Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Content marketing? That takes a lot of time, doesn’t it?

Are you in a hurry to get somewhere? Yes. Content marketing takes time. And getting it right takes a lot of work, and by work, I mean practice, not research. You can look at demographics all day, but if you really want to get going, you’ve got to start doing, start failing, learning where to avoid the failures if you can, and keep going.

Pick Whatever Platform You Want

Have you seen Vine yet? Twitter just launched it. It lets you record six second videos. Like this:

Sweet yet healthy treat. Micro cooking show. vine.co/v/bJtLu2VYeDa

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 29, 2013

Can’t see the video? Click Here.

I just started using it. There’s probably a few ways it could be useful. I thought of one right away, and some of my friends are already making their own version. I promoted who was on my radio show like this:

Radio show guests this week on hbway.com/radio vine.co/v/bJMtr7EbqwL

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 28, 2013

Can’t see the video? Click Here.

So maybe little six second videos aren’t your thing. Maybe you prefer text? Great! Blog. And keep a great newsletter going.

A photo person? Swell! Use Instagram. Or Facebook. Or Flickr. Who cares? Pick whichever platform you want.

But How Do You Find Ideas?

You try things. You see what people are asking about. I dipped into Twitter and saw people asking about details of social media for customer service purposes. Pow. I could write a post about that. I looked on my free health and nutrition group and lots of people are asking for smoothie and juicing recipes. Maybe I’ll make a quick ebook and pop it into the Amazon store. Or I’ll have a live Hangout on Air and share recipes in real time with people from my kitchen.

Ideas are all around you. You need only scratch a tiny bit to find them. But you also have to have your “and this relates to the people I share things with like this” hat on.

Content is a “Pick and Scratch” Process

If you’re looking to build media and get some attention, you need to produce more content than just a little. Where do you find the time? You pick at it. I wrote this while I waited for a YouTube video I was uploading to process. Where did I find time to do the YouTube video? I had a space between two meetings and I knew I needed to shoot this particular video so I got things ready.

It’s the same answers I can give you for living in a little house. You find ways to keep everything functional instead of wasting it. Small houses save space. Content marketers find time. It’s related.

Serve Your Community Passionately

I think about you when I sit down to write. I think about how I can help you. I think about whether I can educate or inspire or instruct. You’re the only person I think about when I create. I don’t wonder what my colleagues are doing. I don’t wonder what’s trending. I work on finding something I can share with you to be helpful. You’re the focus. And that makes it work.

Here’s a formula I love to remember daily: First, earn an audience. Second, nurture a community. Third, empower a network. (feel like tweeting that?) If so, then maybe I’m doing my job well. If not, I’m still on step 2.

You Must Be Responsive and Fast

Gone are the days of “working on a blog post in drafts for the last week.” If the idea’s worth anything, post it. Even unfinished if you have to. You’re not being graded. You’re being consumed, absorbed, and if you’re lucky, passed around. If you don’t have time for the best blog post ever, what are you doing with your time? Reading Mashable? You have work to do.

Utterly stuck? Go for a walk. Ask yourself over and over again what your community wants. Don’t have a community of your own? Write for the community you want to serve! ( tweetable).

This is bigger than “just business.” This isn’t an avocation. This is a path. Are you willing to put in the work to earn what you want?

Earlier this year, Ryan Seacrest partnered with Ford for its “Random Acts of Fusion Campaign,” a transmedia effort to promote the 2013 Ford Fusion. Now with the recent acquisition of New York-based marketing services agency Civic Entertainment Group (CEG) through his company Seacrest Global Group (SGG), the multi-hyphenate magnate aims to connect brands with Hollywood and perhaps create original branded content.

