Have you ever had an idea that you know without a shadow of a doubt will be the next big thing? Have you ever seen yourself coming up with the next idea that will be sure to shake the earth? If you said yes to any of the above questions, one of your main problems will be to find funding like any new business. Symbid.com attempts to use crowd-funding just like kickstarter.com to help those brilliant or not individuals to raise capital. If everyone had the amount of money that they needed to turn their ideas into reality, then we can be sure that we would be having a lot more businesses in our world. How is this possible?

In an attempt to solve this problem for the entrepreneur, symbid.com offers a unique feature where you can post all your bright ideas. The process does not end there, you; the entrepreneur will still need to get funding for your projects. So how do you get the money you need to kick start your idea? Posting your idea on symbid.com is just the first step. The next thing that you will need to do is to find investors who will invest in your bright idea. After you have posted your idea in symbid.com, anyone who is interested in your idea will be able to invest in it with as low as two euros to as much as they would wish to invest. Through funding the investor becomes a shareholder of the promising business opportunity. With symbid.com the entrepreneur surely comes out smiling; his or her idea is given a lease of life through crowd sourcing and crowd funding. Founded by Korstiaan Zandvliet symbid.com surely helps out many entrepreneurs with funding for their projects and ideas. Korstiaan Zandvliet saw the need for a way in which entrepreneurs would find funding for their great projects. If there is one thing that is absolutely great about symbid.com is that as long as an idea is great, you can be sure that you will find the much needed funding.

If you are wondering whether or not there is another similar crowd funding provider, then I can inform you that there are other providers such as Maxclass.com or kickstarter.com  which is in one way or another similar to symbid.com, and a few others. By the look of things, symbid.com has nothing to worry about when it comes to competition. With its firm grip on the market, you as an entrepreneur can be sure to get the funding that you need and your dream will finally see the light of day. What symbid.com actually tries to achieve is crowd funding for the great ideas that many people have. Thanks to this principle, we will be seeing many bright ideas being birthed.

As for my opinion on the potential that symbid.com has and how its future is likely to shape up, I can only say that many entrepreneurs and many investors have been waiting for such a platform, but some competitors are already very well positionned. A platform where they can share their ideas with the world, on the part of the entrepreneur and where investors can find the right projects which they can invest in is a crowing trend. We can be sure be seeing a lot of changes in the way businesses are created and the number of businesses will surely be on the rise.

In conclusion, there is a lot for us to see from symbid.com. We can be sure that we will see a lot of ideas being given life by symbid.com and thanks to symbid.com, you can be sure we will see great ideas coming to life. We can only thank Korstiaan Zandvliet for seeing the problem that many face when trying to kick off their ideas. With crowd sourcing and now crowd funding, your idea will finally find life. The only thing that you need to do is to dream more, you can be sure to find the much needed funding with symbid.com.

One of the startups previously talked on smartideabox.com is currently seeking funding on Symbid. Sellanapp.com

Credit cards are a convenient way to pay for goods or services on the internet. Unfortunately, the use of credit cards online presents a number of risks. First, not everyone on the internet has good intentions. There are spoof sites that masquerade as well known legitimate brands but whose main intention is to harvest credit card information from unsuspecting users.

Second is the risk from hackers who penetrate the defences of ecommerce sites and steal customer credit card information. Once your credit card or bank information is in the wrong hands, you have no alternative but to cancel your card or close your account and order a new card or open a new account.

Mobino is a new online payment system that removes the need for buyers to provide their credit card information when making a purchase. Buyers need only register on Mobino.com once. During registration, the buyer provides their bank details to Mobino as well as their mobile phone number. Mobino.com does not release this information to merchants.

So if Mobino.com does not give merchants this information, how then does the system then work? Transactions are hinged upon a unique token number that is assigned to the merchant’s product. To pay for the product the buyer uses their phone to make a voice call to Mobino. During the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) call, the first prompt will require the buyer to key in the token number as indicated on the merchant’s website.

