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Crowdfunding your startup through sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGO has become an interesting, and in many cases, quite viable way of financing your project. A number of individuals and companies have been able to raise pretty substantial amounts of money through these services, going well beyond what they initially set as their funding targets.

Most notably of late, was the success of Lunatik/TikTok iPod Nano wristwatch, which set the record for the most money raised via Kickstarter to-date: almost $950,000 from over 13,000 backers. Not too shabby considering Scott Wilson and his MINIMAL design studio set out to raise a mere $15,000 in order to get licensing and manufacturing for the project under way.

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What made this project so successful? After all, there are other iPod Nano projects. And it's a wristwatch, which even with the addition of a Nano, might not be the coolest or most necessary of accessories.

Bryce Roberts, the Managing Director of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, points to some reasons he's identified that contributed to the success of the Lunatik/TikTok fundraising endeavor. These lessons that can be seen in other successful Kickstarter projects (such as Diaspora), but they're also applicable in many ways to more "traditional" funding efforts.

Tell a personal story

The Lunatik/TikTok "pitch" wasn't a bulleted list of qualifications or clients. Rather, the members of the team "told personal stories that created a connection to the project that had nothing to do with their professional pedigree." While this sort of storytelling doesn't boost their professional credentials, Roberts argues, it does give the entrepreneurs a certain personal authority and helps to connect them to funders and potential funders in a different way.

Roberts argues that the best fundraising pitches always emphasize this personal aspect. "It's a given," he writes, "that if I chose to invest in you I believe I can make money, but there are the intangibles around personality, perspectives, and life experiences that will make a potential funder more likely to want to believe you."

Tell the product's story

If you watch the TikTok video (below), you'll see the product is featured throughout. This demonstrates what the product can do - and that it can do what the startup promises. The video also demonstrates the larger potential of the product. These might be "small, nice little features" that some investors would dismiss. But with the crowdfunding model, the right storytelling around this seems crucial. "The difference between a nano strapped to a wristband and a premium quality, highly designed, customizable piece of wearable technology is simply a matter of how you tell the story."

But even when you aren't using a site like Kickstarter to raise money, it's crucial that your product be front-and-center in your presentations.

Give rewards and issue progress reports

Investors, by definition, invest in order to make a financial return. Nonetheless, argues Roberts, you should offer more than simply the promise of "making money." These sorts of non-financial rewards can be personal and personalized. By design, Kickstarter tells its users, "the best way to inspire support is to offer people great rewards. Everyone loves limited editions, one-of-a-kinds, and fun experiences (parties, screenings, balloon rides!). Spend some time brainstorming your rewards and people will respond. No one needs another coffee mug."

And as your project and your company are constantly evolving, it's good to keep investors and potential investors up-to-date on your progress. In the case of TikTok, the creators even filmed themselves in China when they traveled to the factory where the watch kits were being made. But the same could be said for all funding relationships; keep your investors apprised of "how you're making progress and how your story is continuing to unfold in a big and important way."

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Readers offer their best tips for using iPhone earbuds with your Mac, using a touch screen with a bandage on, and differentiating between all your power cables. More »

Some people love JavaScript, others hate it. Jeffrey Way is one of those developers that loves JavaScript. He writes that most people who hate JavaScript actually hate the DOM API. But there a few things about JavaScript that drive him nuts, so he's compiled a list of the Top 10 Things that JavaScript Got Wrong.

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Here's Way's list:

The Name. JavaScript is NOT Java
Null is an Object?
NaN !== NaN
Global Variables
User-Agent Strings Report Mozilla. Ever Wonder Why?
Scope Inconsistencies
The Use of Bitwise Operators
Too Many Falsy/Bottom Values
It Can't Do Arithmetic (he notes that he's 99% teasing with this one)
Code Styling Isn't your Choice!

The full article has more detail.

What would you add or subtract from this list?

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Senko Rašić has created a list of tips for MongoDB beginners called MongoDB gotchas for the unaware user. All of these "gotchas" are in the MongoDB documentation, but are the sorts of things that you might not remember until it's too late. Taking Rašić's advice early could save you some major headaches later on.