Dick Clark & Ryan Seacrest

Like the late Dick Clark, whose career he makes no secret of emulating, Seacrest is an entertainer who wears many hats–American Idol host; NBC News’ Today show correspondent; and, of course, host of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which he also executive produces. Through Ryan Seacrest Productions, Seacrest produces Keeping Up with the Kardashians as well as its various spin-offs, and other reality series, such as Bravo’s Shahs of Sunset and E!’s Married to Jonas.

Seacrest also has several projects at various stages of development, including Food Fight with Paramount Pictures, a TV version of the book Nanny Diaries, and a game show based on the popular Zynga game Draw Something.

When the television and radio personality initially approached CEG, the company’s co-founders/CEOs Stuart Ruderfer and David Cohn were “immediately intrigued,” according to Ruderfer. “Ryan has this unique vision for building the new model, the next generation media and entertainment brand business,” says Ruderfer. “What it means for us is we can have a combination of Hollywood access with first-class marketing services.”

For his part, Seacrest says he was attracted to CEG because of its “consistent track record of business success.” Specifically, CEG was responsible for overseeing the marketing campaign for the launch of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, including a series of 1920s-era events, as well as other creative marketing services for brands such as A&E, CNN, ESPN, History, NFL, and Southwest Airlines. The 12-year-old company specializes in experiential marketing campaigns that blur the line between marketing and entertainment.

“For History, the cable channel, we had the world’s largest smoker and grill cooking 2,000 hot dogs around the country,” Ruderfer says, as an example of one of their experiential marketing campaigns. “The idea was to help History reach out to its audience and provide a live experience with the brand that hopefully adds to their viewing experience.”

The company has also created restaurant spaces for CNN, the CNN Grill, and a bar and lounge, the Southwest Porch, for Southwest Airlines.

Although Ruderfer and Cohn will continue to head up the day-to-day operations at CEG, Ruderfer said they would rely on Seacrest’s “advice and counsel and access to resources.”

Since both SGG and CEG have expertise in live events, there will likely be an increased focus on them going forward.

“Live events are exciting television, and they repeatedly draw big audiences year-after-year,” says Seacrest. “My production company is interested in stepping up its capabilities in this aspect of the business, which I think is also an area that Civic could potentially be involved with given their expertise with marketing large-scale events.”

Entertainment and marketing will continue to converge, according to Seacrest, and creating entertaining content is key. “There is so much noise in the marketplace for both content creators and marketers that it increasingly makes sense for these two disciplines to dovetail in interesting ways,” says Seacrest.

Crowd Image: Flickr user Haags Uitburo

Though it took hundreds of thousands of years for fossil fuels to form naturally, chemical engineers at the University of Michigan did it in a minute.

By “pressure cooking” green microalgae in 1,100-degree-Fahrenheit sand for around 60 seconds, the researchers converted more than half of the slimy algae into biocrude oil, which can be further refined into various forms of biofuel.

It’s an exponential improvement over Mother Nature, and a breakthrough for the lab. Two years ago, the team sped the process up to under a half hour, converting around 50 percent of the microalgae into biocrude.

“We’re trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil with marine organisms,” said Phil Savage, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan who conducted the study along with doctoral student Julia Faeth.

Instead of waiting for dead organisms to decompose under layers of sediment over the course of millions of years, Savage and Faeth filled a steel pipe with wet, green microalgae of the genus Nannochloropsis, and pushed it into the hot sand. A minute’s exposure heated the algae to 550 degrees all the way through, and 65 percent of it became biocrude.

In addition to the time savings, Savage is trying to streamline the process of creating algal biofuel by starting with wet algae. Traditionally, algal biofuel producers dry algae before extracting biocrude. That takes time and costs quite a bit of money – which explains why algal biofuels cost around $20 per gallon. Savage and Faeth said that they can’t yet estimate any cost savings for their method, but any simplification of the process could potentially bring prices down.

While the results are certainly promising, don’t expect to fill up with algal biofuel anytime soon. The Michigan team conducted their tests with just 1.5 milliliters of microalgae, and still don’t know why they hit a sweet spot at the minute mark. Savage and Faeth suppose that researchers previously overestimated how long it took to create biocrude, and that affected the yield of prior experiments.

