Thursday night I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Adler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, the New York based group funding platform. Kickstarter serves as a way for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers (as they say on the site) to make their dreams come true, post a project, and collect the necessary funding for it. Similar to others like it, projects much reach their goal in order for any of the funding to be collected upon.

Kickstarter has taken off because of the quality of projects they host and the high success rate for projects that do collect on funding. They’ve also given the power to the people, fundraising on a grand scale is no longer for big non-prof corps. The Kickstarter interface is clean and simple, the concept is one that people understand, and there’s almost always a project that you can identify with and support.

Recently, I contributed to a project call the beta cup project. Check it out and think about contributing…

About this project

We want to find solutions to the enormous problem of disposable coffee cups. The hard part it making something that is still convenient, while ending the waste.

We believe there are lots of people with good ideas – you might have a few yourself. After all, so many of us drink coffee every day, some of us must have thought about this, right?

We’ll ask people to rate and review the ideas and invite the best to create prototypes. We’ll reward the best, with prizes. The prize will help the winners begin the process of getting their ideas to market.

All money raised here on Kickstarter will be used for prize money only (Who will check? We hope you will).

Why is this important? In North America we consume 58 billion paper cups every year, which represents 60% of the worlds total cup wastage.

These cups are not being recycled and most end up in landfill. With less than 2% of us using reusable mugs, we have a serious problem on our hands.

For more information please see http://thebetacup.com or contact me, Toby Daniels, directly.

P.S. Maybe helping fund the prize is not your thing. Don’t worry, there will be lots of ways to help out. Please let your friends and family know about betacup – more than 65% of us are coffee drinkers, so there is bound to be some interest. Who knows, maybe they have already dreamed up the winning idea.