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Rašić's tips:

Use the 64-bit version The 32-bit version is limited to about 2.5GB of data, and you can't switch to the 64-bit version after install without starting all over.
Have a slave DB on another machine If your MongoDB instance crashes, you'll want to recover it from a slave on another server because the data from the master could be hopelessly corrupted.
Secure it MongoDB doesn't use any authentication by default. If you don't want the entire world to be able to tamper with your database, you need to setup some security rules.
Always use getLastError "Unless you need lightning speed, it pays to wait a little to be sure the database is ok with your changes, and that there were no errors modifying the data," Rašić wrote.

Read his post for more details. There's also a helpful discussion on Hacker News.

See also: 3 New NoSQL Tutorials to Check Out This Weekend.

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A recent report found that up to 40% of new work requests on Amazon's Mechanical Turk are spam. It's not the first time that there have been reports that the marketplace for micro-tasks has been used to employ folks for spam or fraud, or to prank friends or game The New York Times Most Emailed list.

But as ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick has often argued, there are some very interesting things you can do with Mechanical Turk. And Lindsey Harper, founder of Swayable, has found that the service has benefited her greatly as she's developed and tested several components of her web app.

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Using Mechanical Turk to Validate an Idea

We noted back in September when Harper had utilized Mechanical Turk in order to help validate her startup idea, using the service to poll 200 people on their reactions to her concept. Then, she had surveyed people to find whether or not they'd use the service, example of how they might use it. In addition to asking for general feedback on the idea, she also captured gender and age demographics, so she could have a better idea of who her market might be.

Using Mechanical Turk to Test Your App

Since then, Harper has continued to use Mechanical Turk, particularly for testing new features and product development along the way. She notes that the analytics and feedback that come with MTurk aren't that useful, so she uses the service in conjunction with SurveyMonkey - the "hits" on Mechanical Turk direct workers to the survey.

She's used MTurk workers to test new features, to find bugs and dead links, asl well as to give feedback on the site's look and feel. Harper says that the service has provided her with a "mass of people for testing" that she could not have otherwise afforded to hire.

Lessons Learned

She does note that she's learned several lessons along the way in helping her maintain the quality of the work she's getting done. She's restricted the location of MTurk workers to those within the U.S, for example, and she's adjusted her pricing until she's found the "sweet spot" - neither the highest nor the lowest. There, she says, she's found quality workers, although she says she does keep an eye out for people that are simply spamming her responses.

As a single-person and non-technical founder, Harper is outsourcing many of the pieces in building her app, of which the work sent to Mechanical Turk is just one component. Harper says she feels as though outsourcing has a bad rap - "Why not hire?" she's often asked. And certainly the recent news about Mechanical Turk and spam will do little to improve that reputation. But for her part, Harper says she plans to continue using the service for testing new features, even after she launches next year.

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Peter Wayner lays out the "dirty dozen" most common programming mistakes in an article at InfoWorld. The mistakes come in pairs. For example: "closing the source" and "assuming openness is a cure-all."

What would you add to or subtract from the list? Which of these pitfalls trips you up the most often? Do you have any strategies for avoiding these pitfalls?

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Here's the list:

Playing it fast and loose
Overcommitting to details
Not simplifying control
Delegating too much to frameworks
Trusting the client
Not trusting the client enough
Relying too heavily on magic boxes
Reinventing the wheel
Opening up too much to the user
Overdetermining the user experience
Closing the source
Assuming openness is a cure-all

You can find detailed explanations in the original article.

Photo by Stephen Woods

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The open database service Factual announced yesterday that it has secured $25 million in financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Factual was founded in 2007 by Gil Elbaz, whose last company Applied Semantics was acquired by Google in 2003, becoming one of the core components of AdSense. Investor Ben Horowitz describes Factual as "a key player in the emerging data-as-a-service market, with the potential to fundamentally impact how people and businesses use data to make decisions."

