A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential, such as unicorns.
Seed money, also known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor puts capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term seed suggests that this is a very early investment, meant to support the business until it can generate cash of its own, or until it is ready for further investments. Seed money options include friends and family funding, seed venture capital funds, angel funding, and crowdfunding.
Pentalog is a privately owned business founded in 1993 by Frederic Lasnier in Orléans, France and now headquartered at Château des Hauts in La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin. The company expanded over the years to offices and delivery centers in Paris, North America, Romania, Republic of Moldova (Chisinau), Mexico (Guadalajara), Germany (Frankfurt), Vietnam (Hanoi), Switzerland (Geneva) and Singapore.
Minted is an online marketplace of premium design goods created by independent artists and designers. The company sources art and design from a community of more than 16,000 independent artists from around the world. Minted offers artists two business models for selling their goods - one in which Minted handles manufacturing and fulfillment and a second where the artists handles manufacturing and fulfillment.
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
Crowdcasting is the combination of broadcasting and crowdsourcing. The process of crowdcasting uses a combination of push and pull strategies first to engage an audience and build a network of participants and then harness the network for new insights. Those insights are then used to shape broadcast programming. These insights and concepts can include new product ideas, new service ideas, new branding messages, or even scientific breakthroughs. These insights are extracted from participants' submissions.
Crowdspring is an online marketplace for crowdsourced creative services.
Figure Eight was a human-in-the-loop machine learning and artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.
Throughout history, architects have often been chosen by setting up an architectural competition and awarding the commission on the basis of the most favoured design. With the advent of the internet, a similar process has been set up by a number of businesses offering small-scale competitions for mainly domestic projects. Like an architectural competition, contributors must register but their designs are judged anonymously, and only the winning design is paid a fee.
Tongal is a platform for content creation, used by studios, brands and talent worldwide. Founded in New York City in 2009," Tongal is now based in Santa Monica, California. The company maintains an online platform that connects businesses in need of creative work with an online community of writers, directors, and production companies.
Owler is an American Internet company headquartered in San Mateo, California. It crowdsources competitive insights by providing news alerts, company profiles, and polls and allows members to follow, track, and research companies in real time. The company was founded in 2011 and has over 3.5 million active users.
Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
Machine Shop co. is an American entertainment company that markets itself as a venture capital firm, event provider, supporter and lifestyle company. It was started as a music company by Linkin Park bandmates Mike Shinoda and Brad Delson in December 2012. Later on, it became a venture capital firm in January 2015. It was established as a joint company of music companies, "Chesterchaz Publishing" by "Chester Bennington", "Big Bad Mr. Hahn Music" by "Brad Delson" and "Joe Hahn", "Nondisclosure Agreement Music" by "Dave Farrell", "Rob Bourdon Music" by "Rob Bourdon" and "Kenji Kobayashi Music" by "Mike Shinoda". In an independent study released on August 14, 2015, CB Insights recognized "Machine Shop" as the seventh most invested company by any celebrity. The company reached the mark due to major investments in "Lyft", "Blue Bottle Coffee Company" and "Shyp".
Creads is a French company that developed and operates an online marketplace for graphic design and other creative services. Founded in 2008 by Julien Mechin and Ronan Pelloux, the company has 35 employees and a network of 50,000 freelance designers. The marketplace functions using a tendering process whereby freelancers subscribe to the site free of charge, then apply for projects posted by companies and/or individuals looking for creative services. Services from various types of freelancers are offered: graphic designers, webmasters, copywriters, illustrators, motion designers, etc...
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over US$34 billion was raised worldwide by crowdfunding.
Indus OS is an Indian smartphone application and content discovery platform based on Android, with the aim to unify users, developers and smartphone brands on a single platform and to create an Indian smartphone ecosystem.
99designs is a Melbourne, Australia, based company that operates a freelancer platform for connecting graphic designers and clients. The company was founded in 2008, and has a United States office in Oakland, California.
Crowdshipping, sometimes referred to as crowd logistics, applies the concept of crowdsourcing to the personalized delivery of freight. Crowdshipping can be conceived as an example of people using social networking to behave collaboratively and share services and assets for the greater good of the community, as well as for their own personal benefit.
