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Sony has launched its own crowd-funding platform, with the intention of financing the company's own projects. The platform is called First Flight and is supposed to promote new business ideas in an effort to bring the company back in to profitability after a few years of bad financial performance.
The First Flight platform will allow people to pre-order new devices developed be Sony employees, although it is all limited to Sony's home country, Japan, for the time being. Right now, there are three projects up for pre-order on First Flight, known as the MESH Smart DIY Kit and the FES e-ink watch.
There is a third project that is 20 per cent of the way to being funded, known as the HUIS Remote Controller, which currently has a five million yen funding goal. On the First Flight site, we see a familiar layout to Kickstarter, with an introcution page which includes pictures and videos along with tabs for updates for the project.
Crowd funding has really taken off in recent years but Sony appears to be the first large corporation to create its own platform in order to fund its own projects publicly. It is certainly a step in a different direction but given Sony's financial position, this may end up being a good option for the company.
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KitGuru Says: Sony doesn't necessarily have the money these days to waste on funding projects that may not come to fruition. In that regard, it makes sense for Sony to gauge market interest in projects before going through with it, although crowd funding is a different way to go, especially for a company as large and well known as Sony. I imagine there will be some conflicting views surrounding this. What do you think of Sony launching its own crowd funding projects?
This is a great practical example of why everyone now hates crowd-funding. It was designed as a way for tiny startups and indie devs to get traction on the industry, and as usual it’s morphed into yet another way for the industry giants to overcharge us for sub-par products.
i think the idea is to get more people involved in the products they are developing.. easy to know if something was a bad idea if there is no investors and people excited wanting to see more.
There’s no need to get money involved if it’s just to get the community involved. There have been plenty of community-heavy development companies, and they haven’t felt the need to make the community pay for that process. It’s a transparent money making process, but there will always be people with too much money and not enough sense who’ll be prepared to put money into something like this.