Awesome Foundation gives no-strings cash to great ideas [video] | Hacker News Reader

Awesome Foundation gives no-strings cash to great ideas [video]

bbc.co.uk

151 pointsschrofer34 comments

This is FANTASTIC! I am quite excited about the whole proposition. Wish it were there when I was in college...

So I quickly contacted several of my friends here in Delhi, India and got them many of them interested. Now we have: http://awesomefoundation.in/

Anyone in India/Delhi, who is interested in joining this, hit me up at paras1987@gmail.com

Are you related to the original Awesome Foundation, or have you just taken the same name?

Not related, but keen on becoming a chapter. Not sure if there are official requirements or it is organic such as BarCamp. (Hoping and assuming it is the latter)

http://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/about_us has details on what to do if you want to be affiliated with them.

Please do get in touch via the website. We're super flexible on chapters running themselves largely as they'd like (quite similar to Barcamp), but we'd like to officially have you in the loop to be able to provide you with resources and connections to the rest of us.

- David Fisher (AF-trustee & co-founder)

So you're not connected to them at all, you're not a foundation, and you straight up copied their name?

To learn more about projects funded and the ideas behind the foundation have a look at their web site - community funding / support at its finest - http://www.awesomefoundation.org/

One of the events they funded was called Balloonacy: https://www.facebook.com/events/277093279051184/

I helped solder like a bazillion motion sensor LEDs to a board to stick in all the balloons.

This is great! How come I have not heard of this before? I have so many awesome side projects that would need a bit of help in order to pay for servers/continue development.

But seriously, I applied to the Knowledge chapter with http://sciencegist.com. Fingers crossed :)

It's also quite inspiring to see the different kinds of projects being funded by this foundation. It helps with the feeling of being alone in the world of projects which "will help people, but can't make money".

I was lucky enough to receive the Melbourne Grant a few months back. It allowed me to prototype a product I eventually tried to get up on crowd-funding. Sadly no luck there, but great initiative and meant I could at least give it a go and learn something.

What was it about? Why did you have no success?

* Here was my crowd-funding campaign: http://www.pozible.com/project/11432

And here's a blog post I wrote about why I think it didn't work: http://www.pigsdontfly.com/2013/05/7-things-i-learned-from-u...

Hey that's a great idea. I have a feeling it would have had a better chance of success in the US.

Did you consider using alternative materials?

If you switched to 3D Printed materials, I think the costs would be much less and you could have funded it with the amount of money you already collected.

I used 3D printing during the prototyping stage, and even using a friend of a friend's printer it still worked out to be roughly $60 AUD a print.

I think it's a great idea too, definitely need to work on beerend 2.0.

Couple of suggestions though: Shipping: if you can analyse where backers are coming from, why not try to cut a deal with stores or brew shops/brew pubs which you could strategically locate where your biggest clusters of customers are. That way you could ship in bulk to single locations, and mail out certificates for backers to go and pick up their beerend. Explain why you're doing this to the backers, and for the stores, send extra they can sell, but they have to hold the reserve amount for backers. Plus you would be sending people to their stores that take their beer storage seriously, so they may turn out to be good customers.

Marketing: Bottle end: maybe change the marketing focus of the product, as you said it can be used for wine bottles, cans whatever. Go all out, dev the 2.0 for glass shelves versions, patent it and sell it to fridge makers

Good luck!

Love the idea. A big market for this would be cans as well.

Did you think of partnering with quirky?

P.s. I would love to try printing this on my replicator2

As nice as the machined metal looks, they'd cost pennies to produce as injection molded parts and would be just as functional.

I've given 3 oral pitches to my local Awesome Foundation over the years and wasn't selected each time. Not sure if that says something about my ideas, pitch skills, or what, but it's a bit of a bummer. FYI: The ideas were a completely solar/bike-powered LAN party, an electronics recycling drive where you get to smash computers with sledgehammers, and a student conference where all the research posters are wheatpasted onto the walls of a graffiti-filled alleyway and presented with paint markers.

Sorry to hear about that- and I encourage you to reapply (even with the same ideas again!). Sometimes it isn't that your idea wasn't awesome, but that there were just a lot of other awesome ideas coming in that month.

- David Fisher (AF trustee/co-founder)

an electronics recycling drive where you get to smash computers with sledgehammers,

Would be super interested in these. I am sitting on all the HDs I ever had and would love to get them destroyed in front of my eyes but am to lazy to do it myself.

Regarding smashing computers with sledgehammers, keep in mind that in doing so you are quite likely to release lead dust and other toxics. You shouldn't be breathing this in and you shouldn't let it get washed down the gutter and into the local stream.

Sorry, I just don't see the appeal of any of those ideas -- though clearly I am not your target interest group.

The smashing of computers as a recycling effort seems ridiculous to me in that computers are filled with tons of toxic materials.

I don't see how smashing them with hammers is good for anything...

Smashed computers can still be recycled, I had a partnership with a local e-waste recycling company. The idea was to give people incentive to recycle with a fun event. With regards to the toxic materials, it was my understanding that only monitors offered some risk. I could be wrong though.

Another interesting method for crowd funding. While cool, I'm still hopeful that we'll soon have the crowd funding/crowd sourcing sites that tackle bigger problems.

A site that funds the next Mars Lunar Rover in an X-Prize manner, for instance. Another site that provides crowd-funded medical grants like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Perhaps another to help fund some of Bill Gates' ambitious projects. He's got big ideas and even he's gonna need a little more cash. :-)

Venture communism?

I'd say it's more like "venture anarchy" or "venture lololololol".

There's no central organization and each chapter is self-organizing. I was a trustee of the SF chapter for about two years. :)

This woman has balls, totally awesome, luv her idea to embetter ones surrounding just by empowering people to DO it. There's a lot Mill-/Billionaires can learn from her.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the concept of self-organization! Writing a thesis+project on it :)

I know some Awesome trustees, and they're not millionaires or even close to it. Just regular Joes who think it's worth $100 a month to meet some interesting people and to be part of something cool.

$100 is not 'nothing', but plenty of people would spend that on other hobbies.

Tim Hwang's (guy who pulled us all together at first) blog is... http://brosephstalin.com/

;)

This looks wonderful! I went ahead and applied for my Thread Hero project: http://threadhero.com

seems interesting... but there's no detail info about how it works - neither for charity side or shirt buyers side... you force me to have another sign up not knowing the details...

Edit: and after entering the e-mail already you ask to share!? I'm not going to share until I know more about it!

It's just a "coming soon" page right now. I'm currently talking with some organizations to figure out the details.

We have a chapter in London Ontario Canada, too! http://awesomelondon.ca

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