By Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly)

We're going to scale things back a little bit on this edition of "Crowdfunding 201" and do kind of a remedial refresher course on how not to run a crowdfunding campaign, or how to avoid basic issues on your crowdfunding campaign.

Do The...

By Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

A version of this story aired on NPR's Morning Edition.

The online video sharing site YouTube is this generation's MTV. Artists like Gotye and Psy have found mainstream success when their videos go viral. Yet the site is dominated by amateurs...

By Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

There has been a lot, and I mean a LOT of digital ink spilled on the issue of "who Kickstarter is for" in the past few weeks. Ever since actor-director Zack Braff turned to the crowdfunding site looking to fund his followup to...

By Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly)

It was inevitable.

After the Veronica Mars folks raised their $2 million in record time, you knew a similar project would come along. Hollywood, after all, is pretty good at taking what works and doing it over and over and over again until everyone...

By Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

While it can be daunting for some, I find myself loving the seemingly exponential emergence of new film distribution platforms.

Every few weeks it feels like a new contender emerges: VHX, Tugg, Seed & Spark... the list keeps growing.

By Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

The actual news out of Boston is still unfolding, yet it might be good to take a moment to come up for air and survey the media landscape. To ask just what this titanic storm of information is doing to our perception of...

By Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

Facebook held another big annoucement event today, this time for their Android make-over they're calling "Facebook Home".

Problem is: does anyone really care?

Every few months Facebook comes up with some new "revolutionary" experience: Timeline, Graph Search, the New Nu Gnu News...

by Nishat Kurwa

Silicon Valley may be the financial center of the tech industry, but lately San Francisco is earning a reputation as the heart and soul of it. Tech workers who don't want to live in the Valley's sprawling suburbs have migrated northward....

Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

To say that the arrival-- and swift success-- of Rob Thomas' Kickstarter campaign for a film based on his television show Veronica Mars has been controversial is putting it mildly.

Nearly every issue that people have with crowdfunding in general and Kickstarter in...

By Nishat Kurwa

Reflections from tech industry leaders like Twitter's Evan Williams and (the especially engaging) Chamath Palihapitiya were the banner events at the Launch Festival in San Francisco this week, but the energy that fueled the conference came from the inventive young founders debuting their startups at...

By: Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

Tugg, Inc. is an Austin, Texas based start-up that lets filmmakers and film fans book screenings at movie theaters with no real financial risk for anyone involved. Instead of buying out the theater, the promoter puts the film event up on...

by Nishat Kurwa

Rockets that launch commercial satellites and robots that manipulate cell phones are the sort of big, bold ideas that excite some of the Silicon Valley investors who addressed the opening of the sixth annual Launch Festival on Monday in San Francisco.

"In the (pitch) meeting, I want...

by Nishat Kurwa

Well, we were waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one.

About a week ago, we began seeing this interview circulate: a Vice writer talked to his friend, a young social worker in San Francisco's Tenderloin, about what it was like to...

By: Noah J. Nelson

Here's the audio podcast edition of our recent Google Hangout with director Marcie Hume. Join Lucas McNelly, Marcie and myself as we talk about her lastest project Where The Magic Happenshttp://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marciehume/where-the-magic-happens-a-new-documentary?ref=live a doc about the lives of stage magicians... and the successful Kickstarter...

By Noah J. Nelson (@noahjnelson)

It's no secret I'm a big fan of crowdfunding in general and Kickstarter in particular. As such I have waited, perhaps a bit impatiently, for Kickstarter to unleash a mobile app into the world.

Today they finally did just that, and...

By Ike Sriskandarajah

When it comes to raising money for the arts, Kickstarter has become the place to go. Since it launched in 2009, the crowd-funding site has successfully delivered over $400 million to creative projects, including three films currently up for Oscars. But for all of Kickstarter's...

By Noah Nelson

Time for the latest buzz about Twitter, the company.

Let's start with Mathew Ingram over at GigaOM:

According to a number of anonymous reports, Twitter is in the process of buying Bluefin Labs, an analytics company that specializes in broadcast media -- an acquisition...

By Lucas McNelly

It's a familiar scene to many filmmakers: they budget out their film, calling in favors left and right, then they launch their crowdfunding campaign and someone sends them an email that says, "Hey, I don't have any money to give, but I'd love to help." Invariably,...

By Noah Nelson

There's no other app worth talking about this week than Vine, the short form video sharing service that was released on an unsuspecting world by Twitter this past Thursday. It's already stirred up all kinds of attention and controversy.

There's a lot of potential here,...

by Nishat Kurwa

President Obama's address today focused on broad immigration form, but his platform on legal immigration has been informed by Silicon Valley notables who've focused on legislation that affects the status of foreign-born tech workers and entrepreneurs.

A group of high-power investors here has been pushing...