If the token number provided is correct, the IVR confirms the amount the buyer will be paying for if they choose to proceed. The next prompt is for the buyer to key in their secret PIN code. Once the PIN code is authenticated, the transaction is confirmed and the payment executed. From start to finish, the entire transaction can be completed in a matter of seconds

Mobino’s strength does not only lie in the removal from the equation of buyer credit card information disclosure. There’s more. For instance, because it uses IVR, one does not need to have a smart phone to use it. This aspect in particular creates an opportunity for Mobino to get a foothold in the fast growing emerging economies where smart phones are still out of reach for most of the population but where ordinary phones are widely used.

That said, this is not the first ecommerce payment system that seeks to eliminate the need for exchanging credit card information between buyer and seller. PayPal is probably the best known online payment system that hides a user’s banking information during a transaction. In fact, apart from paying via credit card, PayPal is in many ways considered the de facto online payment standard.

Even though Mobino uses an IVR system as opposed to a completely web based technology like PayPal, Mobino will at some level inevitably have to compete with the well-oiled PayPal juggernaut – a tough proposition.

Related articles

• Smart phones as credit cards: Will Visa finally let Americans start paying for everything by phone? (slate.com)
• Why Credit Cards Are Not the Future of Online Payment (mashable.com)
• Paypal Is About To Get A Bruising From Facebook And Square (techcrunch.com)
• American Express Takes on PayPal With Serve (mashable.com)
• Square eliminates its credit card transaction fee (venturebeat.com)

While ecommerce is an all encompassing term for transactions that take place over the internet,social commerce refers to transactions that are triggered by or conducted over a social networking platform. Some have considered social commerce to be the next natural step in the Web 2.0 evolution.

And this is not unfathomable. Facebook, the undisputed king of social media, now has a user base that exceeds the population of every other country on earth except China and India. Businesses that can successfully tap into this vast market will no doubt have a leg up over their competition.

Already, there are a number of social commerce applications on Facebook. The current leader is Payvment. Since it was launched in November 2009, Payvment has grown to have over 60,000 brands, merchants and celebrities that use the service to sell their products on Facebook.

Payvment tackles one nagging problem that has bedevilled payment solutions residing outside Facebook – the need for Facebook users to be redirected to a different site in order to complete the transaction. With Payvment, everything runs from within Facebook. Users view and pay for the product without ever leaving the social networking site.

Payvment’s advantage over many other payment solutions on Facebook is in the Open Cart Network. Ordinarily, most payment services only allow your shopping cart to contain the goods of one vendor. In other words, you have to pay before you can move to another store – you cannot shop in different stores and do one final payment for all.

That is now possible with Payvment’s Open Cart Network. As the name suggests, Open Cart allows you to carry your items across as many Payvment-enabled stores as you would like before you make a single payment to all the retailers you bought from at the end of your shopping.

Payvment allows you to search for a product not just in the Payvment-store you are currently on but also conduct a Facebook-wide search. The Facebook-wide search will check for the product in every Facebook store running on Payvment.

Payvment is still on free public beta. Though Payvment’s founder has admitted that at some point they will start to levy a fee for the service, merchants that create a store during the current beta phase will still continue to enjoy the service for free when Payvment starts charging new entrants.

Payvment’s greatest hurdle will be to convince retailers to get on a Facebook-centric payment service when other major non-Facebook online payment service providers have or are already rolling out Facebook APIs. Why be on two payment services (e.g. Payvment and say, PayPal) when you can be on one?

Unless Facebook social commerce experiences dramatic and exponential growth, Payvment will be at a disadvantage against the major general payment solutions that have Facebook APIs.

Related articles

• Payvment Brings A Social, Virtual Shopping Mall To Facebook (techcrunch.com)
• 4 Ways to Set Up a Storefront on Facebook (mashable.com)
• 5 Ways Retailers Are Winning Big With Facebook Commerce (mashable.com)
• How to Monetize Social Media (inc.com)
• Beetailer Lets Ecommerce Web Stores Easily Import Products to a Facebook Page Storefront (insidefacebook.com)

If you have ever tried to set up an ecommerce-ready website, you will agree that one of the most difficult parts of the process is identifying and settling on a suitable credit card processor. And the problem is not because of a lack of credit card processors. On the contrary, the difficulty stems from the fact that there are far too many credit card processors to choose from and the near impossibility of comparing the processors on an apples-to-apples basis.

