If they wanted to, Kickstarter could be one the biggest and best platform for startup crowd funding. They have the infrastructure to capture the promise of the JOBS act/ crowd funding act
Entrepreneurs are creatives. it's no different than the pebble smartwatch or light table project, except you are offering stock in the company instead of physical rewards.
That's all the difference in the world. One is a finite project where you act as a patron and get something in return no matter what (assuming the creator doesn't fall off the face of the earth). If you fund a startup, most of the time your money doesn't have any sort of return.
In particular they're very clear on the finite-project angle. You can't just raise funding for your art studio, but for some specific piece of art or project your studio is doing. A startup can already use Kickstarter to fund a specific project that way, if they want (several game studios have). But they can't just raise funds for the company "in general", which I don't think is something Kickstarter will be looking to change.
That said, I'm currently involved in a Kickstarter project in Design and it occurred to me that since the tech-side seems to draw in the most attention/funding these days--not true when I opened my project/account--, isn't confining this platform to the US counter-productive? Thus stagnating the progress of current or potentially new viable innovations.
If anyone is interested I'm seriously considering open to accepting applications for potential tech projects within Europe, S. America and Asia that want but are unable to use KS, provided they meet certain criteria, for a nominal fee in an opportunity to advance this avenue before Grinda and his ilk clone it throughout the World. Its my free Market solution to ensure that Kickstarter remains the crowd sourcing platform of choice.
If you know anyone in need of such a service tell them to post their email/link here and we can get in touch to get the ball rolling. No promises made, of course, but I think its a short-term solution to the current geographical issue.
Without a doubt the proliferation of accelerators means a lot more opportunity for startups. But keeping in mind that these are for-profit enterprises is critical to success.
I imagine that the app will stay separate in the app store and be its own network, but that photos will also be pushed much harder to FB network and they will attempt to connect data about IG and FB users so they can sell ads against both.
Can someone with experience tell me a little bit about the dashboard AWS provides to clients and why it would be worth paying for an additional service to manage the cloud?
> Can someone with experience tell me a little bit about the dashboard AWS provides to clients and why it would be worth paying for an additional service to manage the cloud?
It's really, really complicated. That's partly because I don't think Amazon is particularly good at UI, but largely because AWS lets you do so much. They have taken things that have traditionally been sold together and split them all apart (IP addresses, compute, storage). Heck, they even sell elastic network interfaces now! Also, AWS was largely designed to be controlled through APIs (and that's how the heavyweight customers use it), so there's not much incentive to make the UI good.
But most customers don't need that level of control, yet they're using AWS to run their apps anyways, probably because they have the most market recognition. Now they have to deal with the complexity but without reaping the benefits, which is rather unpleasant. Hence the need for additional services to help them manage it all.
I think you make a great point about the AWS brand. I notice a lot of startups using it because everyone else does, not because they have shopped around to find the best fit for their company.
Using the standard/dominant solution is not a bad way of making a choice in a market that is still uncertain and not stable. When there is so much uncertainty, it is not about which cloud provider is going to give me more performance or capacity per dollar, but which one is going to be around a couple of years from now or going to evolve to meet your needs. AWS just keeps churning out new services and functionality while everybody else tends to be stuck on basic starting/stopping/resizing VMs functionality
The AWS dashboard is a great tool if you're a cloud engineer; it's technical but necessarily so.
As the CTO of OpDemand, I can tell you first-hand that users are willing to pay for a simplified and streamlined AWS management process. Our users want a Heroku-like experience, but they don't want to give up control of their underlying infrastructure.
With that in mind, we focus on tight GitHub integration, a sleek UI (backbone.js/socket.io) and providing a toolbar with 5 dead-simple actions: start, stop, deploy, clone and destroy. We charge for our tool because we save AWS users time and money.
“The process of building software is getting cheaper and cheaper,” said Borthwick.”The production buzzwords of our era — ‘betas,’ ‘agile development,’ and ‘pivots’ — are all an outgrowth of micro-development, which makes it less expensive to build more. As the cost of building and operating software-based businesses decreases, increasing value will accrue to design.”
That's a scary thought, but I don't think developers are going to be commoditized anymore than designers. Web templates are just as plentiful as API
