As a kid, I always dreamt of growing up and having a house like the Jetsons, with moving stairs and appliances and furniture that worked with just a push of a button. And of course, I’d have a Rosie of my own too. Fast-forward 20 years and that dream is a reality; Alexa is my Rosie, and my house practically runs itself thanks to all the advances in smart home automation.

But living this dream, as great as it is, didn’t come easy. It took some time, a lot of money and a ton of patience to learn and master all this automation and now I’m going to share all that knowledge with you. If you dream of a smart home but don’t know where or how to start, my Guide of the Top Smart Home Devices: How To Make Your Home Smarter Than You will help. I’ll give you a rundown of what you need and give you setup suggestions so that you can make your dreams a reality too!

Smart Home 101

I know, it sounds a bit scary and intimidating, but it’s not as complicated or “Big Brother” as you think.  IOT allows products to interconnect and be easily identified through digital networks, making your life easier and safer.Before you can decide how to automate your home, you need to understand how it works. Simply put, automation is using a button or voice command to control objects around your home. From turning off the lights while you’re at work to advanced surveillance systems, homes are becoming smarter and smarter thanks to the Internet of Things (IOT).

Sure, it’s fun and convenient to have blinds that auto-adjust on command, but it’s the practicality that comes from automation, like being alerted when there is a water leak in your basement, that really makes it worth your while. And you can decide just how “smart” you want your house to be. Add a few products or deck it out from top to bottom, the possibilities are endless.

Smart Home Setup: What do You Need?

All these gadgets sound great, and they are, but you don’t necessarily need them all. And if they don’t fit your lifestyle and you’re not going to use them, then why buy them?

• Where do you live?

  Do you live in an apartment or house? The size of your home will determine whether or not some of these devices are a good buy. For instance, a small apartment is perfect for the smart mop, but it’s not as effective in homes with large kitchens and bathrooms.

• How large is your family?

  Some appliances, like the smart fridge, are better suited to larger families. Yes, anyone can use it, but odds are it won’t be fully utilized if you live alone.

• What is your lifestyle?

  If you’re rarely home colored lights are pointless, while a smart alarm makes sense. Figure out if you need it before you waste money. For example, if you rarely cook, buying a smart pot isn’t going to turn you into a chef.

  Buy things to improve what you already do. Otherwise, it’s not a “smart” buy.

Smart Home Buying Tips

Once you figure out what you need, you need to buy “smart.” Here are some guidelines to ensure you get the most for your money:

The Best Smart Home / Home Automation Devices

Okay, so you’re ready to smarten up your home, now what? Deciding on what brands and products can be daunting. And while you don’t have Rosie, yet, to help you, you have the next best thing: me. I’m going to go through the different smart home devices and explain what they do and how they can help you to make choosing easier. Then we’ll talk setup and buying tips.

Hubs & Controllers

If there’s only one smart gadget you invest in a hub or controller, like the Amazon Echo featuring Alexa, is the way to go. Designed like a Bluetooth speaker, this hub can control things around your home, place orders for you, give you the news, play music and more- all through voice command.

Easy to use, you can check the weather or have her walk you through a recipe while you cook. This device is ingenious, and with a little tinkering on your part, it will even anticipate your needs, suggesting products to order or alerting you when there’s a sale.

Oh, and if you get an Echo, contrary to what you heard, you don’t need an Amazon account or subscription service, as it can play music and more from Pandora and other providers.

For those who would rather use a remote than their voice, the Logitech Harmony Elite is a good alternative. Think of it as a universal remote for your house, working with Bluetooth, infrared, Z-wave and other devices.

Thermostat

Having a thermostat that not only controls the temperature but senses it and regulates it, will save you money and cold feet for years to come. Products like the Ecobee3 do just that, using wireless sensors to detect the temperature in the coldest or warmest room and adjust it accordingly, so the whole house in uniformly heated or cooled.

And of course, it can all be controlled through a smooth touchscreen or remotely from outside the house using their app. There are many different brands in this category, but the Ecobee3 is my personal choice because it is user-friendly and compatible with the Echo and Apple’s HomeKit.

Smart Alarm

If there is one thing you WANT to be smart, it’s your home security system, and there is no shortage of option here. Indoor, outdoor, or combination of the 2, you can customize what is being monitored and control it from just about anywhere.  Vivint and SimpliSafe are 2 viable options here, with the Vivint under $100 and the SimpliSafe a bit higher. These alarms all have monthly monitoring subscriptions, but you don’t have to use them.

Even better though is the personal monitorization, with cameras that you can access from your phone or work computer, to see what’s going on at any time. You can also get alerts on your phone in the event of an emergency. If you have small kids at home or elderly parents, this is a Godsend.