“My guess is that the reactions that produce biocrude are actually must faster than previously thought,” Savage said.

Though nature took a while to create fuel, more time spent in a pressure cooker could actually be deleterious to the algae. ”For example, the biocrude might decompose into substances that dissolve in water, and the fast heating rates might discourage that reaction,” Faeth said.

Even if further research shows that it’s completely feasible to create large volumes of crude from algae in short periods of time, biofuel producers still have to generate enough heat to get large amounts of algae up to 1,100 degrees. That’s going to require a great deal of energy, not to mention algae. While algae doesn’t displace farmland the same way ethanol and other crops grown for fuel do, the US would still need enough algae to cover the state of New Mexico to meet its energy demands with biofuel.

The American system of higher education has long been the envy of foreign onlookers — that’s why the governments of many countries are inviting U.S. universities to open satellite campuses in their centers for higher learning, in hopes of adopting some of the U.S.’s best home-grown practices.

But it’s not just the foreign countries who benefit from the deal. In what the New York Times called an “educational gold rush,” U.S. universities are rushing to claim their turf in cities across the Middle East, East Asia and India.

Where these two aligning interests come together is at education hubs, such as Doha, Qatar’s Education City. When most people think of the Persian Gulf states, things like oil tycoons, casinos and over-the-top hotels come to mind. However, the government of Qatar has taken enormous strides to present the capital city as a regional center for education and research, as the home of the 14-acre hub of universities located on the city’s outskirts.

At Doha’s Education City, students from all around the Arab world can receive medical degrees from Cornell, computer science degrees from Carnegie Mellon, or journalism degrees from Northwestern, without the culture shock of moving, or the post-9/11 fight for a visa facing many Arabs who hope to study or work in the U.S.

Education City, an initiative of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, is home to some nine institutions of higher education, as well as primary and secondary schools. The campus is the brainchild of Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, who had the idea to bring branches of several leading universities to a unified campus in Qatar, the first of which opened in 1998.

With regional advancement in mind, Education City was developed to teach students the skills considered critically important by the Gulf Cooperation Council, as well as a place where university researchers can build relationships with public and private sector colleagues.

The campus includes schools from six U.S. universities — Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar School of the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and Northwestern University in Qatar — École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC), the University College of London Qatar and Qatar’s Faculty of Islamic Studies.

But what’s in it for the U.S. universities? The opportunity to get ahead on the burgeoning trend of campus internationalization.

“Sometimes people ask: Why is Northwestern University in Qatar and not in China or India, for example,” Northwestern University in Qatar Dean Everette E. Dennis said in an interview upon the graduation of the school’s first class in May of this year. “Part of the answer is: Because Qatar’s leaders asked us to come. There was an invitation extended, and a determination was made that this had value for the University.”

The rise in opening overseas branches reflects a shift from sending students to semesters abroad or swapping faculty on research exchanges. Just as Dennis described Northwestern’s decision to open in Qatar because of the government’s invitation, so was New York University lured into opening its satellite campus in Abu Dhabi by a $50 million gift from investor Omar Saif Ghobash, according to the Times.

Collaborative urban research hubs are not unique to the Middle East. New York City approved plans in December 2011 to build a graduate campus for technology on Roosevelt Island, Cornell NYC Tech. The campus will be a partnership between Cornell University, which has its main campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and Haifa, Israel’s Technion Institute.

“We believe this new land grant can help dreamers and entrepreneurs from around the world come to New York and help us become the world’s leading city for technological innovation,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when the campus was announced.

The city gave the university $100 million and a grant of city-owned land to help spur the $2 billion project, which will eventually facilitate 2,500 students. Beginning in Spring 2013, graduate engineering classes will be taught in a temporary location until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete.

