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A gift for that friend who watches “Home Alone” every year
It’s that time of year again. You’re permitted to huddle up on the couch — roast beast from Whoville in one hand, a moose-shaped mug of eggnog in the other — and watch a whole bunch of movies you saw at this exact time last year.
From The Santa Clause to Home Alone and The Grinch to Jingle All the Way, these movies are the ones you know back to front. You probably routinely quote them out loud, to the detriment of your relationships.
And if it’s not you annually weeping through Love Actually and The Holiday, or demanding someone listen to your pitch on Die Hard as the ultimate holiday movie, that person is definitely someone you know.
Here’s a few gift ideas for that cotton-headed ninny muggins. Now, go easy on the Pepsi.
It’s only onscreen for a hot minute, but Home Alone fans will know this blueprint well. Our hero Kevin McCallister maps out his defenses, strategically planning surprises for the Wet Bandits. And you can get a print on Etsy!
Pair it with a Little Nero’s Pizza cap and you’ll have a very merry Christmas, ya filthy animal.
If you really love Christmas, come on and let it snow with this delightful Love Actually pillow. Artist and designer Thom Kofoed illustrated one of the most iconic scenes from the film. It’s now a pillow you can give to your own true love.
Clark Griswold’s beloved moose mugs from Christmas Vacation are really awkward to sip from, but damn, they’re good movie merch. Featured in such scenes as Clark losing his damn nerve, these moose mugs should be filled with ice cold eggnog and served when the shit’s about to hit the fan at your family holiday meal.
One of the less obvious holiday movies, but nonetheless, Gremlins is 10/10 yuletide fun. LA designer and illustrator Miranda Dressler created these delightful little pins featuring a Gremlin in a Santa hat. If you’re giving it to a true fan of the film, pair it with one of her Gremlin greeting cards.
What better outfit to snuggle up watching Elf in than this ugly Christmas sweater, emblazoned with one of the highly quotable movie’s best lines. You’ll find many, many variations on the Elf-themed UCS around the internet — just pick your favorite quote, add “sweater,” and punch it into Google.
Monopoly fights are as strong a holiday tradition as pudding, so why not argue over a version inspired by Tim Burton’s cult classic? This collector’s edition of the classic, polarizing board game replaces the traditional boardwalk real estate with locations like Jack’s Tower, Oogie Boogie’s Casino, and Sally’s Alley. Fine holiday fun.
The Grinch’s faithful sidekick Max was the key to the whole “stealing Christmas” operation and every Who in Whoville should know it. This adorable plush toy comes with a pair of removable reindeer antlers — the same faux-reindeer solution seen in the film. Plus, if you press his paw, his ears move up and down. Your giftee’s shriveled heart may grow three sizes after seeing it.
Arnold Schwarzenegger fought tooth and nail and Sinbad to get his son a Turbo Man doll, and all you have to do is shell out your rent money. Made exclusively for Wal-Mart by Tiger Electronics for the release of Jingle All the Way in 1996, this talking action figure is a rare find. You’ll find a few on eBay for cheaper, but plenty are out of the packaging.
And you thought stop-motion animation was creepy on a good day.
From Robot Chicken to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Adult Swim programming has become notorious for its cartoon insta-nightmares. Their newest series, The Shivering Truth, appears to be shepherding that legacy into a whole new league of horrifying.
Created by Vernon Chatman, an Adult Swim alumnus, the stop-motion project has been described as “a delicately crafted, surreal anthology comedy, a miniature propulsive omnibus clusterbomb of painfully riotous daymares, all dripping with the orange goo of dream logic.”
What does that mean? Well, based on the trailer, we can expect a woman to have her face rubbed off onto a carpet, a drinking game involving a whole lot of fingers, a scary worm burrowing into a guy’s head, a surprisingly gory game of peek-a-boo, and a whole lot of other stuff I’d rather not think about… including hand nipples.
The Shivering Truth hits Adult Swim Dec. 9 at midnight. Plan your electric bill accordingly.
US President Donald Trump said on Monday he doesn’t believe his own government’s report warning of massive economic losses if carbon emissions continue to feed climate change unchecked.
The National Climate Assessment, quietly unveiled on Friday, warns that natural disasters are worsening in the United States because of global warming.
It projected that climate change will “cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century”. The effects will spill over into global trade, affecting import and export prices and US businesses with overseas operations and supply chains, it added.
Responding to questions about the economic impacts of climate change, Trump said it doesn’t think they will be devastating.
“I don’t believe it,” he told reporters on Monday.
“I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine,” he said.
The report, written with the help of more than a dozen US government agencies and departments, said the effects of climate change would harm human health, damage infrastructure, limit water availability, alter coastlines and increase costs in various industries.
