Here is a link to the news, enjoy!

This journey has been both challenging and stressful for the team and so we would like to thank all of you once again for the continuous support you all have shown so far.

Not too long ago, a famous diner in Waterloo was burned down. It was a place of love and laughter and a second home to thousands of University of Waterloo/Wilfred Laurier students. In tribute to such a great place, we at GroupVestor are working on a fundraising campaign which will help bring Mel’s back bigger, faster and better. Stay tuned!

CTV Report: UW Plaza Burns Down

The Early Days

Here is an update on what’s been going on this past month here at VeloCity and the Accelerator Centre for Bootcamp team, Group Vestor. Below group member Moe Adham talks about the progress, successes and difficulties the team has encountered thus far. Stay tuned for more updates as the program progresses!

Our first month has been a great experience. First, we have had the time to work on our business model. We have been lucky enough to talk to some advisors in the industry, and have tweaked out initial model to better suit market conditions and launch timing. We now have a very concrete plan, with an execution strategy, and a feasible implementation schedule. We plan to launch our first product at the end of the month with our lead customer. Networking with the community has also been a priority, and we now have some local business leaders as advisors. Finally, we have been planning out our financing situation, and planned for the future. We have set out a preliminary plan for continuation at our current burn rate, and have plans for raising more funds from grants in the near future.

From a development perspective, we have really focused on a lean operation. This has involved a lot of outsourcing, with a focus on direct supervision and purchase over contract. We have been lucky to find a firm providing a solution that has been a great launch point for our product, and has saved us around 1 months of development work. We are currently finished our first design iteration, and are reviewing the product for a meeting with customers at the start of June.

Our main challenges so far have been mainly focused on time, resources, and business development. Our initial plan had some flaws, and through feedback, we have been able to work out the kinks. We have a very ambitious plan, and very little time to execute. We have done a lot of work to ensure that we are not wasting time, and outsourcing work wherever possible.

Moe Adham,
Group Vestor

This collaboration for innovation coupled with transparency delivers an optimized environment that produces outstanding returns – as well as an edge in the increasingly competitive global landscape.
The Internet and crowd sourcing platforms allow the brightest minds all over the world to communicate in real-time, forming a “global brain.”  Forward-looking investment firms who embrace this have the opportunity to break traditional barriers of innovation and venture creation and achieve global missions at a formerly unheard of pace.
This is the venture model of the future.

http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/06/25/crowd-sourcing-the-future-of-investment/

I couldn’t have said it any better myself, take Wikipedia as a case in point. Prior to Wikipedia’s explosive growth, our go to source for credible knowledge was either Britannica or Encarta. But it has proven so that mass collaboration on web is changing the dynamics and economics of many markets and will continue to do so. Over the course of the last decade we have seen many variations of this model in various markets for different verticals, e.g community based design (99designs.com),  crowd funding a football team (myfootballclub.co.uk) and many more. All these sites have had an enormous amount of success and continue to do so.

So what’s next? There has been a lot of hype and discussion around crowd funding and many believe that the disruptive technologies of the web are going to reinvent the way the public funds projects and businesses. By definition crowd funding is:

Crowd funding (sometimes called crowd financing or crowd sourced capital) describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.[1]

We have seen a few successful examples, particularly Kiva.org, which enables people in 1st world countries to invest in small business projects in 3rd world countries. Some industry experts predict that it’s the next biggest game changer. Who knows what the future holds for the finance industry, but one thing’s for sure, with the power of collective intelligence and collective funding we are bound to see a change in the way we invest and what we invest in.

For those who are interested in learning more about the future of social capital take a look at (http://www.socialcapitalmarkets.net/)

- Ahmed Shuaib