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How Crowdfunding Is Changing In 2017
Crowdfunding is changing gears
When it comes to traditional business financing, you might be able to find tons of options being presented in front of you. This is because even though it would always be more favorable to continue operations with your own funds, that might not always turn out to be that feasible. This is particularly more important when the business would be thinking of expanding their operations. In that case, they would have to look to other sources, such as crowdfunding.
So, for those people who seem to have a pretty vague idea regarding the whole thing, SmashFund is actually a method with which you would be able to raise funds from external investors. In doing so, you would have to make them believe that they are indeed spending their money in the right place. In addition to that, there are many other benefits which would be enjoyed as a result of crowdfunding. It is also because of this reason that this option has actually been considered to be more favorable than the traditional business financing options.
Therefore, if you are thinking about going for SmashFund, you would be curious to find out about some of the benefits that it would entail for yourself along with for your company. So, to know more, take a look below.
- It is more efficient than traditional fundraising
When you would find yourself to be at the early adoption stage of your business, you might not find yourself to be in a position where you would easily be able to raise capital. In addition, you might not even be that sure that you are attracting all the right people.
So, SmashFund is actually considered to be a much more effective option than seeking out a loan or accredited investors. This would also ensure that your message is being sent out to all the right people.
Hence, with the right platform, you would be able to tell the story of your business, set up a quick video, as well as set up some enticing rewards. In addition, you would also be able to benefit from having everything in one centralized location where potential backers would be able to find you.
- It is a place to build social, traction, proof, and validation
You would also find SmashFund to be the ideal place for building up your social networks. This is because a highly visible and strong crowdfunding campaign would be able to provide you with social proof and validation that would be vital in you charting your way forward. This is because when potential customers would be showing interest in your business idea, you would have social proof of all your efforts. So, once early adopters would have been convinced by your ideas, you would easily find other people to follow suit. This social proof would then eventually be translated in to traction.
- It is an opportunity for crowd-sourced brainstorming to refine your idea
Even though you might think of your business idea to be the most perfect and unique one, it might be open to flaws. However, since you might consider it to be your baby, there is no way that you would be able to handle criticism.
However, one thing that would need to be understood is that they might provide you with the perfect opportunity to provide ideas and suggestions which would help to improve your initial business idea. So rather than getting offended and thinking that your potential investors would be out to get you, it would be highly recommended that you take it in stride. This would also be an opportunity when you might be able to derive the unmet needs of customers. This would help you to make some tweaks in order to make your business idea better and appealing to a larger market.
- It doubles as media and marketing exposure
Lastly, SmashFund would also double as a marketing and media exposure. This is because press coverage would create more eyes on your campaign and create lasting brand awareness for your startup. This would in turn also help you to get in touch with some major investors and thus take your project forward.
Therefore, as is quite apparent, crowdfunding is something which would indeed be favorable for your startup. I found most of this information on a great SmashFund review article. I researched it deeper and everything was acurate and true so I hope you enjoy my thoughts on it.
Writers Need Tough Friends

If you are one of my close friends, you know how often I complain about how pathetic I feel as a writer. Research, expanding knowledge, and developing new insights are one thing but knowing how to articulate them in a clear — let alone, beautiful — prose is a completely different beast. I’ve always struggled with clarity of expression, as I think most writers would admit. Some parts of When God Spoke Greek I would like to do over again, but on the whole it came out into the world much better than it looked in its first draft. The one simple reason is because I had a very tough friend read it.
This is a toast to Charles Halton.
I remember feeling so smug when I finished that first draft sometime in the spring of 2012. I knew what I wanted to say and I said it. I waited a few days for Charles’s feedback, and then it came. And it was painful. He spoke simply but pointedly about how ugly my prose was, how cumbersome my constructions and how contorted my logic in several places. He even had the nerve to say that at least a dozen times he had spotted the signs of a true amateur who doesn’t know what he’s doing, like young David trying to fit into military gear and to wield a sword made for a brute. “You’re trying way to hard, bro,” said he. “Look, this can be a great book, and you say some cool stuff, but right now it needs some serious help in the style department. Why don’t you forget about tweaking the arguments further and just work back through the text focusing on the way you are expressing yourself.” [On content alone, Frans van Liere looked at some material in a pervious version that would have extended the book up to the Reformation, and he likewise spoke bluntly by urging me to consider cutting it off at Jerome, since to continue further would require me working a lot harder on the research. This was another type of blunt honesty that made the book better.]
These comments sting. Ask any writer, any academic and they’ll tell you. It’s humiliating and frustrating. At first — forgive me Charles, for I have sinned against you and never told you — I cursed the day the forces of the universe brought the world this longhorn-loving, brisket-eating, oil baron-affiliated, Bush-president-producing son of a Texan mother. Really, I was angry.
But guess what happened the following Monday? As I began to read my book from the first word of the first chapter, I looked at it with far greater scrutiny than I ever had before. To be sure, I was not going back through it because during the weekend I had a moment in which I saw the light of Charles’s revelation. No, I was going back through it so that I could prove to myself that my writing was fine and his criticisms were overblown. But on page three I saw a sentence that just looked awful, suddenly. Then another on page five, and then a whole paragraph on page eight, and on and on and on.