The assessment also said projections of damage could change if greenhouse gas emissions were curbed, although many of the impacts of climate change, like powerful storms, droughts and flooding, have already begun.
The report supplements a study issued last year that concluded humans are the main driver of global warming and warned of catastrophic effects to the planet.
Trump on climate change
Trump’s comments on Friday were not all that surprising given the president’s past rhetoric on climate change.
Last year, Trump announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Deal to combat climate change, though the country cannot do so until after the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has also rolled back Obama-era environmental and climate rules such as the Clean Power Plan, while seeking to boost output of oil, gas and coal for domestic use and for shipping to allies and partners.
US output of crude oil is already the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia.
During the 2016 presidential election, Trump called climate change a “hoax”, although he has since said he does not believe that to be the case.
The president often falsely cites cold weather as proof global warming is not as bad as scientists say. Scientists, however, are quick to point out that weather is a short-term event and climate science looks at weather patterns over an extended period of time.
Clearly, both Walmart and Amazon are well aware of the stress that comes with all the entertaining around this time of year because they are coming in clutch for Cyber Monday with SO many deals on vacuum cleaners—but not just any vacuum cleaners: We’re talking Dysons.
Safe to say Dyson doesn’t get its top-notch reputation from doing a lackluster job in the cleaning department. Whether you’re in the market for a cordless vacuum, upright, multi-floor or combination vacuum—Dyson products are pretty much a sure thing when it comes to getting the job done. And with all the shopping and planning you’ll be doing around the holidays, the last thing you need to worry about is picking the right vacuum to catch all the dust bunnies in the dining room you only use once a year.
So save yourself the stress and guessing and hop on one of these cleaning machines while you can get them at one of these *seriously* awesome prices (for real—you can save up to $200 on some of these top models right now).
Check out the best Dyson deals below—there are plenty to choose from.
Ten years ago, Indiegogo launched the modern era of crowdfunding by creating a place where anyone could pitch their idea, product, or creative endeavor to the entire world, asking for the funds to make it reality. Today there are no shortage of crowdfunding sites, and even though Indiegogo isn’t as large as rival Kickstarter, it’s still tremendously influential, offering entrepreneurs not just a funding platform, but also support beyond their campaigns, with tools to ease the transition from concept to launch.
Indiegogo has always had a more worldwide audience than its peers, and now current CEO David Mandelbrot wants to take things further with more outreach to inventors in China as he leads the venture-funded company to profitability. Mandelbrot joined Mashable’s MashTalk podcast to talk about how crowdfunding has evolved since in the past decade, how the company approaches quality control, and what he thinks of Indiegogo’s “anything goes” reputation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mashable: Where did you start getting involved in crowdfunding, and how did that sort of transition into Indiegogo and then the CEO gig?
David Mandelbrot: Earlier in my career I spent about seven years at Yahoo, starting in the late 1990s, so I’ve been working in online tech for over 20 years now, but the way I got involved in Indiegogo was, I was at a start-up before Indiegogo call Tynt and we had a board member who was also on the board of Indiegogo and he was based here in New York, we were based in San Francisco, Indiegogo was based in San Francisco, and every time he would come to one our board meetings, his name was Lewis, I would say, “Hey Lewis, what else are you doing while you’re here in San Francisco?” And every time he would say, “Oh, I just had a meeting over at Indiegogo. That is the most amazing business. So exciting what they’re doing, the way they’re empowering entrepreneurs.”
So he’s inspiring you?
Every time he would come he would be like, “Alright let’s talk about Tynt, but let me really tell you about what’s going on at Indiegogo.” In the end Indiegogo got acquired and then, I’m sorry, Tynt got acquired, and then Lewis introduced me to the founder of Indiegogo and things just progressed very rapidly from there.
Well, one of the founders. Wasn’t there, like, three people?
Yeah there was three cofounders of Indiegogo, one is named Slava Rubin. He was at the time the CEO of Indiegogo. We also had two other cofounders, Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell. Danae and Eric were both business students at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley when they had the original idea for Indiegogo.
Are any of them still involved?
Yes, actually both Slava and Danae are both still very active members of the board and Eric Schell is our head of product at Indiegogo, overseeing all of our product development.
So how did you get convinced? You keep hearing about how what a great place — what was it that sort of persuaded you?
Yeah you know it’s interesting for me it’s always been about working with businesses that are doing something that’s transformative. So when I went to Yahoo in the late 1990s I was actually really excited about how the internet was gonna change the way we consumed our media.
That was the place to be in the late 90s.
It really was.
Maybe not a few years later.
It’s sort of sad, I know. I wonder if at some time people will remember you know that there was a time when Yahoo was sort of at the center of so much of what was happening.