Smart Door Lock

If you’re going smart, a door lock, along with a good security system,  is a must-have, giving you peace of mind when you’re home and away. The one I like best is the Schlage Connect, a deadbolt lock with ANSI Grade 1 security durability. It has over 30 pins and a built-in alarm that will alert you of any suspicious activity.

It also works with the SmartThings hub so you can connect from your smartphone or tablet. Which means you never have to worry if you locked your door or not ever again. It is a bit pricey, but worth every penny.

Lightbulbs

Need a little mood lighting? Feeling “blue”? If so, you’ll want to invest in smart bulbs like the Philips Hue, which allow you to control how bright they are and what color. These bulbs, though pricey, are a sweet indulgence, especially if you entertain a lot; You can go from soft green to bright orange, setting the moods for parties, watching movies and more.

The bulbs work with Alexa, Siri and more and there is a Hue White coming out, so you can control the intensity of a white light- at a much lower cost.

Appliances/Furniture

Yes, even machines are getting smarter and there are quite a few innovative  items that fall under this category; let’s take a look:

• Baking: If you’ve ever baked, you know how precise the process is and how easy it is to mess up. Well, not anymore with products like the Perfect Bake Pro. It makes baking easier than ever, with a scale for exact measurements and an app that take you step-by-step through the recipe.If you dream of baking your kids the perfect birthday cake or want a healthier, less expensive treat at home, this one for you.
• Barbecue: The idea of perfectly grilled ribs or chicken is easier than ever with one of the new electric barbecues on the market. Many, like the one from Char-Broil, have an app to let you control the temperature and will alert you when your food hits the ideal temp.Electric is more stable than gas or charcoal, and it costs the same as a traditional barbecue, making this buy a no-brainer.
• Refrigerator: This is one of my favorite smart gadgets, eliminating the age old question that plagues mom everywhere: do we need milk? With a smart fridge like the Samsung family hub, all you have to do is look- while you’re shopping in the supermarket. It has 3 cameras and will snap pictures and email them to you every time you close the door, so you know what you need and what you don’t.

  There’s also a touchscreen interface that lets you track family schedules, like soccer practice or upcoming sleepovers, so you can plan ahead and pack lunches or stock up on munchies. A welcome gift for moms everywhere.

• Vacuum/Mop: Self-propelled vacuums have gotten even better, featuring built-in navigation and slimmer bodies to get every corner. And of course, what good is vacuuming without a smart mop? Yes, products like the Braava Jet will mop your floors for you. Similar to the Roomba, it sprays water for deep cleaning.
• Pots: Everyone loves a slow-roasted stew, but a lot of times we’re afraid to leave the crockpot going all day while we’re at work. Now you can have the best of both worlds thanks to brands like Belkin. They make a crockpot that you can regulate from a phone app, so you can turn it up or shut it off from anywhere you are.
• Bed: A bed that can monitor your heart rate and breathing, as well as provide feedback on how to improve your quality of sleep is alright in my book. Sleep is a precious commodity, so a smart bed is a good investment, ensuring you get the most out of it. The one from Sleep Number uses an app to suggest mattress firmness, lets you adjust each side individually, and can alert you if your breathing or heart rate is off. Brings new meaning to the term “sleep like a baby.”

As you can see, there is a lot to consider when automating your home, but hopefully, my Guide of the Top Smart Home Devices: How To Make Your Home Smarter Than You will make it easier. Smart Homes are the wave of the future, improving the quality of our day to day lives. Just use this guide and be “smart” when choosing a device and you’ll feel like your living bigger than George Jefferson, I mean, Jetson.

Although we hear of wildly successful crowdfunding campaigns, the truth is that the majority of these campaigns fail. The leading reward-based crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, has a 37 percent success rate and Indiegogo’s is even lower. And those cool hardware projects that seem to just take off and get immediate traction with backers? Don’t be fooled: According to research on completed hardware projects, 70 percent of those that raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter and Indiegogo added venture or angel investments before launching their campaigns.

These entrepreneurs' inability to get traction with backers did not necessarily occur because their products were unappealing. More often than not, the key reason a project fails to meet its goal is that the project owner underestimated the amount of time and cost that would be required to properly market that campaign.

The need for a marketing budget, then, is not just for reward-based campaigns; it applies to investment-based crowdfunding campaigns, as well. 

While top equity platforms promote the thousands of registered investors they have on their sites just waiting to discover the Next Big Thing, most of those platforms have criteria and costs for actually marketing a deal to those same investors.

But, remember, there's a price tag for getting highlighted in that platform’s weekly email, or being promoted to its social media followers or featured in its webinars. To gain visibility to investors, an entrepreneur must have marketing dollars ready to commit or at the very least a willingness to surrender (sometimes substantial) equity or warrants in his or her venture to the platform owners.