If you have been in this kind of predicament, Feefighters.com promises to make the search for a credit card processor far easier than it is when one is using the traditional approach. Feefighters.com uses a ‘reverse auction’ approach. All you need to do is provide certain key information about your business and the credit card processors in turn submit their bids to get your account. The Feefighter.com portal uses a standard structural format for all the bids thus allowing you to make a fairly accurate assessment and comparison of the real cost of each card processor’s bid.

Feefighters.com is fast. Keying in the details of your business can take less than 5 minutes to do. The details customers are required to provide include business name & address, owner name(s) & address(es), monthly transaction volume, average value of each transaction and the proportion of sales via different channels (over the phone, mail order, online, in-person).

Bids for your business from matched, prequalified bidders are available immediately you submit the details about your business. Other than speed, Feefighters.com also provides substantial cost savings. Since its official launch in the spring of 2009, Feefighters.com claims to have saved users of the service an average of 40% of the costs of credit card processing. Feefighters.com is free – the site only receives payment from the card processor when a customer signs up.

To ensure the protection of customers, all credit card processors cleared to bid on Feefighters.com must commit to certain core principles. These include transparent pricing (no hidden fees), comprehensive statements of the customer’s account for the duration of the contract and waiver of all cancellation fees. Feefighters.com also conducts an independent assessment of each credit card processor before the processor is allowed on the bidders’ roster.

When a customer selects a processor from the bids received, this does not mean that they have entered into a contract. Rather, this is interpreted as consent by the customer to Feefighters.com to provide the customer’s contact information to the credit card processor. The customer and processor must still go through the process of completing paperwork that signifies the establishment of the contract. Note that customers are under no obligation to select a winning bidder and they will not be charged if they do not.

There is little doubt that Feefighters.com has developed a business model that has significant potential. Neither credit card processing companies that bid on the site nor the customers incur any cost before the contract is finalised. And even then, it is only the card processor that pays a fee to Feefighters.com, something that card processors will ordinarily be glad to do as a cost of getting more business.

Related articles

• FeeFighters – Make credit card processors bid for your business (feefighters.com)
• How FeeFighters saved startups $50 million a year in credit card fees (thestartupfoundry.com)
• Apple Square sallies forth from stores (go.theregister.com)
• Top Dying Industries, and lessons for your startup (feefighters.com)
• Square Drops $0.15 Fee for Credit Card Purchases (mashable.com)

Why? one of the main reason is that it’s not real money and people don’t treat like real money. It’s not easy to spend and it expires…yes real money can be spent everywhere and doesn’t expire. This is the main reason why giftcards are of great intrest for companies. According to the Corporate Executive Board Tower Group in Harvard Business Review April 2011, The amount of money lost by US costumers on unredeemed giftcards is of a whooping 2.5 Billions Dollars Lost every year. It’s basically free profit for the card issuers. In 2007, this loss was as high as $8 billion.

How can we come up with an idea to make costumers benefit a maximum from those cards and stop those giant companies taking it from our pockets. Well I’ve identified 2 companies that are around the same concept.

“buying unwanted cards at a cheaper price and reselling them with a margin”

It’s beneficial the card seller because he would not have been able to get anything from it and the re-buyer because he gets to by card for cheaper.

The First company is GiftCardRescue.com who was featured on US TV show Shark Tank. here is a video on how they work.

The second one is Cardpool.

they claim “Buy gift cards for up to 35% off or sell gift cards for up to 92% cash back”

CrunchBase Company Profile

Official Website

Whether it is for purposes of computing tax returns, preparing yearend accounts or to help you have better grip of personal or business expenses, recording and keeping track of expenditure is important. But considering the sheer number of receipts the average person piles up in a month or year, it is clear that maintaining order is no mean task. It is not unusual for one to spend hours each month organising and adding up receipts.

Plendi.com is changing how people manage receipts by making the process more efficient. Plendi’s process is simple. First, install the Plendi app on your smart phone (the app is available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry). Use your phone to take a photograph of the receipt. The image is then securely transmitted to Plendi.com servers.