It sounds like you’ve got that taste of wanting to be around innovation.
Absolutely, and I think that industries are most interesting at the moment when they’re going through real transformation and what was so interesting to me about Indiegogo that I could see from the very beginning was the potential that Indiegogo had to really change the way entrepreneurs launched their businesses. The typical way that entrepreneurs always launched their businesses, I’m going to overly simplify ’cause of course each entrepreneur’s journey is different, but the typical way that entrepreneurs used to launch a business is they would get an idea, maybe they would start working on it a little bit, and then they would go out and raise financing and then they would develop the product and then they would hopefully get a distributor and get that product into retail stores and then at the very end of this long process that could last years, that product would show up in a store and only at the very end of that process would you find out if there was an actual market for that product, if there were gonna be customers.
Right.
What was so interesting about Indiegogo was the way it was radically transforming that model. The way an entrepreneur could determine extremely early in the life cycle of their product or their business, whether there was gonna be a market for that product and I could see early on what we’ve now come to see over the last ten years, which is it that it would have a really transformational impact on the way entrepreneurs brought their products to market.
There’s been a lot of products that have been funded through crowdfunding and then become these massive success stories. I guess if you’re a VC or a bigger company you can look at these projects and say, “Okay, this thing made 400% above its goal — that’s a good sign.”
Absolutely, you know what’s interesting is almost every party that’s sort of part of the entrepreneurs journey, every third party that the entrepreneurs engaging with whether it’s an investor, a distributor of that product, if they’re a product entrepreneur, the retailer, they’re all basically making a bet essentially on whether there’s gonna be a market for that product in the end. You know the VC is anticipating there will be a big market for this device and the distributor is thinking a lot of retailers will be interested in this device.
The reason that crowdfunding and Indiegogo in particular is so transformative is it makes that part of the analysis so much easier. So what’s exciting about Indiegogo is in part that so many entrepreneurs on Indiegogo have been able to go on and raise venture capital financing. Entrepreneurs on Indiegogo have raised over a billion dollars in venture capital financing after their Indiegogo campaigns.
But what’s also exciting is the way the entrepreneurs have a much easier time getting their products into Target stores, into Amazon, into Brookstone, into many retailers that otherwise might have had more questions about those products. They can look at the success on Indiegogo, say I can see that there’s a market for that product, I wanna carry it in my store.
Dave Mandelbrot (left) guests on Mashable’s MashTalk podcast, hosted by Pete Pachal (right).
Image: Raymond Wong/Mashable
From everything you’ve said, it’s very clear how like crowdfunding changed a lot in the entrepreneurial process, particularly with products. But how do you think crowdfunding itself has changed since it started getting very popular about ten years ago?
There’s a few ways it’s evolved. For one thing the landscape has changed a lot over the last ten years, so when Indiegogo launched a little bit over ten years ago, Indiegogo was actually the first crowdfunding platform. There was no Kickstarter then, there was no GoFundMe then, if you count Patreon there was no Patreon at that time. Indiegogo was the pioneer of crowdfunding and over time other companies started to focus on crowdfunding. Kickstarter jumped in I think about a year later. GoFundMe a few years after that.
The main evolution in the landscape has been that as crowdfunding has evolved, different companies have developed their own individual areas of focus. So for example GoFundMe now is exclusively focused on personal causes and non-profit fundraising, and in fact Indiegogo earlier this year, we actually sold off the portion of our business that was focused on non-profit and personal cause fundraising to a company called YouCaring that was subsequently acquired by GoFundMe so that’s part of GoFundMe’s business now. Kickstarter has really maintained a focus on what they call creators. So those are filmmakers, musicians, the fastest growing category actually on Kickstarter over the last few years has been tabletop game developers.
Oh really? Like these kind of like handheld things?
No not handheld things, like actual tabletop games, like Monopoly. And then Indiegogo in particular over the last three years has really developed a focus on product entrepreneurs and helping those product entrepreneurs identify if there’s a market for their product, and really take their idea all the way from an idea in their head all the way to a manufactured product that’s getting into the hands of their backers.
You mentioned Kickstarter, and I feel like you guys were first, and then they came in and then they kind of swooped up all the attention and the glory. Why did that happen?
You know things changed a lot around, I believe it was 2012. 2011 or 2012 was when the people really started to notice Kickstarter and the main thing that transformed things was that Kickstarter had a single campaign on Kickstarter that was very successful which was a campaign for this product called the Pebble Watch.
You might remember that, and at that time that became the most successful crowdfunding campaign of all time as of 2011 or 2012. It raised over 10 million dollars and so what happened was Kickstarter sort of opened up people’s eyes to the potential of crowdfunding and for a while their name was somewhat synonymous with crowdfunding.
