Looking for seed funding?

Check out kickstarter which helps creative people find seed funding for their projects.  This from their FAQs section

What is Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors.

We believe that…

• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.

Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.

The site recently helped launch Diaspora a new social networking site that plans to take on facebook.  More about that here.

Ouch!

Pricing in the digital age has become a seriously complex subject.  The absence of a physical check before a transaction means that a pricing error can snowball into a disaster pretty quickly.  One example – 6pm.com recently lost $ 1.6 Mn during the course of a six hour pricing error.   This is what happened

Hey everyone – As many of you may know (and I’m sure a lot of you do not), 6pm.com is our sister site.  6pm.com is where brandaholics go for their guilt free daily fix of the brands they crave.  Every day, the site highlights discounts on products ranging up to 70% off.  Well, this morning, we made a big mistake in our pricing engine that capped everything on the site at $49.95.  The mistake started at midnight and went until around 6:00am pst.  When we figured out the mistake was happening, we had to shut down the site for a bit until we got the pricing problem fixed.

While we’re sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million – ouch) selling so many items so far under cost.  However, it was our mistake.  We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up.  We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great customers.  We hope you continue to Shop. Save. Smile. at 6pm.com.

Nice press release – done in a way that makes the best of a bad situation.  However, another company could have gone bust with a mistake like this.  Could one prevent this. Perhaps.  Many companies build systemic alerts linked to abnormal sales volumes.  Of course, this happened between midnight and 6 am – so an offshore monitoring centre could probably have spotted it 🙂