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Factual is an open platform for developers and publishers to build apps with its data, accessible via its APIs. Factual hosts hundreds of thousands of datasets across multiple categories, but it's recently turned its focus to building out its local data repository. In September, the company launched local datasets for more than 14 million businesses, and Factual also signed partnership deals with a number of companies to deliver local data, including Booyah and Facebook Places.

Elbaz says that "with the new funding and support of our superstar team of investors, we can become a driving force in the open data revolution that's transforming the web (and the world) as we know it." Indeed, big data has been an important trend this year, with many startups like Factual leading the charge. That notion was echoed in a blog post by investor Mark Suster today who called the sort of data-as-a-service that Factual offers as "the next major layer of the cloud, a major victory for startups."

Data as the Next Layer of the Cloud

Suster argues that as we have built out the cloud stack - storage, processing, and management - a gap has grown between that infrastructure and business logic. Suster says that data is necessary to bridge that gap. Although companies have long had to build their own databases and amass their own datasets, now it is possible to do build products with the assistance of startups like Factual that offer data-as-a-service.

"What really excites me," writes Suster, "and what is such a win for startups in the potential to massively speed up innovation and make it cheaper. What if every YCombinator and TechStars company had access to the Factual dataset and when they created their concepts it was with a large corpus of data? What if we could publish large pools of drug data and allow hackers to create databases of drug interactions that reduce problems with prescriptions. Imagine if you could have developers building financial services apps that created more transparency of trades. I predict that data over time will become the next major layer of the Internet supporting both consumer and business applications."

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Back when I was in graduate school getting my masters in journalism and mass communication, I worked on various "lab projects" which were challenges faced by media organizations that they wanted to tackle but didn't have the means or the resources to do so. So basically, the students at my school were a think tank for the local media. One of the first issues we were tasked with investigating was finding a new way to allow comments for online news stories to be more efficient and less offensive.

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The problem faced by most online news sites is that the anonymous nature of the Internet makes it very easy for vulgarity and off-putting comments to be posted, and for some sites, these types of comments pervade their site. Many of today's popular sites with comments have integrated systems to where readers can vote down bad comments while promoting good comments, which helps the bad stuff to be filtered out. Others have tried blocking fowl language with asterisks or by deleting the comment automatically, but this has only lead users to find unique ways of spelling their beloved curse words.

Some startups, like Disqus, have made it much easier to manage comments, and identity tools like OpenID and Facebook Connect have helped to lower the amount of anonymous commenters on the web, but anonymity is a fundamental cornerstone of Internet culture. Or is it?

In a recent New York Times article about how many news sites are starting to remove anonymous commenting, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post said she thinks that anonymity is losing its once exalted position atop the foundation of the Web.

"Anonymity is just the way things are done. It's an accepted part of the Internet, but there's no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments," says Huffington.
"I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity."

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures says there is plenty of room for innovation within comment boards. Wilson uses Disqus on his blog and has some suggestions for features they could include to make the commenting experience better, but he believes one of the ways to innovate in the space is to introduce game mechanics into commenting.

"Game mechanics will reward the kind of behavior the community wants and will punish the kind of behavior the community does not want," writes Wilson on his blog. "The anonymous commenter who has valuable information but can't publish in their own name will be rewarded. The anonymous commenter who leaves a hostile name calling piece of crap will be punished. And the comment thread and community will be better off for it."

Entrepreneurs that strive to create a truly innovative product usually first start with a problem that needs solving, and comment systems are certainly a problem that needs solving. Therefore by some transitive property, innovation in the commenting space seems to be an open door of opportunity for startups to walk through and offer a solution.

Are there other companies like Disqus that may be looking to disrupt the traditional comment system, or do you have an idea for making the process more user friendly? Let us know your thoughts on the state of comments and how you would change them in our very own comments section below!

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

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One of my favorite blogs to peruse now and then for amazing advice on web design is Webdesigner Depot which produces excellent in depth guides for various design related issues. Monday they produced an excellent in depth post that provides a step-by-step breakdown of best practices for creating a screen-cast for a Web page, a feature many startups like to include on their homepage to familiarize new visitors with their product.