So, how, exactly, do you maximize your marketing efforts? Here are five tips:

1. Don’t launch without a budget.

While much can be done for free, like sharing your campaign via your social media channels, emailing your friends and family or hosting offline meetups or launch parties, the most successful campaigns still incur costs. From shooting a video, to buying Facebook ads, to launching a PR campaign and even hiring a graphic designer, many crowdfunding campaigns invest a minimum of $20,000. With almost 6,000 active projects competing at any one time on Kickstarter, these campaigns need to to invest in ways that help them look polished and get noticed.

2. Ensure that your vendors have experience with the type of campaign being launched.

Investing in a campaign manager or marketing expert doesn’t always mean success. Take the case of Simon Thomson of social appSource. Despite extensively researching and interviewing PR and crowdfunding agencies to give his campaign the best possible chance, Thomson spent $20,000 with a well-known crowdfunding PR agency, only to be greatly disappointed in its work. “Quite quickly into the first three months of working with this agency," Thomson said, " we understood that the claims made about greatly increasing our social media presence on various platforms and having strong press relationships were false."

Simon said he also discovered that the PR group was uncreative and unresponsive when faced with challenges or requests to help the campaign get back on track. So, the lesson here is, when selecting a PR or marketing firm, be sure that it’s not only creative but able to support the specific type of campaign you are launching (sports, film, tech product, service, etc).

Since crowdfunding has become synonymous with pre-ordering a product, make sure that if your campaign is not product focused, any company you work with has experience that aligns with your particular campaign type and industry sector.  

3. Understand who does the heavy lifting.

Many of the companies using crowdfunding today are actually organizations with their own substantial PR and marketing budgets -- as well as a full back-office support staff of internal PR people, marketing experts and financial backers fueling and helping their campaign.

Given this reality, you should clarify with any potential marketing vendor what it actually contributed to any campaigns it cites as examples of its past success. Review the vendor's press contacts and ask to interview previous clients to ensure that the success it's touting resulted from that vendor's own efforts rather than the work, staff and budgets of the companies behind those successful campaigns.

4. Make sure your copy has the appropriate call to action.

Although you may successfully drive traffic to your campaign, what's key is to convert those viewers to backers. Simon's app Source had 10,000 visits to its campaign page yet still had issues converting visitors to backers because its copy had not been drafted with the appropriate calls to action to encourage contributions.

Although Source's original campaign for $25,000 succeeded, the company had hoped to raise well beyond this sum and ended up launching a second campaign to meet its capital needs -- this time, however, without the marketing budget it had previously lost on a nonperforming vendor.

5. Strive to gain early momentum.

One key to a successful crowdfunding campaign is to gain early momentum. Most platforms indicate that project owners should attract the first 30 percent of their support from their own networks before turning to PR. Then, the first three days of any subsequent campaign are crucial.

At this juncture, founders should send a project-preview link to their inner circle in advance of their campaign launch and be diligent about keeping in contact, so these supporters will contribute as soon as the campaign goes live. Founders should also rely on PR -- but not to drive backers the day they launch. Instead, the PR should be there to help entrepreneurs cross the chasm between the initial support they've had (from friends, family, and co-workers) and the supporters to whom they have no connection as yet.

If you're a founder contemplating crowdfunding, don't be misled by the handful of “hits" that seem to go viral and then easily amass thousands of supporters and funders. While any project can be successful, given the right combination of preparation and execution, any attempt you make to raise significant funds will most likely need a well-planned and funded marketing and PR campaign.

And, along the way, don’t forget to check those client references if you're hiring an outside firm.

Posted from : http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250842

1. Technology changes;
1. Peer to peer business transactions using robotics ( Mobile phone ) cutting off the middlemen 
2. Cloud,server and storage managed by large cloud providers  replacing local devices
3. Wireless equipment replacing wire 
4. Software and hardware robots will do the work faster and cheaper with higher accuracy  and quantity. 
2. Economical changes   
1. Recession has damaged the economy and clients think of cost reduction more than expansion
2. Rise of Inflation,  labor cost ,  insurance cost  and health care  were clear 
3. Getting older was a concern
3. Having 30 year financial obligations such as mortgages and Kids 

Click on the image for the full series.
Original photo by Bruce Evans on Flickr.

Crowdfunding has come a long way since 2008, when a group of UC Berkeley MBA students launched Indiegogo. It’s now a multibillion-dollar industry growing literally exponentially and worldwide.

My research suggests crowdfunding will grow more than 100 percent in 2013, and according to various industry sources, it grew 60-80 percent in 2012.

And while the roots of crowdfunding remain here in the United States, the movement holds much promise and has massive implications for the global economy.

Recently, the World Bank commissioned a study on how crowdfunding could be applied internationally and what its potential could be for affecting entrepreneurship in second and third world countries. It did so by asking Crowdfund Capital Advisors to study the issue, a firm made up of the very people who brought crowdfunding to the fore in the U.S.: Jason Best, Sherwood Neiss and Zak Dorian-Cassidy. The three entrepreneurs spent almost two years rallying support for a crowdfunding exemption from SEC registrations and stood in the Rose Garden in 2012 when President Obama signed the JOBS act into law allowing crowdfund investing in the United States.