So did they just get lucky then? Because I think there was a perception that with Kickstarter, there’s a certain bar that needed to be met there that maybe didn’t exist on Indiegogo. Is that wrong? Or is that actually a strength?
For a long time and even now in some ways, Kickstarter has had and continues to have a very different approach to how they accept entrepreneurs onto the platform. For, you know, Indiegogo has not only tried to be as open as possible a platform but a also very flexible platform. So on Kickstarter there’s basically one way to offer crowdfunding campaign. You need to provide your product to Kickstarter. Kickstarter actually evaluates who can be on their platform, and who can’t be on their platform.
We take a different approach in part because when the company was founded the goal was to essentially eliminate the gatekeepers so rather than, our idea was why should the VCs be the only people to determine what products get funded and what products don’t, and it’s our feeling that if we evaluated each product for whether it was acceptable or not to our platform we would just be inserting ourselves as the gatekeeper, and with Kickstarter doing that, in our mind they’re inserting themselves as the gatekeeper rather than letting the public essentially decide what products get funded.
So Indiegogo has always been a open platform where any entrepreneur can actually run a campaign on Indiegogo. What we have changed in the last couple years though to make the opportunities much more clear to backers is that we now require entrepreneurs to be very direct about which stage they’re in, in development.
So if you just have a concept, but you haven’t actually developed a working prototype of your product yet, you need to disclose that to backers on Indiegogo. If you have a prototype, we actually verify that you have a working prototype. If you say that you’re in production we actually ask for a production version of the product so that we can validate it. So we’re actually a more open platform but also with a set of rules to make sure that backers that back campaigns know what they’re in for.
So there’s more nuance to it, but it’s more democratic in a simple way — why not just let the people decide?
Absolutely and what’s wonderful about Indiegogo is that because we have this different set of rules it enables products that might not have gotten the opportunity to launch on other platforms or be successful on other platforms to be successful. One example that comes to mind was a campaign that ran I believe about three years ago on Indiegogo was for a product called the Flow Hive, and the Flow Hive was a new type of beehive actually and apparently there had been no real innovations in beekeeping or beehive development in the last 50 years.
Don’t tell Apple.
And a father and son team from Australia came up with an idea for a better beehive. They put in on Indiegogo, they needed $50,000 to be able to set up a manufacturing facility in Australia to be able to manufacture the first beehives. Now at that point when they hadn’t quite gotten to real manufacturing of the product yet, they might’ve had a hard time being able to launch on Kickstarter, they launched on Indiegogo.
They raised, within two months, they raised 13 million dollars to make beehives from an evolving and emerging beekeeping community all over the world, and at Indiegogo we’ve got thousands of stories like that, of entrepreneurs who you might never have thought would have been successful but the public actually got this democratic opportunity to identify what they were really interested in and directly communicate that to entrepreneurs.
So, I have to ask: How do you guys make money?
I’m glad you’re asking! You know we actually just announced this morning, we just had our first profitable quarter in Q3.
Nice.
Indiegogo makes money in a few different ways. The first thing, and the primary way that we make money is that we get fees that are a percentage of the amount of funds raised on our platform. So our standard fee is a 5% fee, and so 5% of whatever the entrepreneur is able to raise on Indiegogo goes to Indiegogo. The entrepreneurs on Indiegogo, and we really like that fee structure because it means that we have a shared interest in the success of those entrepreneurs on Indiegogo. If they’re not successful on our platform then they don’t need to pay us and if they’re extraordinarily successful on our platform then they pay us more. So that’s the primary revenue stream.
So if it’s 5%, and you’ve raised over the years $1.6 billion, what is that…?
That’s 80 million. But that’s just the primary way. In addition, as more entrepreneurs are using Indiegogo as a platform to go direct to consumers, which is really the big movement that Indiegogo is a part of. Now entrepreneurs are bypassing traditional retail, traditional distribution mechanism and they’re selling their products directly to consumers online and as we do that, there are more and more services that those entrepreneurs need. If they’re marketing their product on Indiegogo, the often need help with marketing. Critical to a successful campaign on Indiegogo is having a really good video that demonstrates the benefits of that product. Indiegogo now offers solutions to entrepreneurs to develop a really good video.
Is that like you have an in-house staff of editors, shooters?
Yes it’s a combination of both expertise in house and in outside video. It used to be that if you were a product entrepreneur and you wanted to raise interest in your product, you know say 15, 20 years ago, the only way to do it was with brand marketing and by creating a television commercial. Most of the entrepreneurs on Indiegogo now are able to produce a video for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 or in a lot of cases less. The most most successful campaigns, those videos are watched by millions of people.
Oh, they’re just fun to watch. I feel like the crowdfunding formula is almost like a reality show plus cool gadgets. I mean it’s like this sort of addictive format you can watch them one after another for hours.
