Crowdfunding app launches on iPhone

Ioumusic: New Artist Crowdfunding App Launches

How Does It Compare To Other Fan Funding Sites?

IOUmusic, in a similar vein as other grassroots, crowdfunding applications such as Kickstarter and RocketHub, is a new donation website that's focused on assisting musicians and providing them with alternative means to fund their creative projects.

As well, they are positioning themselves as a way for fans to pay artists for music that they have obtained for free. The founders of the company state that while this is their first incarnation, as a crowdfunding app, they are open to evolution of the site as the needs and wishes of artists change. From the payments to the artist, garnered from their fans, IOUmusic takes a 10% cut.

Two Alternatives

According to Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, “Kickstarter charges a flat fee of 5%, but also passes along the Amazon Payments transactional fees (3%-5%) to the artists who use the platform, for a total fee anywhere between 8% and 10%. RocketHub charges a flat total fee of 8%." Thus, depending on your goals, there are the fees to consider, but sometimes one site just feels better than the other.
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ioumusic.com

Crowdsourcing - Dissonance Overload, Needs and "Innovation"

A close examination of the startups funded by Google alumni reveals that most of these "innovations" are parodies of innovation, designed to serve entirely contrived "needs" for mobile computing "crowdsourcing."

One "star" is the firm which created the game Tap Revenge for the iPhone and other mobile devices. This shining example of American "innovation" and technical prowess (entire new empires of technical innovation beckon from here) is raking in the vast sum of $1 million a month now.

Another "hot company" is Fan Bridge which makes software to manage one's online fan base. The site supposedly has 20 million users and is described as a "no-brainer" goldmine for vulture/venture capitalists.

FourSquare lets "friends" (in parentheses because the word has been so debased by online "friends", Friendster, "friend me," etc. that it has an ambiguous meaning now) share tips on local hotspots.

This is known as crowdsourcing, in which the audience/users provide the content for free and since there are so many voices contributing, the content embodies the "wisdom of crowds." In exchange for creating the content exploited by the "innovative" site, the users earn the right to be bombarded with adverts on their mobile devices.

The silly little detail which is not mentioned in this breathless account of "innovation" is that the vast majority of these "businesses" are based on precisely this same model: crowdsourcing provides content, and advertising provides the revenue stream because everyone already knows nobody will pay even $5 a month subscription for these sorts of proliferating "services."

After all, Yelp and others have already occupied this "space" for some time.

The unasked question in all this "innovation" based on "mobile computing services" is this: if people no longer have any disposable income, then exactly how effective will all those adverts be? Second question: Exactly how many parasitic services can be supported by online adverts? Yes, that "pie" is growing rapidly at the expense of traditional media (and standard Web banner ads), but it remains a tiny sliver of the economy (a few billions of dollars).
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Appswell Tests the Crowdsourcing Model for iPhone Apps

Last time I checked, there were 85,000 iPhone applications in Apple’s iTunes App Store, a number that seems to grow by thousands every week. But most of those apps were dreamed up by developers, not by average users. Now there’s a way for anyone with a bright idea for an iPhone app to submit it—and, if other people like the idea enough, to see it get made. It’s called Appswell, and it launched yesterday. The idea behind the Cambridge, MA-based startup, the brainchild of a young serial Web entrepreneur named Dan Sullivan, is to take advantage of the collective creativity of iPhone users to come up with the next great money-making app, and give everyone a chance to share in the proceeds. Anyone with an iPhone can submit an idea to Appswell or vote on other users’ ideas. Each month, the company will turn the most popular idea into an app, and reward the creator with a $1,000 cash prize and a stake in future sales.
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appswell.com

Crowdsourcing: New York City Wants You to Create an App For That

On Tuesday, New York City is rolling out the next phase of its NYC Big Apps competition, an initiative that will supply local programmers and developers with a stockpile of raw municipal data sets to build applications for the Web and mobile phones. Contestants will have access to more than 170 data sets supplied by over 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts. “Crowdsourcing is a very hot topic in the Gov 2.0 space right now,” said Kristy Sundjaja, vice president of media, green, and emerging technology at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is co-sponsoring the competition.
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Crowdsourcing coming to iPhone apps, big time

If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from. In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps. Users of the Google Maps iPhone app can get real-time traffic flow data that is based on the passive participation of other users. This is an example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that is a growing trend, especially on iPhones.
Which means, of course, that the application itself is crowdsourced...
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