How do you think cities can best facilitate education? Let us know what cities have to gain when they become education hubs in the comments.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Clint Tseng

It starts with a passion. In this case, Jacqueline Carly was a native New Yorker who felt compelled to move to action and help people with a gesture of some relief supplies for Hurricane Sandy.

She connects with her loudmouth boyfriend (me). I have the “loud bullhorn” of a platform. I ask for a place to stage a supplies drive collection.

It requires a community-minded place with their ears open: Microsoft New England Research and Development center (Microsoft NERD) comes to the rescue. Immediately. Late on a Saturday night. And in force. I have no idea what Sara Spaulding feeds those people over there at Microsoft in Cambridge, but they are fast, ready, nimble, helpful, and they went the extra distance.

It requires the community: you (and others). Without the actual supplies, the drive doesn’t matter. We had help from far too many people to name (and I will forget some of you), but Sara and Audrey and Jen and Lois and Marshall and Andrea and Walter and Keith and Nivas and Scott and Chris and Jeremy and John and Kevin and Anthony and Kerry/Dan and the many people who found a way to drop off supplies at the drop of a hat. The amount of help and feet-on-the-ground we had were amazing.

It requires research. Jacq finds all kinds of small DIY networks of people all over NY and NJ who are sourcing materials and supplies. People like Jennifer Iannolo were quite actively filling their Facebook profiles with all kinds of pointers to local communities of need. Jacq sends hers to the Unitarian Church of Staten Island and into the hands of the wonderful Reverend Susan. I forget where Jennifer took hers. And more are to come.

Then, it’s a matter of communication. I ask for a vehicle in case we get more than we can carry in Jacq’s car. We get another driver, Jen, and then Mike Bavuso from Big Foot Moving & Storage volunteers two guys and a truck and labor to take the rest of the supplies down to NJ. This happened via Eileen at Yard And a Half landscaping, who follows me on Twitter. Mike has no idea what he’s getting himself into, but he goes for it. We get an amazing pro moving company (who you should hire for your next move in the Boston area), who help us greatly.

We ask where to ship supplies to New Jersey, and Deb Ng finds the answer by the mayor of Newark himself, Cory Booker. So that’s how that gets done. I was talking with my small town’s mayor about what Mayor Booker did, and he was excited for the possibilities, because this kind of accessibility and this kind of velocity is what will power the next wave of active government.

And what’s it like to deliver these goods? Here are some words from Jen, our second driver:

“Delivered goods to New Hope Church in Newark earlier today. Never been hugged or blessed so much. Watched a woman with an infant get blankets I brought. Then went and reloaded with stuff friends collected and hit the shore area. Creepy! Large stretches of no lights, trees down, and boats tossed right up on land by the roads. Was able to do so all because you got an idea and ran with it. Got to personally bring generator gas and a birthday cake to a family in real need. It was a long, tiring, awesome day.”

That’s what YOU did. Jen helped, but you did it, too.

The Recipe

Without the passion, nothing starts. Without the platform, no one responds. Without the big-eared community anchor, we have no place to work. Without you, we have nothing to fulfill our passionate hope. Without the research and on-the-ground networks, we have no way to deliver. Without the “last mile” teams, we have no success.

Use this recipe if ever you’re compelled to movement. Find the actors for this and you will succeed.

We are indebted to you, because without you, there was no adventure, no story, no learning, and most importantly, no relief to those still fighting to get back to this century. And their struggle continues. If you want to help, there are many ways. The easiest? Text REDCROSS to 90999 and you’ll be donating $10 to ongoing relief efforts. And thanks.

Square has a proposal for small businesses that they’ve never heard before: Instead of taking a percentage for every credit or debit transaction, it will charge them one flat fee each month.

“It’s kind of like your cell phone bill,” Square CEO Jack Dorsey tells Fast Company. “You can pay per minute or you can go unlimited. You can pay as you go at 2.75% per swipe, or you can pay $275 per month.”