They actually really are fun to watch, and they’re fun to watch because it’s fun to see the most innovative products that are coming to life, it’s also really exciting to see the entrepreneurs behind those products. When we’re marketed to during the Super Bowl, there’s paid models and actors that are demonstrating that product, there’s something actually really rewarding about getting to see an entrepreneur actually explain this product that they have dreamed of and how they are trying to bring that product to life.
You know part of why Flow Hive was so successful is that the backers on Indiegogo just fell in love with the founder and wanted the founder and his dad to be successful with this campaign. Earlier this year we had the most successful campaign on Indiegogo on any platform over the last two years for an electric bicycle called Mate X and the founder of that company is a female entrepreneur. She is a mom with three kids and backers get excited about supporting an entrepreneur like that. So yes, there’s something about the videos that’s just fun to watch, in part because it creates a better connection between the backers of those products and the entrepreneurs that are building those products and providing them to users.
Well congrats on your first profitable quarter, by the way.
Thank you.
How many countries is Indiegogo in now?
About 230 countries. People back projects and offer products from over 230 countries and I’ll actually tell you one of the most exciting things about Indiegogo is that last quarter 48% of all of the transactions on Indiegogo were cross border. So what we’ve created is a true world wide marketplace for entrepreneurs to be able to reach new customers by going direct to consumer.
Why have you had so much success in terms of being international so quickly? Is there a secret to doing that?
You know you asked earlier about how the crowdfunding industry is changed over the last ten years. As we at Indiegogo got really focused on product entrepreneurs, people are recruiting new products and wanted to learn if there was market for those products and go direct to consumers with those products. Our worldwide strategy became much more clear, the most clear example is China actually, needless to say, not only is a lot of product manufacturing happening in China but now there’s been manufacturing in China for decades. There’s a lot of great product innovations that are coming out of China.
I bet you could go down to the Shenzhen market, grab all the components you need and if you’re an inventor, you know, bam, see if something works. Then all you need is Indiegogo to help you out.
It’s absolutely true, and so what we did, part of why it’s worldwide is that Indiegogo really invested in making Indiegogo a worldwide platform. In the beginning when I first joined Indiegogo a little over five years, we used four different payment processors, in part to ensure that we could support transaction processing in those 230 countries. We’ve since been able to streamline it somewhat, but we have a real commitment to being a worldwide platform from the beginning and then in markets like in China, where there’s a strong base of entrepreneurs.
We’ve actually hired people that are dedicated to that Chinese market and so you mentioned Shenzhen, we have dedicated people working for Indiegogo, there’s a little bit of a complicated legal structure to be able to do this in China, but that are based in Shenzhen to create a streamline way for China-based entrepreneurs to be able to reach a U.S. market with their products.
I know Amazon has done a lot in the last couple years to sort of open up its marketplace to international sellers, a lot of them out of Asia, and they’ve received backlash for it because some of these are knockoffs of other products, and they’re either not as good, or even if they are as good, they’re really undercutting the innovation happening here because of the rapid commoditization. Do you see a similar backlash possibly on your side, and are you doing anything to guard against that?
We did see that. One of the things that’s still so exciting about working with a relatively early stage company is that we can be really flexible, so we did see that. We started to see a lot of knockoffs on Indiegogo, we also started seeing a lot of distributors or resellers that were using Indiegogo as a way to just distribute products…
I feel like this is your “fake news” problem. It’s nice to be democratic and be hands off but at the same time you have to take some kind of active roll in ensuring some quality control.
Absolutely, and yes we’re democratic but part of being democratic is also being hands on to ensure that we don’t have fake news, so it’s a policy on Indiegogo that you need to be the original entrepreneur of the product and we have a dedicated trust and safety team that reviews the successful projects on Indiegogo and ensures that is the actual entrepreneur that is running that campaign.
We don’t allow distributors or resellers on Indiegogo and of course if we get notice of copyright violation or patent infringement we’re fully compliant with the DMCA rules and in a lot of cases we’ll take campaigns down if there’s any type of IP infringement happening on our platform. So we did start to see that; we responded very quickly and there shouldn’t be any products on Indiegogo that are not products that are being offered by the original entrepreneur behind that project.
So this may be old news, but I remember about five years ago now the Kickstarter guys came out and basically wrote a blog that said, “This isn’t a store.” I think they were getting a lot of bad press for various things not really living up to snuff at the time. Was that an overreaction do you think? Has it gone into more this is a store with caveats? What should consumer expectation be?
