Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Crowd funding for dollars

By James de Rin - in London 

We live in exciting times. With every day passing the end game beckons to disrupt the banking system,  sometime in 2026, the payment system, our credit cards, banking, virtual currency, the block chain, or let's just call it "money" like the Pink Floyd song, as we know it and ultimately funding new projects with equity or loans for start ups, small businesses or in simple english "ideas". 

Who will win the financial arms race? The cyber punk futurists, the freaked out bankers, the block chain specialists, the venture capitalists or some one with a really high IQ and a Mensa membership who makes a simple mass adoption that's accepted by regulation (tricky) and the people that's you and me who actually adopt that app, mechanism, or start up. Snapchat is catching up with Facebook,  and you tube needs a complete reboot Netflix, Amazon prime, Hulu anyone?

Crowd Sourcing and Crowd Funding is littered with expendables like Quirky. It never pays to be first into the space. It's the mop ups that seem to get it right. They learn from other's expensive mistakes and refine, study and usually get lucky. Most success stories were not by design but by being in the right place at the right time. You don't even need an office anymore http://www.wework.com which seems to be replacing Regus with community space!

Facebook is now massive $117 - $120 a share but when it floated at $38 a share and dropped to $16 a share who knew. Only with mass adoption on the cellphone did Facebook get it right. Google is still getting there with mobile. My point is with Facebook you have your market already built. The next step with the block chain that trendy mechanism to reinvent secure contracts away from dark web bit coin exchanges and with R3 and now Chain in New York rebooting banking by digitising dollars into the block chain for the banking brands! We used to say dialing for dollars now it's digitising for dollars!

It's coming except it won't be instant, it will be stealth, it will crawl up on us by 2026 and by then it will have been accepted. Digitised banking for millennials on the block chain. 

Our idea is "Block chain equity crowd funding on Facebook, snapchat, what's app, you tube". I love the Bloomberg terminal ad mantra: any platform, anywhere! There is nothing to stop Facebook doing it themselves but they seem more focused on advertising dollars, virtual reality and competing with You tube videos when the biggest prize would be a Facebook bank, crowd funding dollars for projects. It's a Kickstarter meets Facebook play with equity on the block chain.  

Fundabrand.com coming soon...