Dorsey says the flat monthly fee is continuation of Square’s emphasis of making credit card fees understandable, which it has until this point accomplished simply by charging the same transaction fee for every swipe.

“When a customer puts down a credit card, the merchant has no idea what they’re paying for,” Dorsey says about traditional payment processing. “If it’s a typical credit card it may be one rate, if it has rewards on it it might be a much higher rate. If it’s a corporate card they’ll pay the highest rate.”

A rate that doesn’t change is much more understandable than one that constantly wavers. But a monthly bill that stays the same is even more so.

The plan isn’t for everyone. Square will limit it to merchants with $250,000 of transactions per year or less. After merchants exceed that limit, they’ll be charged the 2.75% transaction rate. And some merchants–particularly those with low volume–will be better off skipping the monthly plan altogether.

But Dorsey says that “for a lot of merchants” the $275 per month fee will be a significant reduction in what they are paying Square in transaction fees now–about 1.8% of their transaction volume instead of 2.75%.

Partly because credit card companies charge merchants a percentage per transaction, almost all payment processing companies do the same (the exceptions being Dwolla, which removes credit cards from the process altogether, processes transactions less than $10 for free, and charges $.25 for the rest, and LevelUp, which doesn’t charge a transaction fee and makes up the credit card fees by charging merchants for marketing campaigns).

One reason Square is able to lower its transaction rates is because of its bargaining position as a company that handles a high volume of transactions. It can pass rate reductions it negotiates credit card companies on to consumers.

A recent deal Square made with Starbucks to power the coffee company’s U.S. credit and debit card payments will significantly increase its transaction volume, and therefore its bargaining position. Which means it’s in a good place to continue the trend.

“It took us another year and a half after setting a flat 2.75% rate to innovate pricing again and turn it into a subscription model and a utility,” Dorsey says. “But we plan to keep on doing that. We’re starting with small businesses, we’re starting with this plan, but we want to evolve it.”

Small business owners: Would you opt into this plan? Tell us in the comments section below!

Image: Flickr user Ombligotron

I basically never use Siri. Half the time she has no idea what I’m asking her for, which is only funny when you’re not in a hurry. The times she’d be most useful to me, I’m usually out on the streets of New York City, and the background noise seems to confuse her, which leads to me yelling the same phrase at my phone over and over while worried New Yorkers hurry past me, shielding their children.I can’t remember the last time I used Siri on purpose, but I must accidentally launch her at least once a day. For some reason, it always happens when I’m on the subway: “Siri not available. Connect to the Internet,” she tells me in her humorless bot voice. Usually, the other people in my car pretend not to notice, tho earlier this week another passenger helpfully shook my arm with both his hands and told me, “Siri doesn’t work when you’re underground!” I thanked him and moved to a different seat. I should probably just turn Siri off, but I keep thinking I might suddenly think of a great reason to use her.

A quick Twitter search proves I’m not the only one who has a rocky relationship with Apple’s faceless lady:

I think Siri is a great idea and has lots of potential, but so far she hasn’t lived up to it. Maybe that will change with the iPhone 5 (or 6). As Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO of Speaktoit (Siri’s Android cousin), told Fast Company recently“The field is still in a really early phase of development. It’s something like the search engines in the beginning of the ’90s.”

Do you find Siri useful, or annoying? Share your best–and worst, and funniest–Siri stories below, along with any tips you might have for the unconvinced (me).

Image: Flickr user Scott Moore

Service matters. We know this in our guts, and yet, most companies make service an after-thought, and a cost center. They say, “We value our customers,” quite often on their pre-recorded 6-8 minute long hold message tape. Service has always mattered, but it’s coming to be a vital competitive edge. With that in mind, I wanted to offer you 9 starting points for improving your service craftsmanship.