I am working every day on improving my craft as a writer. Becoming a good writer is not something that happens overnight. It takes many years of hard work. I’m still working on it and will continue for my entire life. After the book was published I continued to find things I wish I would have changed, but I recently searched on my computer for those old files I had sent to Charles, and they are unfathomably embarrassing. Even with the many shortcomings that still characterize When God Spoke Greek, it is a much different book thanks to the honesty and directness and toughness with which my friend Charles Halton spoke to me that day.
Don’t Divert with #NYPDLivesMatter
Even if unintentionally, by using #NYPDLivesMatter you’re appropriating a tag that was meant to call attention to the very opposite of your tag and you’re claiming that the heinous act of one rogue, disturbed individual against two lives is equivalent in its audacity to the systemic oppression, harassment, and murder of numerous black lives by the same power.
All murder is evil, and there can be no justifying what happened to these police officers. There can also be no question that there are thousands of police officers who suit up every day to do the right thing, to put themselves and their families in danger for the sake of communal peace.
And yet, very few who have protested either in person or in writing in the last few weeks (myself included) would be found guilty of holding a position of outright opposition to all police officers. It is absurd that I have had to defend myself to family and friends. I do not think every police officer is corrupt and I have been proud of family members who have served as police officers, firemen, and military. But neither can you deny that police corruption is a widespread problem, whether we are talking about small, petty crimes or larger, systemic problems like the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
Protesting police brutality and calling attention to #BlackLivesMatter is not a “war on police”, as some have called it. It is rather a call to a social responsibility for the world we have created for blacks in America. It is also more important to call it out loud and clear now, after the brutal slaying of two police officers, because it takes no seer to foresee that many even if not all police forces will be licking their chops to exercise brutal force in retaliation for what has happened.
The war on America’s streets is not a “war on police.” Don’t be naive and imagine that a few instances of rogues killing police is a threat on the level of entire police forces walking the streets with guns in what is being increasingly recognized as a more militaristic police state in the 21st century. And don’t fail to see who their first targets will be.
We ought to be screaming louder than ever that #BlackLivesMatter, because if we allow the rhetoric of the NY Police Union President — who now blames the peaceful protesters of the Garner decision for this act of miscreant violence — to influence where we go from here, you can be sure that the multi-generational War on Black Lives will continue. That is the real war in America’s cities, just as it has always been.
Happy Holidays, But Don’t Stop Reading!
I’ll reflect on 2014 next week from ‘Murica, but before I hang out with Santa tonight over buffalo wings (you can keep doing your cookies but I keep it real with Saint Nicky) I wanted to say thank you to all of you who have made 2014 the best year of my life.
This year more than ever before I’ve met so many of you who read these pages and those of you with whom I’ve been connected through social media channels. I’m a big hugger. I don’t like handshakes. So being able to hug your necks and high five you in San Diego, Salamanca, Madrid, Helsinki, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Birmingham, St. Andrews and wherever else I’ve been has made me very, very happy. I have finally met in the flesh many great people like Nyasha Junior, Ryan Woods, Brennan Breed, Eva Mroczek, Janelle Peters, Kristian Petersen, Chris Keith, Anthony Le Donne Juan, James Crossley, and so many more. And I’ve been fortunate to solidify further the great connections with friends with whom I collaborate and converse online, like Shabana Mir, Ellen Muehlberger, Art Remillard, and so many more.
I hope you all have some nice days off. And whether your feet are getting roasted by fire in the Rockies or the Alps, have a read of this excellent article by James Grossman and Anthony Grafton from The American Scholar, “Habits of Mind”.

Dear RBL, we want you to be great
I am not in competition with RBL. I support any and every book review publication that produces excellent essays for the benefit of scholarship. It helps all of us when there are quality essays written by qualified experts who engage the books under review in a fair and insightful manner.
As the editor of MRB, I realize that it might appear I’m trying to throw another under the bus for our gain. But hear me clearly: RBL is not a competitor of MRB. We do different things and we go about them in different ways. What I want more than anything, for the sake of biblical scholarship, is for the Society of Biblical Literature to own up to the fact that the RBL has now spun so far out of control that we can hardly trust it anymore.
In a society as large as ours is, there is no excuse really for reviewers who do not have a single bit of solid evidence to show any kind of expertise in a book they are supposed to be reviewing. The examples are numerous, but to point to only one, it is offensive that with all the scholars we have at our disposal, the RBL seemingly let a pastor who only holds a D.Min. to publish a review of Tom Bolin’s book. I can’t even go into the line-by-line absurdities in the review. It’s just that I’m supposed to believe there wasn’t anyone more qualified to write this review?
There are a number of changes RBL could make. But here’s the simplest one: Stop reviewing everything. I realize the RBL wants to cover it all, but an editorial board either needs to step up and put in more work to ensure quality control, or they just need to admit that you can’t exercise the quality control you want with limited resources. I think the RBL should go with the latter. Just don’t review everything, and then you won’t have to accept pitches from people who have no business interacting with a book.
