The US Senate passed amended legislation to allow legalized "crowdfunding" today. The CROWDFUND Act (Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure) was approved by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio, 73-26.
With the act's passage, companies would be required to use SEC-approved crowdfunding platforms that provide investor protection. This is an addition to the House of Representatives' JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act. Both bills have bipartisan support, with the main business concern being low investment barriers could encourage fraud. Hopefully, the Senate's amendments address that exact issue.
Under the new legislation, yearly crowdfunding is capped at $1 million per year for businesses. Investors will also have their contributions capped based on income, with some people only allowed a maximum of $2,000. The House and Senate bills have yet to be reconciled and signed, but crowdfunding outlets like Crowdfunder already claim $13.55 million is waiting to be committed to more than 900 companies.
Personally I love the new WP Media uploader, however it seems to have been creating trouble for a large number of our contributors. While there are no shortage of sites providing a simple code snippet to disable the old Flash based uploader in versions of WordPress prior to the 3.3 overhaul, we were unable to find any existing solutions to apply a similar tweak to the new media uploader released with WP Sonny.
To resolve this, we added the below code snippet to our custom functions file, which forces the media uploader to default to the browser uploader in 3.3, while still allowing access to the new uploader on demand:
add_action('pre-html-upload-ui', 'sw_switch_to_browser_uploader');
function sw_switch_to_browser_uploader()
{
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function($, exports) {
$('document').ready(function() {
var divs = $('#plupload-upload-ui, #html-upload-ui');
var links = $('a').filter(function() { return $(this).text() == 'Switch to the new uploader' || $(this).text() == 'browser uploader'});
links.click(function() {
divs.each(function() {
if ($(this).css('display') == 'none') $(this).show();
else $(this).hide();
});
});
$('#plupload-upload-ui').hide();
$('#html-upload-ui').show();
});
})(jQuery, window);
</script>
<?php
}
Seeing as how this was a fairly popular topic pre-3.3, we’ve bundled this as a plugin for easy implementation and made it available here.
If you’ve come up with your own interesting tweaks to the new media uploader in WP Sonny, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Editor’s Note: Charlie Warzel is a Staff Writer for InTheCapital, a Streetwise Media Property covering SXSW. Follow him on twitter at @cwarzel
So far one of our favorite panels here at SXSW has been today’s, “How Social Media Imperils Political Parties” panel with some serious DC stalwarts, including two amazing entrepreneurs with DC-based startups. Joining the New York Time Magazine’s Matt Bai were Mark McKinnon of Hill + Knowlton Strategies, Joe Trippi of Trippi & Associates, Nathan Daschle of Ruck.us, and Marci Harris of POPVox.
The conversation veered in many directions tackling issues like how parties can adapt, how harmful social media actually is, and how the political environment is changing. The short answer: Political parties are losing steam fast and may find themselves arguing their way to their own irrelevance. The proof: of the panelists, only one (Trippi) is registered to this party. And all of them (excluding Bai) have worked heavily in politics and government.
After the panel, we caught up with a few of the panelists and asked them the same question, ‘We’re going to see a generational transformation where more tech savvy people will be entering politics and important roles in government. Do you think this can save political parties?’ Here’s what they told us.
“You can save these political parties, but I guess it depends on what saving means and they wont ask of from the voters. Depending on what you ask from voters you have to give something in return. I think if they allow for flexibility and for individuals to have a voice inside the party they could continue to exist. Right now there is just no tolerance for that kind of thing.”
“In some form, but not essentially the way there were. The generational impulse is so anti-institutional…its much more of a free agent mentality. i think the trend of independence is real and doesn’t reflect a political view as much as a cultural view. I think they don’t want to be locked into an institution. Obama is a great example of this…i’ve described it as ‘he’s trying to remodel the house but his in laws still live in the back bedroom. Its been so weird for him to interact with the congressional leadership which is all a decade older than him. Obama was right on the cusp of that generation that almost grew up digitally and I think that he really existed as a personal vehicle more than a party vehicle. i think that’s the generational transformation that will have the most high impact. I don’t think the idea of a party can survive quite the way it has for other generations.”
Joe Trippi, Founder & President, Joe Trippi & Associates:
“They’re probably going to go dead. It’s like I said you had ABC, CBS, & NBC, and no cable. You used to have Coke, Pepsi and 7-Up. Period. There’s only one reason for hundreds of years that your political choice has been limited, it is because the power structure in the country wants to keep it that way. They’re loosing their ability to do that and who knows, it might be a dystopia, but its happening.”