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This article focuses on the creation of live screen capture videos of someone demoing the website, but I think a lot of this same methodology can go into creating any sort of introductory video a company uses to explain their site. The first step, as with any project, is to plan, and the first questions you need to ask yourself before you even start to storyboard include "What do we want to accomplish with this video?" and "How detailed do we want to get?"

Once you figure out the content, length, tone, and medium of your video, then move on to storyboarding. Storyboarding is an important step in creative processes such as these because it is much easier to visualize the end product before putting any real technical effort in. Filmmakers don't just storyboard as a way to outline their plot, they use it to do early edits to the film before wasting any time shooting stuff that will never make it past the cutting room.

By getting a storyboard of your production down, you may realize it's too long, too boring or not informative enough; you can determine these flaws by showing the storyboard to anyone unfamiliar with your product and then use their feedback to make alterations.

"The more detail in your storyboards, the easier the editing stage will be," writes Stu Green, author of the post on Webdesigner Depot. "Your storyboard will help you stay organized throughout the whole process, and if you ever get lost while producing the video, the storyboard will get you back on track."

If you plan on doing a straight screen-capture demo, don't just wing it; make sure you script out what you're going to say as you demo the site. Additionally, spend a few extra bucks on a nice microphone to record your voice - quality audio goes a long way in video production. Of course there are options that don't include a voice-over, but as Green points out, having one provides that human aspect to your video that will better connect with viewers.

Green provides a healthy list of options for software to record you screen-capture videos with, including Screenium, Jing, CamStudio, iShowU and Captivate. One nice option that I find is overlooked these days is the screen capture abilities included with the standard version of Quicktime on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. For a low budget product, Quicktime can get the job done, but if you wan't something a little more pro looking, one of the aforementioned applications will help also.

As the article continues, Green goes over techniques and methods for creating an interesting and captivating video, including things like pacing, editing techniques, and how to promote the video on the website. But if you'd rather not go through all this trouble on your own, there are a number of production houses that specialize in these types of videos.

One I always come back to when talking about these types of videos with friends is Common Craft, which you may know for their "In Plain English" series of videos. While they make videos to explain complex ideas "in plain English," the artists at Common Craft also will create custom videos for companies. A visit to the homepage of Dropbox displays a video explainer of the product created by Common Craft in their easy-to-grasp paper cut-out stop-motion style. Other clients of theirs include Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meetup and Intel.

Another production studio that makes similar videos is Epipheo Studios, which I learned about through watching a video explaining how Yelp's review filter works. Epipheo is also responsible for some of the Google Chrome OS and Google Wave videos you've seen, as well as videos for doubleTwist, and Zoho to name a few.

Videos such as these can go a long way in helping to rope in new visitors to your site. These can also be useful for an early stage company looking for a quick and unique way to explain their concept to potential investors, though I sometimes think it is better to be able to explain things through words as well. That being said, don't rely too heavily on these videos as pitch material, but rather as a link you can forward to hopefully garner interest in your idea.

Be sure to check out the full Webdesigner Depot article by Stu Green, as it is brimming with useful information regarding screen-cast production.

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On Saturday Apple let the public get their hands on their newest creation, the iPad, setting off a flood of hype and media coverage which has likely yet to reach its peak. Yes, this is yet another post about the iPad, and my apologies go to those who are tired of being choked by the frenzy of stories surrounding the iPad launch, but a few things I learned from this weekend might come in handy for undecided developers.

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Personally I tried to avoid the iPad hype this weekend, and not because I'm not a fan of Apple products or because I have a specific disdain for the iPad; I tried, and failed, to avoid the hype because I believe I underestimated its potential impact. This is just part of the reason I believe any developer even contemplating the idea of making an iPad application should do it, and do it as quickly as possible. Here's why.