Click the image to see the full report.

The study, which I helped develop, was released in October. And what we found was both expected and surprising: Crowdfunding is going to be a disruptive global influence, but in some cases, not quite in the way you might think.

Here are a few of the most surprising takeaways from the report:

THE 93 BILLION DOLLAR QUESTION

The question the World Bank asked our research team to address was a market size estimate — in other words, how big of a phenomena is crowdfunding and crowdfund investing?

Our team brought in economists with experience in the developing world and created a model utilizing purchasing power parity analysis. Essentially we estimated the income levels needed internationally to allow individuals to invest. We then made very conservative estimates (less than 1 percent of portfolio allocation) and looked at the size of the potential crowdfunding investment market.

The model predicts a $93 billion equivalent crowdfund investing market by 2025.

Our model assumes that no institutional investors allocate money through crowdfunding portals — despite examples of this occurring in the U.S. and the U.K. If we were to assume institutional investors get in the market, then crowdfund investing becomes a several hundred billion disruption to early stage capital markets by 2025.

CROWDFUNDING IS TRULY GLOBAL

In the space of only five years, crowdfunding has grown from a handful of sites to nearly 1,000 platforms operating on every continent except Antarctica. Entrepreneurs are using crowdfunding to raise either debt or equity financing for their businesses in 27 countries, and that list is rapidly growing.

The World Bank report built an empirical model to predict in which countries crowdfunding was likely to emerge. We studied a number of economic, regulatory, cultural and normative variables and found that crowdfunding in the second and third world was related to flows of foreign direct investment and diaspora investing.

This suggests that crowdfunding is operating as a vehicle for entrepreneurs to solicit either donations or investments from the extended network of expats, emigrees and organizations seeking to bolster economic development in their home country. One of the most successful examples is OurCrowd, which solicits investments in the U.S. for Israeli technology startups.Homestrings solicits donations from individuals who moved from Africa but want to target donations back into Africa.

CROWDFUNDING CAN EMPOWER WOMEN

Alicia Robb.

Crowdfunding relies on the power or social networks, and since women are more active on most forms of social media than men, it is unsurprising that data shows that women are at least as successful as men in using crowdfunding. While women appear to set lower goals than men, according to Alicia Robb, senior research fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, they are very effective at raising funds through crowdfunding.

It is well documented that professional investors show strong homophily — meaning they invest in businesses led by people who share gender, race, religious and educational characteristics with them. This means that women in the United States receive less than 5 percent of venture capital investing dollars, despite founding more than 50 percent of new ventures. This pattern exists throughout the world, and crowdfunding may represent a significant disruptive influence that can enable women founders to fund their businesses without relying on institutional investors.

CROWDFUNDING IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

Islamic finance imposes strict regulation on the types of contracts that can be used, and this can act as a damper on startup financing. However, scholars have stated that crowdfund investing is compliant with the principles of Islamic finance — which are based on fairness, equitable treatment of all parties, and avoidance of undue obligations. The World Bank report shows that the Muslim world may be one of the first markets in which crowdfund investing may be truly game changing — it is the first new form of Islamic finance to emerge in centuries.

The youth of the Middle East are just as technology savvy as those in the U.S., but the combination of rampant youth unemployment and limited access to capital for companies is curtailing new company formation and in part leading to the instability in the region. Crowdfunding may represent a new vehicle for allowing these smart young men and women in the Middle East to finance their technology firms and create both economic and political stability in this time of crisis and economic despair in the region.

From rural Africa, where crowdfunding is done from mobile device to mobile device, leapfrogging over the lack of wired Internet access, to the offices of NGOs who see crowdfunding as the next step in microenterprise lending (made famous by Grameen bank), to accelerators and universities in South America, Europe and the Middle East, crowdfunding is a new tool allowing the funding of projects and startups. How big it will become is an open question, but for the first time companies can use the power of social networks and social media to directly fund their passions.

Richard Swart is a PhD in Information Systems, an international award-winning academic and a recognized thought leader in the crowdfunding industry. Richard is a founding member of the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA), the Crowdfunding Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (CIFRA), and an early leader in the field. Richard co-organized the first major national conference on crowdfunding and coordinated several educational events on the JOBS Act throughout the United States. He is the Director of Research and Analysis for Crowdfund Capital Advisors (CCA) and works closely with the University of California, Berkeley in the Innovation in Entrepreneurial and Social Finance Program which is dedicated to academic research on crowdfunding.

Posted from:http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/12/world-bank-crowdfunding-investment-market-to-hit-93-billion-by-2025/