The sooner you can take the photo after the receipt is issued the better – the receipt is still in pristine condition and not a crumpled state as is likely to happen after it is handled for a while. Taking the photo early is also important in safeguarding the record just in case the receipt is lost shortly after.

On receiving the digital image, the back office staff at Plendi manually key in the important fields from the receipt and upload the data by the end of the next business day. The data captured includes date, currency, vendor, net amount, VAT and total amount.

All the information can then be accessed on Plendi.com by the client. The records (including the images) can be exported to Excel and PDF files. With Plendi.com, there is no longer need to worry about lost receipts. Plendi.com stores your records for an indefinite time frame for as long as you are subscribed to the service.

This archive can come in handy during a tax audit, external audit, internal audit or a dispute. Remember that tax authorities in several countries including the US, the UK and Ireland accept receipt images as legitimate supporting documentation for tax returns. The digital records ensure accountants have much less to do and save valuable time – they no longer need to sift through, organise and record tons of paperwork.

Plendi.com automatically converts the currency of the receipts to your home currency thus saving its clients the headache of manual conversion of foreign currency-denominated receipts. Using Plendi can see one significantly reduce their tax bill. For instance, one year’s parking receipts can bump a significant chunk off one’s overall tax obligations.

One of the key areas of concern with Plendi.com will be data accuracy. After all, the data is manually keyed in by humans. Plendi do admit they can make mistakes. However, their recommended course of action in the event of an error might not come across as reassuring – that is, users should use the web interface to correct any such errors that are inconsistent with the receipt image. This may be translated to mean that clients are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the records.

In order not to appear as though they are absolving themselves from blame for typing errors, Plendi.com would probably create a stronger case for the quality of their output if they could indicate their current error rate (as long as it is impressive). For instance, a 99.8% error rate will give users the confidence that errors are the exception and not the norm.

It is this high cost of medical care in the West that has spawned medical tourism. Medical tourism is where a person travels to another country in order to access health care at a fraction of the cost they would incur for the same care in their home country.

It is not all rosy though – medical tourism has its risks. For instance, most potential medical tourists start their research on the internet. But the internet is full of difficult to understand information, contradictory claims and unclear accreditation standards. The reality is that medical quacks are just a few clicks away.

Tripmedi.com, a joint winner of StartupBus 2011, has developed an online service to steer medical tourists away from these and other pitfalls they are often exposed to. Tripmedi.com creates an intuitive way for people to get the information they need to make the right decisions when going for surgery overseas.

It has a friendly user interface that allows users to evaluate different medical choices overseas. The parameters the different choices can be evaluated against in Tripmedi.com include quality of service, reputation, cost of surgery and location.

In particular, Tripmedi.com focuses on 3 pillars in helping medical tourists make the decision to travel abroad. First is statistics on the doctor’s past performance. Such statistics would include the number of procedures the doctor has carried out versus the number of complications or infections that have resulted from the surgeries the doctor has participated in. Most world class hospitals routinely record such information.

The second pillar is the doctor’s resume as well as the reputation of the hospital. How many years has the doctor been in the practice? What qualifications do they hold? What are their areas of specialisation? What nationally or internationally respected awards has the hospital or the doctor received?

The third pillar of Tripmedi.com is probably the most important – community recommendations. This is born of the recognition that statistics alone (however detailed) do not provide the necessary level of reassurance that one needs to select the country, hospital or doctor to go to for the procedure.

Unanimous word of mouth still trumps statistics. Through community recommendations, users that have had experience in a given country or hospital or with a particular doctor can give their own view of how the country, hospital or doctor measures up.

Tripmedi.com is wading into an area that has a huge market and potential for growth as long as the cost of world class medical care continues to differ by as wide a margin as it does today between countries.

As long as Tripmedi.com can ensure that the information is up to date – a tall order considering the number of countries such medical institutions are spread out in – it will rise to the top as one of the most authoritative sources of information for medical tourists.

Over the last 10 or 15 years, the term corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained traction worldwide as an integral part of the responsible business’ strategy. However, the growth of CSR has inadvertently created the impression that activities to make the world a better place are difficult or near impossible to monetize.

