They're doing it to try and get college students to buy their computers and are chipping in ten percent of the purchase price to everyone who uses it.

-          Gordon Burtch of the University of Minnesota, Anindya Ghose of New York University and Sunil Wattal of Temple University have presented a study on crowdfunding. Forbes has uploaded a video interview for anyone who might be interested.

Let us help you raise some cash!