Except there are ways to get around that. Ever known anyone who got a loan from parents/friends/ to start a business? Spin it as debt rather than equity. Although you could make a decent argument for waiving those restrictions for very small investments (say sub-100 dollars per investor with a cap on total investment as well).

But that's fine- if you can't do it you can't do it legally. That still doesn't mean that Kickstarter is anything other than a complete rip-off, transfering risk from the business to the buyer. The way its supposed to be is you make a product, taking the risk, and profiting for doing so. Its not supposed to be you con people into giving you money, let them take the risk that you can't complete development (or that you're just a scam), and then profit as well.

They're more of an investment than stocks are (outside of public offerings). But buying an item at a discount isn't an investment. It's like coming home from the mall with 20 shirts you didn't intend to buy and saying "but I saved money, they were on sale!"

I'm going to hope that was a joke. I don't have the heart to explain all of economics tonight.

Then let me invest, rather than prebuy. Let me buy a tiny part of the profits. But I'm not going to pay to pre-purchase an item that doesn't exist yet from a company with little to no track record. That puts all the risk on me, the consumer, rather than the entrepeneur. That's ass backwards.

Which is why I'll never do a kickstarter- I'm not going to pay extra for early access to a product that I can't test and may never be made. I'd be willing to invest for a share of the profits, but not pay extra for a presale.

Except it hasn't. There's a reason why empathy and altruism exist, and both have shown positive correlation with the ability of the species to survive.

Only against future gambling winnings. And I'm not sure how it crosses over years, I've never lost enough in 1 year to have to care.

Having taken a few of them- they're a good overview, but they don't provide anywhere near the depth I expect of a college undergrad course, much less grad school. MITX is much better, and even coursera is better. The only "advantage" of udacity is celebrity teachers and a slightly better website.

Sounds great to me. I always paid my taxes on online poker winnings anyway. I just want to be able to play a tourney at night every now and again.

And they'd like a pony too. Pink if possible.

Sure, they'd love to have you pay them and not use it. But given a choice between low usage low pay and high usage high pay with the ability to sell additional services, they want the second. They really don't care about the bandwidth used by the messaging app, which was all they could talk about.

Android is hitting the 1 billion point inside of a few months. They're seeing 1.5M activations per day. 357M Android devices were shipped in 2012.

http://bgr.com/2012/09/12/android-cumulative-shipments-2013-1-billion-units/
http://news.yahoo.com/googles-schmidt-sees-1-billion-android-phones-9-162220903--sector.html

No, they weren't. This was happening TWO YEARS AGO. At a meeting with TELECOMs. Telecoms want people to use more data, not less- they want to sell streaming video services, extra gigabytes, exclusive content, etc. Basically they were trying to push their phones by touting that their customers would make the telecom less money than other phones. It was ridiculous.

First off, BB was never the king- Symbian was. It always crushed BB worldwide.

Secondly, do you know how ridiculous you sound claiming that 1 billion people jump on anything in a heartbeat? These numbers don't grow fast, it took years to grow when smartphones had a huge advantage in features vs the competition (feature phones) and are only just now overtaking them in total. Moving those numbers when comparing apples to apples between smartphones is nearly impossible- Android only overtook Apple by creating a low end market.

Secondly, it was totally to do with features. BB was a powerful company that rested on their laurels. They didn't try to drive to the mass market, they were happy with the business market. When they got piledriven by Apple and Android they didn't react quickly. People wanted a great web browser, apps, a responsive touch screen UI, etc. BB took a long time to deliver, and arguably still doesn't. They tried dumb ideas like a tablet that needed to be connected to a BB phone to work. And it didn't even have email when it released!

They have enough cash that a resurrection is possible, they aren't going to dissolve in the next year or so. But for that to happen upper management needs to realize that the market has passed them up and that they need to respond. I've seen no recognition of that from them. And as time goes on it will be harder and harder to catch up, as they'll be so far behind in app ecosystems that they'll be unable to capture new consumers.

So yeah, BB is a joke.

The almost 1 billion people using Android and the nearly equal amount on iOS beg to disagree. Heck 189 million feature phones shipped last quarter- even they dwarf you. Your platform is irrelevant, and that's not even counting how out of touch with technology its management is (I work in the industry- as everyone else was touting how amazing the new smart phones were they were touting as a feature how little data their users used as a selling point).

Thank goodness, I can now finally text the last two people on earth who own a blackberry.