Yeah that’s a really good question. So it’s interesting, we’ve done plenty of research with the backers of projects on Indiegogo and while people have many reasons for backing a campaign, maybe they know the entrepreneur, maybe they wanna make sure that product gets built, what we learned from engaging directly with our backers is that the primary reason that backers back campaigns is because they want to get the product. That’s why they’re doing it. So when you’re in a situation like Kickstarter had a few years ago where they had this project called the Coolest Cooler…
Oh yeah, infamous.
Yeah it raised 13 million dollars and even with the 13 million dollars was not able to deliver that product to the backers. That’s a bad experience for users. You know frankly Kickstarter can say we’re not a store but when people spend 13 million dollars on a product that they don’t get, they’re going to be very unhappy, regardless of what you say.
So what Indiegogo, you know, recognizing that this is a risk with entrepreneurs, we started working closely with companies that could help the entrepreneurs that the most successful entrepreneurs on Indiegogo manufacture and ship those products, so a lot of entrepreneurs went into trouble because, and I think this was the case for Coolest Cooler, because they haven’t really thought through all of the components that they need for that product or how much manufacturing is gonna cost.
So on components, Indiegogo has formed a partnership with Arrow Electronics, one of the largest component distributors in this country. Arrow, for free, will actually review your bill of materials if you’re an entrepreneur on Indiegogo and make sure that you thought through every single component that you need to manufacture that product. They will make sure that those components are not close to the end of life, requiring you to re-engineer the product.
We formed partnership, if you’re a successful entrepreneur on Indiegogo and say you sell 10,000 of your product or you get 10,000 backers for your project, you’ve gotta figure out how to ship to 10,000 backers, so we formed a partnership with Ingram Micro to make sure that entrepreneurs have a solution for doing the logistics of literally shipping 10,000 products.
That’s a lot of stamps.
It is a lot of stamps! And as a result now backers are much more likely to get their product than ever before because we know that for backers to be truly thrilled with the experience that they have on Indiegogo they need to get their products, regardless of what we say. So whether they receive the products that’ll make them most happy and I’ll add on that, in our marketplace we do guarantee fulfillment of the product, and of course the customer satisfaction level is much higher in our marketplace than it is for overall crowdfunding.
So one of the things that I think has changed a lot in crowdfunding, it’s not that new anymore, but is the established companies coming in and like oh this is actually a great place to sort of try out new, like part of their development process, I’m thinking specifically of the Bose Sleepbuds. They had a campaign, I think it was early this year or late last year.
Late last year.
I went to their launch event, and they told me all about the Indiegogo experience and it was really interesting because it always a very different product for them, and they concluded they should do crowdfunding [as part of the development process]. That whole idea seems to have really caught on.
It has, yeah. Within Indiegogo we refer to this as our enterprise business but we’re really talking about really well established companies that are using Indiegogo as a platform for product validation.
My favorite example most recently, just last quarter was Gillette. So Gillette as I’m sure most people know, you know Gillette of course is in a competitive business in the razor business, and particular with some recent direct to consumer brands that have come along, and Gillette is of course always innovating with razors and Gillette developed a new heated razor, and the old model would have been to get all the way through development and then do a big marketing campaign for their new razor.
What Gillette is realizing, which is what most great direct-to-consumer brands now are doing that it’d be worthwhile to get out to consumers earlier. So Gillette actually launched their heated razor on Indiegogo, they launched a project actually for their heated razor and they’re doing it in part to get their first customers, but of course Gillette has a very robust distribution system, drug stores and all kinds of stores all over the world.
What the enterprises are really using Indiegogo for is similar to what Bose, like Bose launched a campaign on Indiegogo, is to connect with consumers early, and get their feed back and figure out if the price point works for consumers, to figure out which features are most important to consumers, to get consumers to test that product. That Bose campaign, Bose did something pretty amazing. Bose actually sent an early prototype to all of the backers of that campaign that bought the headphones to get feedback. They collected that feedback and then after they got that feedback and they made some modifications to the headphones, they then sent all the backers the actual commercial version of those headphones.
Right, that was pretty sweet. Like a big company can sort of afford to do that too. I don’t know if every startup can model their campaigns after that, but…
Exactly, but for them it was a great way to connect with customers.
Oh, and establish so much goodwill.
Absolutely, and if I’m Bose, or Whirlpool has run two campaigns on Indiegogo, I love the Whirlpool example. Whirlpool, known for their washers and dryers, launched a kitchen appliance that was a composting machine on Indiegogo actually, and they did it primarily so they could connect with early adopters and get feedback on the product and I asked them how would you connect directly with consumers before Indiegogo, what would you do if you couldn’t do it on Indiegogo? If they’re selling products through Best Buy, Best Buy doesn’t tell them who the customers are. If they’re selling, for any of the other enterprises that are selling through Amazon or Walmart, they hold that information very close to the vest. So what Whirlpool told me is that the primary, before Indiegogo, the primary way that they would find out who their actual customers were, was from people sending back those warranty cards.