Hugh Pickens writes with a link to Atlantic writer Mark Bowden's account of how one gambler has cleaned up against casinos: "[B]lackjack player Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City's Tropicana casino after previously taking the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. How did Johnson do it? For one thing, Johnson is an extraordinarily skilled blackjack player. 'He plays perfect cards,' says Tony Rodio. But that's not enough to beat the house edge. As good as Johnson is at playing cards, his advantage is that he's even better at playing the casinos. When revenues slump as they have for the last five years at Atlantic City, casinos must rely more heavily on their most prized customers, the high rollers who wager huge amounts and are willing to lessen its edge for them primarily by offering discounts, or 'loss rebates.' When a casino offers a discount of, say, 10 percent, that means if the player loses $100,000 at the blackjack table, he has to pay only $90,000."
No one has ever built a nuclear reactor at a weekend hackathon, or on a bus to SXSW. In an age of lean startups and hyper-focus on capital efficiency, you might think nuclear power is anathema to the startup and venture world. But you’d be wrong.
Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, both nuclear engineering PhD students at MIT, started working on Transatomic Power, a nuclear reactor design startup, back in 2010, and incorporated it last year. The company’s product is called the Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) which they claim is not only safer than traditional nuclear reactors, but generates power using the radioactive waste of existing nuclear plants.
That means the design addresses two of the big questions around nuclear power: waste disposal and safety (the third is cost).
The business model is to license the design of reactors, not to build plants, which is an absurdly capital intensive endeavor. So a company like Transatomic can stay relatively lean. I spoke with Dewan, Transatomic’s CEO, about what it’s like to run a nuclear reactor startup, and why it’s actually a good time for the industry.
“We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do after we graduated,” she tells me, noting that most nuclear engineering PhD’s go into academia or to work for a National Lab. “We wanted to do something exciting with nuclear, and we realized the only way we could do that is to have a startup of our own.”
Leslie Dewan, Transatomic CEO
And, according to Lewan, it’s a great time to be running a nuclear startup. Despite last year’s Fukushima disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently approved two new reactors, the first to receive licenses since 1978. And the environment abroad is better in many cases, she tells me.
One of the things Dewan finds most exciting is how much more room for innovation still exists in the nuclear industry.
“There’s so much more to be invented in it,” she says. “We’re kind of going into this uncharted space.”
But they’re not alone. Nuclear startups including TerraPower, General Fusion and Hyperion have raised tens of millions, including from prominent investors like Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates.
Though there are a handful of funded nuclear startups out there, startup culture remains somewhat foreign to the nuclear engineering community.
“People in nuclear engineering PhD programs don’t think about nuclear startups as being a career path after graduation and that perception I believe is changing just because of the growing visibility of other nuclear startups that exist in the U.S.,” Dewan says.
Nonetheless, she credits her department at MIT for being supportive of their effort.
As with any startup, one of the biggest challenges Transatomic will face as it tries to grow will be hiring. But the crunch for nuclear engineers makes hiring a Ruby developer look easy. Most of the nuclear engineering talent is locked up in academia and labs, and the demographics of the industry skew older, a legacy Dewan attributes to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island that is only recently starting to change.
Dewan admits that a startup in the nuclear industry faces extra challenges, but believes that the market is ripe for disruption.
“Compared to other startups, especially computer science startups, this definitely requires more of an infrastructure,” Dewan admits. “Fukushima brought much greater focus on the safety problem with old conventional nuclear reactors,” she says. “I think that it might be the case that Fukushima will push the industry toward more innovative, safer designs.”
See Dewan, Massie, and advisor and MIT professor Dr. Richard Lester present at TEDx:
Want your own copy of that beautiful statue in the park? If you have an iPad, you can start making your own right then and there with a little help from 3D printing and Autodesk, the company best known for making drafting software like AutoCAD.
It works like this: You’re in the park with your iPad, and you see the statue. Using a free app called 123D Catch (available April) and the iPad’s camera, you snap photo after photo of it, adjusting your position slightly each time (Autodesk recommends taking between 50-70 shots, circling the subject twice at different angles). The software then assembles your 2D photos of the statue to create a 3D model.
Once you’ve got your model, you can upload it to an online account at Autodesk’s 123D site, where you can tweak it, share it and even get it created via a 3D printer. Of course, if you have your own 3D printer (like a MakerBot), then you can “print” it on your own, though the size of the finished product will obviously be limited by your equipment.
There are other issues as well. The kinds of things you’ll be able to capture and print is very limited: The object needs to be completely stationary, and you can’t change the lighting since the software uses parallax mapping to create the 3D model (so no flashes). You’ll also need to take some shots above the object to get a full rendering, so those taller statues are probably out.
Then there’s the issue of copyrights and whether or not it’s even ethical to duplicate something like a sculpture via 3D printing. As a one-shot decoration for personal use, it’s probably OK, but if you were to print out several and start giving them away as gifts or selling them, it’s verging into a very gray area.
Still, if you take a step back and see what this is — just take some photos of an object with an iPad and soon afterward you have your own near-identical copy — well, that’s about as close to a duplicator ray that you’re going to get in 2012.
