Crowdfunding

While a handful of independently owned Blockbusters and other independent video shops remain in operation across the U.S., they feel more like museums than anything else. It's fitting, then, that Video Fan, a rental shop in Richmond, Va., has been granted nonprofit status.

Taylor Swift has inspired crowdfunding site GoFundMe to raise its donation limit. The shift comes after Swift had tried to give $50,000 to Naomi Oakes, an 11-year old girl who is suffering from leukemia and uses Swift’s hit "Bad Blood" as her fight song. Because of the donation cap on the girl’s GoFundMe campaign, Swift…

The Federal Trade Commission has landed hard on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. It may be just what the doctor ordered to protect people donating to odd and sundry products and companies pitched on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and others. In the world of crowdfunding, the mechanisms of consumer protection are pretty thin. While crowdfunding platforms assert a…

Go big or go home, right? That seems to be the mantra at the Greek Bailout Fund page on crowdfunding site Indiegogo. The campaign, started by a 29-year-old Brit named Thom Feeney, popped up two days ago, seemingly as a good-natured (if tongue-in-cheek) way to lend a hand to Greece, which yesterday announced it was unable to make its scheduled 1.8-billion-euro International Monetary Fund loan payment. "All this dithering over Greece is getting boring," reads the campaign's mission statement.