Of course, nothing could be further from fact – there are numerous business that are solely involved in social activities and are returning a profit from doing so. 33needs.com is an online crowd funding website that connects social entrepreneurs with investors.

33needs.com serves as a platform (the only one of its kind) for ordinary people to invest in social enterprises and reap financial and emotional reward. The emotional reward is in knowing that one has contributed to making a difference somewhere in the world.

Financial reward is in ‘Impact Points’ awarded by 33needs.com that can be redeemed in any one of a network of ‘Impact Partners’ around the world. There are 6 classes of social enterprises that the 33needs.com helps organise funding for.

• Health – Businesses that provide products and services that help people live healthier and longer lives.
• Sustainable food – Enterprises that use sustainable farming and processing practices to make more food available to meet the need of the world’s burgeoning population.
• Opportunity – Businesses that equip men and women with the skills necessary to provide for their households.
• Planet – Entrepreneurs whose goal is to ensure a cleaner world.
• Education – Individuals or institutions that create the environment for more people to access a good education.
• Community – Enterprises that work towards the protection and preservation of unique but endangered cultures.

The social entrepreneur must indicate a specific target amount that they would like to raise. The funds are only released to the entrepreneur if the contributions from investors reach the target amount. If the total amount invested does not reach the target figure, the investors get a full refund of their money.

The rationale for refunding investments when they fall short is to ensure the entrepreneur has all the cash they need to achieve the goals they had outlined. This is good for investors as it reduces the likelihood of failed enterprises or projects.

The accrual purpose for the money will differ for each business. The cash may be for starting up a new business or to expand a going concern. The funds may go towards building a website, increasing inventory, research, marketing etcetera. 33needs.com helps social enterprises address their operational needs so they can focus on delivering their product.

The fact that investors are individuals who are attracted by the cause the social enterprise stands for means the social entrepreneur enjoys support from persons that are passionate about their business. This alone serves as a powerful drive for entrepreneurs to achieve the goals they commit to at the point of sourcing for funding.

While 33needs.com is quickly making a name in the crowd funding arena, its difficult-to-understand and widely-varying reward structure might be an impediment to more investors signing up. However, it has the potential of making headway among persons that would like to make a difference without necessarily expecting anything in return. This is because there is no collateral that the investor can redeem if the social enterprise goes bust.

Today’s world is all about consumption…What we buy, what we do, what we give etc…So basically spending money can more or less explain our daily activities.

Twitter is all about telling everyone what you are doing, and we know how popular it became. But I’ve never been convinced, not enough people can be bothered to actually write down those things. If this could be done automatically evrytime they do something with their creditcard, no effort would be made.

Imagine you go to starbucks buy a coffee, swipe your card, type your pin, and the press ok if you want you’re purchase to be put online!.

You’re friends can keep track of what you are doing. I think it’s a good idea pretty much an upgrade of the services VISA/MASTERCARD offers today.

I would be willing to try. But I would be pissed off to see some of my friends purchases if I can’t aford them ahahah

Cloud is trying to bring back the well know industrial theory that consist of dividing in order to increase efficiency. BUT they claim that anyone/any company could use their service in order to divide task and outsource them ONLINE!.

This Would:

• Decrease Costs
• Increase Efficiency
• Better Quality

What do they offer!

• A workforce (thousands of highly-qualified workers)
• Help in dividing task into simpler one to achieve complexe work done

• I wide variety of workers gives the possibility to cut down hard task significantly.
• Faster results with a worldwide workforce working at all times

• They provide you the service of cutting down everything for you so you can just enjoy the benefits

So basically it takes the idea of the ever so popular www.getafreelancer.com or www.odesk.com and makes it accessible to everyone especially companies who lack of internet knowledge.

I wouldn’t be surprise if they don’t even have a workforce and just re outsource those task on those well-known websites.

But they definitely ease the process of benefiting from those opportunities!

They also list fields where outsourcing is fairly easing ( non creative work mainly fits in that category ).

1. Data Processing
2. Data Entry
3. Image Processing
4. Internet Research
5. Product Merchandising
6. Content Filtering
7. Content Creation

They also offer intresting career opportunities:

http://www.cloudcrowd.com/company/careers