Bad reviews can have a negative impact on a scholar’s career. What’s inexcusable is when the bad reviews that go online or in print and remain there forever are written by people who shouldn’t be writing the review. SBL owes it to its members and to the disciplines of biblical and religious studies to produce reviews of a higher quality, written only by qualified scholars. It would be far better for Tom Bolin and anyone else who has been subjected to a pseudo-review to have their book completely ignored.
Many have written to RBL to express frustrations but nothing has changed. I want to put my money where my mouth is. I don’t want to lob missiles of criticism without also offering myself to help in any way possible, if anyone at RBL would like to reach out.
Construction In The Northwest
Construction in the Northwest
Property maintenance involves a great deal of work, the majority of which you can’t handle on your own. This includes equipment needed to do job tasks, fall safety, necessary PPE, Etc.. He saw engineering for an approach. As new construction starts to rise up once more, we’re excited to present a marvelous chance to relish top notch new construction for an outstanding selling price! Contact Us and we’re going to ensure your project receives the attention it requires from concept to completion. He said that this procedure is truly about collaboration.
The History of Construction in the Northwest Refuted
You may have observed wind turbines springing up around the Pacific Northwest in the past ten years. More wind is going to be developed. Fresh air on a great day feels fantastic, but should you take that day and set it in the center of winter, its not ideal, Cohen states. Remember in this instance the siding needs to be near perfect so that water isn’t directly driven into the home, but it is possible because I have seen it first hand.
The Foolproof Construction in the Northwest Strategy
Contractors Northwest stands today among the Inland Northwest’s biggest general contractors. He’s experienced in all regions of the company and actively sells not just residential and industrial properties, but in addition, rural tracts of land. Little information is supplied to the public. We’ve got a very long collection of creative clients that agree. She also said they’re an extremely modest number compared to a couple years back. We work hard to supply the best outcome and experience to our residential and business clients.
Starting prices vary from $549,000 to $709,000. Buyers and Sellers need micro info, and in several cases comparable data is extremely limited. A normal homeowner isn’t likely to know these sorts of things which is the reason you really must seek the services of an expert Northwest Siding Contractors like SFW Construction that will know right from wrong and the nice and the terrible products. It’s projected that on average the homes would deliver emissions reductions of over 900 lbs of carbon dioxide in comparison to a typical dwelling. The house was constructed on terraces up the face of the hill. My house was constructed in 1909. I would like to work with you to are YOUR housing dream come true.
Building in the northwest has hit a major boom here in 2016 and 2017. Now that we have a new president, I think people are a little more relaxed and ready to spend money again. One if those first places to spend is typically housing. In hopes that interest rates hold, contractors are spending money. Spec homes are starting to pop up in the Portland area and surrounding towns and cities. This is a good sign for the future. Let’s hope it lasts and we can have a prosperous year. It would benefit us all!
To learn more about SFW and what they can do for you, visit their site at: http://www.sfwconstruction.com/siding/
Different Lumber Saws And Uses
The diversity of lumber saws
You can use a lumber saw for just about anything. This includes, chop saws, tables saws and circular saws. When there are lots of types and sizes of circular saws available on the market, I want to speak about what I believe to be the three most significant divisions. Makita, Milwakie, and Skill. Skill being the best in my opinion due to the length of time they have been in business. It is hard not to be good at something when you have been around as long as they have been.
There are a large selection of price points, materials, and total quality among the assorted offerings. Saws are made from the highest quality of vanadium chrome materials. Reclaimed products are extremely eco-friendly, and you’re going to be a large part of preserving our environment for a long time to come. Jigsaw manufacturers usually express motor power with regard to amperage, in place of horsepower. It is essential that you use the proper safety equipment with these cutters because they may be dangerous. I have many scars on my fingers and hands from saws alone. I am lucky to still have all my fingers as I was a carpenter for 18 years. The closest calls I have had were with my skill saw and chop saw. For some reason I was always good with the table saw and only ran into binding issues where it would spit the piece of wood back at me a few dozen times. This can hurt, but not as bad as a cut.
Chop saws are always scary when you are doing detailed work. When it grabs, it grabs fast and pulls whatever is around it in with it. I cringe just thinking about some of the 1-2inch pieces of wood I have cut on a chop saw. Just dumb and I am lucky. Please do not ever try that.
There is a whole other breed of lumber saw that you wouldn’t consider and that is a package saw. This is a special saw designed to cut larges packages how you would like them cut. You would have to go to a package saw manufacturer to get one of these made or purchased. They are more for large companies that do bulk items and need a specialty saw designed or made.
You also have saws that are used in lumber yards like timber saws. These are massive machines that are long enough to hold an entire tree. They then grip the tree and pass it through to cut it down into 2×4’s or whatever size is needed. I will include a video blow on how these work so you can see for yourself. To get a machine like this, you have to go to a special manufacturer to get it made like Pacific Trail Mfg. They make custom lumber saws of all shapes and sizes to fit the clients needs.
We hope you enjoyed this article and please feel free to comment below.