I have to ask though, I know with this idea there’s been a bit of a backlash from sort of the “true” Indies — like, “This is supposed to be our place for startups and people just starting out, and how do we stand out when there’s these bigger fish swimming in our pool?”
Honestly, directly we’ve heard very little negative backlash from the entrepreneurs on our platform and you know we’ve had over 800,000 people that have raised money for different things on Indiegogo and we’ve had almost no negative feedback directly, and the main reason is that the entrepreneurs recognize that these established brands bring a lot of new users to the platform and while they may come to see that big enterprise campaign from Bose or Whirlpool or General Electric or Lego or some of the other big brands that have used Indiegogo, while they’re there they tend to browse around.
I was looking at some stats. There’s something like 22% of your users back more than one campaigns?
Absolutely and if they back one of these large enterprise campaigns then they often elect to join our email lists and they’re getting notified regularly of the latest and greatest innovations on Indiegogo. So what those large enterprises do actually is they really help build the community of early adopters on Indiegogo that then get turned on to innovative projects from small and large entrepreneurs alike.
So what’s next for you guys?
So a lot of things. You know the big things that are coming up for us is continuing our worldwide expansion. We’ve been thrilled to see the tremendous growth that we’ve had in China and we’ll continue to explore how we enable entrepreneurs from all over the world to reach audiences elsewhere in the world.
We’re also continuing to implement to form new partnerships to help entrepreneurs be more successful in manufacturing their products and shipping those products so you’ll see over the next year more announcements of partnerships to enable entrepreneurs once they’ve raised a lot of money to be more successful. You’ll also see us rolling out even more services to make the whole crowdfunding experience easier for entrepreneurs.
And you’ll start to see us in the beginning of next year exploring more and more with guaranteed shipment of products as we have more established entrepreneurs using Indiegogo, they’re less reliant on the funds that they raised in their campaigns to be able to ship their products and they’re able to actually guarantee that that product will ship. For example, Lego launched their first toy aimed at adults on Indiegogo a couple months ago.
“Aimed” at adults?
I’ve learned from experience not to say that Lego is launching their first adult toy on Indiegogo.
That would be really off-brand for them.
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The Cincinnati Bengals will have to make do without quarterback Andy Dalton for the rest of the 2018 season after he suffered a thumb injury during Sunday’s 35-20 home loss to the Cleveland Browns.
The Bengals announced they placed Dalton on the reserve/injured list Monday and acquired Tom Savage from the San Francisco 49ers via waivers to bolster their quarterback depth chart.
According toIan Rapoportof NFL.com, Dalton tore ligaments in his thumb and may need surgery.
The injury happened in the third quarter when he was attempting to recover an errant snap. It ends the three-time Pro Bowler’s season after he completed 61.9 percent of his passes for 2,566 yards, 21 touchdowns and 11 interceptions.
This is more unfortunate news for a Cincinnati team trending in the wrong direction. The Bengals started the season 4-1 and appeared to be well on their way to snapping their two-year playoff drought, but they are just 1-5 since. What’s more, wide receiver A.J. Green hasn’t played since Oct. 28 because of a right toe injury.
If there is a silver lining, Jeff Driskel played well after Dalton went down. He finished Sunday’s game 17-of-29 for 155 yards, one touchdown and zero interceptions and demonstrated his ability to make plays with his legs with a rushing touchdown.
He will be ahead of Savage on the depth chart. Last season, Savage appeared in eight games for the Houston Texans (six of them comingafter Deshaun Watson tore his ACL). He threw for 1,412 yards, five touchdowns and six picks.
While the world waits with bated breath for Ariana Grande‘s rom com-inspired “Thank U, Next” video, The 1975 have shown their appreciation for the pop smash with their own cover.
The British band debuted their version of the self-reflective chart-topper while visiting BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge on Monday (November 26). Speaking about his cover choice, frontman Matty Healy said, “I want to dedicate it to the artist of the song, who’s become, I think, the main protagonist — is that the right word? — in most people’s lives. The person I see spoken about most, and somebody I’ve started to really care about for some reason. … She’s had a right old tough time and I like her a lot. I think she’s cool. And she’s got a great voice. And I don’t. So I’m gonna sing one of her songs.”
Even with lyrics so expressly personal to Grande — ones that reference her exes and her parents — The 1975 managed to make the song their own, giving it a synthy, soulful arrangement that prominently featured gospel singers to cover for Healy’s supposedly “not-great” voice.
Grande, for her part, showed The 1975 some love on Twitter, retweeting their performance with a heart emoji, as well as Healy’s tweet about her that said, “We (and I mean society as a whole) fucking love you.”
