Tag Archives: funding

The Aerial Bold Project

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“Aerial Bold : Kickstart the Planetary Search for Letterforms!” is the 11th Kickstarter project that I funded. The project was launched by Benedikt Groß & Joey Lee on October 14, 2014. After two weeks, 100% was funded by 480 bakers. At the end 569 backers pledged 11.492 $ to help bring this project to life.

Aerial Bold is the first map and typeface of the earth. The project is literally about reading the earth for letterforms, or alphabet shapes, written into the topology of buildings, roads, rivers, trees, and lakes. To do this, Benedikt Groß and Joey Lee traversed the entire planet’s worth of satellite imagery and developed the tools and methods necessary to map these features hiding in plain sight.

On March 8, 2016, the results were finally presented. The entire letterform database has been made available as a usable dataset for any art – design – science – textual project. Selected letterforms have been converted into a truetype – opentype font format that can be imported into any word processor.

The results of the project are presented at the Aerial Bold Project website. An embedded typewriter allows to enter text with the different fonts :  Satellite, Buildings, Suburbia, Provence. The size, offset, background and location of the fonts can be selected.

Aerial Bold

Aerial Bold Typewriter : Satellite font, Hamburg, size 150, offset 0, red background

Additional information about the process, data, fonts and credits are available at the project website. A catalog and posters complete the documentation. Below are some pictures of my name written with the Aerial Bold fonts.

Aerial Bold Satellite Font

Aerial Bold Satellite Font

Aerial Bold Buildings Font

Aerial Bold Buildings Font

Aerial Bold Suburbia Font

Aerial Bold Suburbia Font

Aerial Bold Provence Font

Aerial Bold Provence Font

Kickstarter projects

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Last update : October 6, 2018

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects. It’s a crowdfunding platform for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Since the launch in 2009, more than 12 million people have pledged over 2.8 Billion dollars, funding more than 118.000 creative projects. Project creators set a funding goal and a deadline. If people like a project, they can pledge money to make it happen. Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing : projects must reach their funding goals to receive any money. To date, 36% of projects have reached their funding goals. Backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not to profit financially. Instead, project creators offer rewards to thank backers for their support.

A Kickstarter app for mobiles is available at the AppStore.

I am a backer for the following projects :

Kickstarter Account Page

Kickstarter Account Page with backed projects

Here is a list of further projects which I consider very interesting :

Links

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing

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Last update : September 24, 2013

Crowdfunding is the application of the Crowdsourcing concept to the collection of funds through small contributions from many parties in order to finance a particular project or venture. Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

The First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing will be held November 7-9, 2013 in Palm Springs, California, USA.

Crowdfunding is alternately called crowd financing, equity crowdfunding or crowd-sourced fundraising.

An early precursor of the crowdfunding business model was Praenumeration, a common business practice in the 18th century book trade in Germany.

Crowdfunding is not only used to fund a startup company (equity-based crowdfunding), but also to create artworks such as music, theater, dance, films, literature and technology.

Crowdfunding platforms bring together the project initiator and the crowd. They create the necessary organizational systems and conditions for resource integration among all the players to take place. There are over 450 crowdfunding platforms with fundamental differences in the services provided. A comparison of crowd funding services is available at Wikipedia.

Some examples of crowdfunding platforms are listed below :

Since soliciting investments from the general public is often illegal in most countries, unless the opportunity has been filed with an appropriate securities regulatory authority, traditional crowdfunding platforms treat funds as donations. In the U.S. the crowdfunding exemption movement has been successful in 2012 with the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act or JOBS Act,  a law intended to encourage funding of small businesses by easing various securities regulations.

In the past capital for startup companies has mainly been provided by business angels (also known as angel investors), in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. An increasing number of angel investors organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share research and pool their investment capital, as well as to provide advice to their portfolio companies.

Some angel networks in Luxembourg and the Greater Region are listed hereafter :

  • Luxembourg Business Angel Network (LBAN)
  • Seed4Start
  • EBAN (pan-European representative for the early stage investor community)

Here are some links to selected crowdfunding projects :