This is interesting:
http://news.techworld.com/sme/3336872/crowdfunding-site-crowdtilt-offers-alternative-kickstarter/If you want to drum up funds, there are techy ways to do it: Justgiving for charities, and Kickstarter for neat-o projects. There's not much for ad-hoc any-old-thing stuff, though -- if you want to rent a party house, or run a server for a year, someone with deep pockets needs to be the point man and do a lot of chasing around. There's always some schlub who doesn't pay up, too.
Crowdtilt is basically this: propose a thing, and set a cash value for it. People pledge. If the value is met in pledges before the thing expires, the pledges get billed and the proposer gets the loot. If not, nobody is billed.
I can see it being amazingly handy for all sorts of things. Why didn't someone think of this before?
(Beta, US only, but hell, it's gonna kaboom)