The 1975’s Live Lounge visit also included performances of “Sincerity Is Scary” and “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You),” two tracks from A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, their new album out Friday. Which will arrive first: that album or Grande’s “Thank U, Next” video? Stay tuned!
We have good news and better news for you. The good news — it’s Cyber Monday, so you can get all your holiday shopping done in quick fashion. The better news — the Apple iPad Mini 4 is on sale at Walmart right now for Cyber Monday.
Currently, the Apple iPad Mini 4 is $279 at Walmart, $120 off the original price of $399.
While the iPad Mini 4 is one of the older models available at this point, it still delivers on the quality you’d expect out of an Apple device. There’s a reason you still see people using iPhone 6s when the iPhone XS Max and XR are out in the wild. Apple devices can last, and the Mini 4 is an example of that.
It’s the ideal companion for anyone looking for a high-quality tablet without committing to the larger, more expensive options out there. It features the sharp Retina display most people associate with high-quality and newer Apple products, so everything you watch and do will come through clear and crisp on the screen. Its 128GB of storage will also be plenty to handle the numerous apps you’ll download. And while iOS 9 is now a few years old, it will still deliver the kind of reliable performance you associate with Apple devices.
Just make sure to act fast, Apple sales are usually worth it, regardless of the time of year.
No matter how much you brush, you just don’t seem to make your dentist happy during your annual checkups. Your dentist always seems to be upset that they have to scrape so much plaque and other gunk out of your mouth every six months. If there was just a better way to brush your teeth. Enter the Oral-B Genius 8000 electronic toothbrush. It’s one of the best smart toothbrushes out there and today it’s on sale for only $94.94.
The toothbrush is discounted for Cyber Monday at $124.94, or $125 off its list price of $249.97, plus you can save an additional $30 after an instant rebate at Walmart. The Genius 8000 syncs to your smartphone via the Oral-B app and Bluetooth (no pun intended) technology to help you brush your teeth better using facial recognition to give you real-time feedback and coaching about your brushing technique and habits. The app can also give you pointers to get your entire mouth in shape for your next dentist visit.
The smart toothbrush features six brushing modes — such as sensitive and whitening — that can remove up to 500% more plaque than regular toothbrushes, a two-minute timer to help you keep track of the dentist recommended brushing time, and Oral-B’s 360-SmartRing with LED lights to brighten up your brushing experience with 12 vibrant colors to choose from.
But don’t just take our word for it. Walmart customer JessicaTL writes:
“This is the first electric toothbrush that Ive purchased. So far I’m loving it. It’s easy to set up and practical to use. The first time I used it I instantly felt the difference in how clean my teeth were in comparison to when I was using a manual toothbrush. I have not yet set up the technological Bluetooth connectivity yet but will have to give that a try!”
Vehicles drive by the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly as the automaker announced the closing of multiple facilities, including this one, on Nov. 26 in Detroit, Michigan. | Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images
GM’s announcement that it plans to cut up to 14,000 jobs has put a spotlight on the impact of the administration’s trade policies.
President Donald Trump said on Monday that he is “not happy” with General Motors and is putting pressure on the company to undo its plans to shutter North American plants and cut thousands of jobs.
Trump said he spoke with GM CEO Mary Barra after the company on Monday announced plans to cut up to 14,000 jobs.
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“I was very tough. I spoke with her when I heard they were closing and I said, ‘You know, this country has done a lot for General Motors,’” Trump told reporters at the White House, adding that he encouraged Barra to maintain GM’s operations in Ohio. “You better get back in there soon.”
Trump said his administration is putting ” lot of pressure” on GM to come up with alternatives to the cars that aren’t selling well, like the Chevrolet Cruze.
“They say the Chevy Cruze is not selling well,” he said. “I say well then get a car that is selling well and put it back in.”
GM on Monday said it would stop manufacturing several poorly selling vehicles like the Cruze and possibly close as many as five North American plants. The news has threatened to undercut Trump’s pledge to bring factory jobs back to the United States and has put a spotlight on the impact of the administration’s trade policies. GM previously said the administration’s tariffs on imported steel have cost the company $1 billion.
The president’s comments came as top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow was scheduled to meet on Monday with Barra, according to an administration official. The meeting had been scheduled prior to GM’s announcement.
Barra has enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration, having met with the president — along with other CEOs — several times last year.
During a speech last year in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump vowed to reopen the state’s shuttered factories.
“We’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build new ones,” Trump said, adding, “After years and years of sending our jobs and wealth to other countries, we are finally standing up for our workers and for our companies.”
GM announced Monday that it plans to halt production at its Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant, which is about a 20-minute drive from Youngstown.
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Daily Trends Hunter 