Do you think 3D printing is something you’d ever use? What for? Let us know in the comments.
Halo ODST Soldier
This soldier from Halo was printed from a single piece of material on an Objet printer.
Many people believe that Democrats are the more tech-savvy party in the U.S., but Twitter-happy Republicans in Congress are turning that theory on its head.
Republicans in Congress use Twitter “more effectively” than Democrats, according to a recent study from Edelman. Tweeting members of the Grand Old Party not only saw more retweets, engagement and amplification than their Democratic brethren, but their tweets were also more substantive — Republicans were 3.5 times as likely to mention specific legislation and they included 52% more links and almost 60% more multimedia than Democrats in their tweets.
Edelman’s deep dive into Congressional tweeting habits went even further in an effort to determine the “best practices” for tweeting Senators and Representatives. The study highlighted Senate Republicans, who got the most mentions and had the highest “influence” among Congress, according to its analysis.
The study also looked at the timing of Congressional tweets. When are Congress’ thumbs firing away? Usually when members aren’t in the building, but they don’t have a problem tweeting away while in session, either. However, few tweets are sent immediately before or after a vote. It also found that members who tweeted in the morning and later in the week were most likely to be mentioned by others.
There’s also a great deal of across-the-aisle tweeting happening in Congress: about 49% of Twitter handles in the House and Senate reached across the “virtual aisle” by mentioning the handles of counterparts in the opposite party — and those aren’t all political jabs sent over the Twittersphere, either. 51% of those tweets were “collaborative” in nature.
Regionally, members from the western part of the U.S. saw the fastest follower growth and received the most mentions. Congressional tweeters from the Midwest received the most replies, while those in the Northeast got the most retweets and amplification.
What can Congressional tweeters do to improve their tweets? Edelman composed a list of the “Yeas and Nays of the Congressional Twitterverse:”
1. Tweet regularly
2. Tweet links to relevant and compelling content
3. Use hashtags
4. Tweet about specific legislation
5. Retweet other users
6. Be strategic with replies
7. Tweet early in the day
8. Tweet during the latter half of the work week
9. Don’t be afraid to tweet over the weekend
10. Tweet while in session
Edelman complied a list of 456 Congressional Twitter handles for use in the study. That was made up of 89 Senators and 367 Representatives, of which 194 were Democrats, 260 were Republicans and two were Independents. Analysis was done by Simply Measured from Sept. 2, 2011 through Dec. 25, 2011.
Do any of the study’s results surprise you? What do you think of Edelman’s advice for Twitter users in Congress? Let us know in the comments below.
The TiVo iOS app has been updated v1.9, and whether you're on iPad or iPhone there's a slew of new fixes and tweaks available. On both platforms, the Facebook login has been streamlined, there's To Do List / Season Pass management for Series3 DVRs, ability to create a WishList search and more. The iPad version features a new full-screen Browse UI (shown above) and collapsible folders while the iPhone receives high res retina display quality images. Zatz Not Funny mentions those higher quality pics will come to the iPad as well in the next few weeks, while TiVo's blog post mentions all of these features will arrive in its Android app(s) this summer. We say apps plural, because that's including a specialized Tablet version due in the springtime. For now however, the changelogs for the iOS versions are available at the links below.
President Obama’s online efforts during his 2008 bid for the White House revolutionized digital campaigns — and if Nielsen’s latest numbers are any indication, his team is working hard for a repeat in 2012.
According to a recent Nielsen analysis, President Obama’s campaign pulled in more unique voting-age visitors than the four remaining Republican candidates’ sites combined throughout January. In total, Obama’s site received 4.2 million unique visitors over the age of 18 during the month:
A deeper dive into Nielsen’s data offers revealing demographic data for Obama’s and the Republican candidates’ sites in January:
Rick Santorum’s campaign site got the highest percentage of female voters (60%), while male visitors dominate the pages of Ron Paul (56%) and Newt Gingrich (51%).
Ron Paul, the oldest of the Republican contenders, has drawn plenty of the youngest visitors: more than 30% are less than 34 years old. More than 50% of the eyeballs on Obama’s site are older than 50, and people aged 50-64 are the most concentrated age group on his site.
Gingrich’s online audience is among the most wealthy and educated — more than 25% earn at least $100,000 annually, and 50% have at least a four-year degree.
Finally, Mitt Romney’s campaign had the highest percentage of Hispanic visitors (17%).
Do any of these results surprise you? Sound off in the comments below.
blackbearnh writes "Forums and chat groups are letting fans organize and discuss their favorite shows with increasing ease, but what happens when the writers and producers of TV shows start paying attention? An article in today's Christian Science Monitor takes a look at how the production staff of recent shows has interacted with their fan base, and how the fans are having an increasing influence on not only the popularity, but also the plot and characters."