Crowdfunding is one of the very discussed subjects lately. One of the advantages of turning to crowdfunding is that it allows you to test your idea. But what happened these days with one of Kickstarter’s projects is really mindblowing.

The awesome project that got mindblowing results is  Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android. It was started on April 10 (or around that date). Their initial goal was set to $100,000 but what happened in less than a month can’t be compared to anything that happened before.

Usually it takes a few days, if you’re lucky, to raise a few thousands. Pebble came and turned everything upside down, they raised $1M in 28 hours. Oh, but $1M is not all, they’ve raised $6,5M so far and they still have 23 days to go, almost double as much time as elapsed until today.  I don’t want to think what could happen…will the total amount double, triple? 

The VCs might be frightened at this point. What if the future will be crowfunded and not investor-backed? I’m not sure what amount they could have raised from investors, if they wanted to. The amount they got is comparable to a Series A.

So what is Pebble Watch?

As they say, “Pebble is the first watch built for the 21st century”. Basically, it is a watch that connects via Bluetooth to your smartphone. It also has apps, it’s highly customizable. It alerts you, shows you who’s calling, lists tweets, can be used as a bike computer…and the list goes on and on.

It is a record!

The Pebble Watch is the highest ever funded project on Kickstarter! So it is a record. I guess it is something nobody expected, not even the team behind it. My guess is that we will see more of this happening from now on, since we are becoming more social (I mean more active and proficient at using social media). However, this is still a record.

Will the amount raised double, triple? What is your guess?

Well, this is my first blog post. A blog is meant to be a social tool and thus I want to summarize what happened in the last 4-5 years to this kind of tools. 

If you wanted to establish an online presence a while ago (4-5 years ago), you know how costly it was. The online platforms apparently evolved, so much so it is now possible to have it for free. I remember I paid $60 4 years ago to buy a one-year hosting solution and a domain name. 

What’s the recipe to a free online presence solution? Well, in my case it is Tumblr (for the blog) + Google Apps for personal use (for email solution). Obviously, there are lots of other options like Wordpress.com, TypePad s.o.. However, so far I did not manage to find a way to get a free domain name (I don’t mean donations nor subdomains).

Besides costing $0, there are also other advantages like the relief from having to maintain a server, backing-up files, monitoring resources to make sure it doesn’t slow down and others.

Social proof? There is! Many top-engineers, US top-investors and even Foursquare (yeah, Foursquare’s blog is hosted on Tumblr) are hanging out on Tumblr (don’t know about other platforms but I guess they are no exception), so it is not a solution only for those who couldn’t afford to pay $$.