There Aren't That Many iPad Specific Apps Yet

When I first joined Facebook in 2004 it was still very small and very young and I could remember being able to page through the less than 100 groups that existed on the site. Then it was easy to either find a group you wanted to join or to create one and gain a large membership. Now, the network has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of groups and finding the ones you actually want is much harder.

The iPhone has gone through this same process. When the App Store launched, only a few thousand applications were on it, making searching for apps easy and making the potential impact of new applications much larger. Now, as we know, hundreds of thousands of applications clog the App Store and make searching and discovering new applications exponentially harder than before.

The same thing will happen to the iPad, which means now is the time to jump on the train. A current search of the App Store for iPad apps turns up just over 3,200 applications, a fraction of the number of iPhone/iPod Touch apps which will likely pass 200,000 later this year. While the iPad does run these other apps, there is a dearth of iPad apps, especially those that are not just scaled-up versions of their iPhone predecessor. The time has, obviously, never been better for app developers because right now with so few iPad apps, the probability of being discovered early is much higher.

The Apple Buying Culture Wants Your App

People don't love Apple for their low prices; they willingly hand over hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for the company's various products. The culture of the people who buy these products has taught them that price is not the main motivation behind why they buy something, while at the same time making them more willing to hand over their cash in micro-payments for individual games and applications.

From the iPod to the iPhone, iTunes and the App Store have bred a new a customer willing to pay $1.99 for music, or $2.99 for an app they've never tried without hesitation. I know I've done it before, and I should feel worse about it but I don't. I've spent a few bucks here and there on applications that I used only a handful of times but I don't get angry about it. Honestly, my music purchases are much farther scrutinized than my app purchases. For better or worse, we've been taught to accept the throwing away of a few bucks here and there, and app developers have been cashing in on that for a while now.

The other opportunity around this buying culture for the iPad is that people will likely pony up a few extra dollars for each app on average. While developing an iPad app may not be twice the effort it takes for an iPhone, the customer will likely be willing to pay $1.99 for an app that was $.99, especially just after launch. If I had an iPad right now, I'd want to test out the best applications on it, and some of those apps are likely to cost as much as $9.99, but I would likely still buy them because, hey, I just spent $500 on a device, what's a few extra bucks?

The Hype Window Is Big, But Not Too Big

The hype over the iPad has just begun, and it will only get bigger as more people discover what it can do and start being stared at by strangers on the subway. The hype will continue later when the 3G version of the iPad launches, though it will not be quite as large as this weekend's surge. The 3G launch will likely get the media buzzing about it again, and it will help the hype live longer than normal, however, that window of excitement could close this summer.

New MacBooks and new iPhones are expected to be announced, if not launched, this summer, and they could likely steal a majority of the spotlight away from the iPad, especially if the mythological creature that is the "Verizon iPhone" does in fact become a reality. Apple will likely do everything in its power to keep the hype surrounding the iPad up until the holiday season when the company does its best business, by then, however, there will be a lot more iPad apps than there are right now.

This Thing Is Likely Bigger Than Most Expected

Originally analysts had estimated that between 200 and 300 thousand iPads would leave shelves this weekend, but Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray revised his guess to between 600 and 700 thousand after seeing the hoards of people waiting in line Saturday. Numbers aside, the impact of the device before its launch speaks volumes to its potential from here on out.

Several media companies announced they would be developing special no-Flash sites specifically for iPad browsing, and others said they would be providing HTML 5 video capability in anticipation of the device. All the while, several outlets, like WIRED and the Wall Street Journal announced they were working on iPad applications for viewing their content.

After Apple's past success with the App Store on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's no surprise that these companies are jumping on board even before the iPad is in customers' hands; they recognized the importance of early adoption and being in the store at launch. Popular technology journalists have given mostly positive reviews of the device as it seems actually seeing, holding and using the device speaks louder than just reading, or hearing about it.

Personally, I didn't think the launch would be this big, but it has certainly been another success for Steve Jobs and Apple. That being said, the reasons to develop on the iPad pile much higher than those not to, so if you're even considering it, do it. Do it now.

Click here to see ReadWriteWeb's full coverage of the iPad's launch.

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