Cure Your Amnesia

If someone buys from your organization and then later communicates with you about some matter, it would be good to know that they are a customer. Though we’re not really supposed to treat people differently, you would be foolish not to treat your best customers with the utmost of care. Remember that “most money paid” isn’t always the criteria for best. You’ll know the difference. To cure this, simply be sure that every system that requires one to know a name also gives that file some kind of nod to the fact that the customer is a repeat patron of your organization. Want to go a step further? Remember what I did last time and ask me if I want more of the same.

Consider The Extra Touches

In almost any business transaction, there’s an opportunity to add an extra nice touch. Quite often, this makes a powerful impact on your customer. What can you do? It can be simple, inexpensive, or even free, if it’s timely and shows a level of connectedness with your customer. Christopher Lynn from the famous Hotel Colonnade in Boston knew that Jacq and I were out at a Black Keys concert. He ran over to the mall across from his hotel, picked up a copy of the latest CD, and had it on our pillow when we came back. It was a perfect little touch that cost about $15 and 20 minutes of his time, but that strengthens my commitment to staying at the Colonnade any time I’m in Boston. What extra touch can you give? Can you draw smiley faces on my sales slips? Even that’s nice.

Communicate Simply, Clearly, and Almost Often

Airlines seem to have mastered the art of vagary, especially lately. As I experience more and more delays on flights, I’m getting answers like, “we’re just waiting on some paperwork.” First, it’s 2012. Do we really use a lot of paper? Evidently so. Second, why are you holding up my flight 10-15 minutes for a piece of paper? Answer: that’s not really why they’re delayed.

People want to feel informed. This improves outcome, even if the response from a company is a bit negative. It’s better to know that you’re not going to get your package today than it is to say, “Well, we’re tracking it and there haven’t been any updates to the status.” Be simple, be clear, and communicate fairly regularly (but not too much- if you over-communicate, it’s showing fear).

Reduce Friction Everywhere

Most processes come about from past experiences, and rarely from current circumstances. They almost never come from “what’s best for the customer.” If you have a process that makes it harder for people to do business, why would it shock you that people won’t do business with you? Policies are meant to facilitate business, not hamper it. Revisit every policy frequently to determine whether it’s giving you or your customers/clients a problem. It’s amazing what you’ll turn up. Sometimes, fixing this kind of friction costs money, but often, it’s as simple as crumpling up a piece of paper and starting with a new perspective. The rewards are magical.

Say Thank You

Companies have a strange history with saying thank you. Sometimes, they get the words out, but follow them up with, “And I’d love you to buy THIS item, too!” Other times, they say thank you only when they’re ready to hit you up in the sales process again, or when they need something. Get in the habit of thanking your clients and customers. It’s a magic secret to creating good service.

Service Craftsmanship

Service Craftsmanship is part of the Human Business Way, a set of guiding principles and practices we’ve assembled for professionals in companies of any size – solo to mega corporation – so we can help you build a sustainable, relationship-minded business. If you want to learn more about the Human Business Way, I’d recommend checking out my weekly newsletter (it’s FREE).

A huge number of components that are allegedly part of Apple’s upcoming new iPhone have surfaced via Apple’s Asian supplier chain–seemingly many more than we’ve seen for an unreleased iPhone. With so many pieces available from different sources, and all of them connecting together so well, it’s pretty certain that they’re genuine.

So what can we learn? It’s pretty familiar–an evolution of the incredibly densely populated iPhone motherboard. There’s some chatter about Apple using the newly approved nano-SIM card, but since the card is technologically the same as every other SIM it’s not an interesting development.

Then there’s talk of modified antenna connections offering proof that the next iPhone will be 4G. Makes sense that 4G will be present–it’s not clear why the antenna changes are present since they may even point to the presence of NFC antennas.

The big take-away from these leaks is that Apple’s phone is definitely en route and that despite Tim Cook’s promise of even tighter Apple security, the information is still leaking out.

The date has been rumored since July, but now multiple sources (or possibly two different outlets relying on the same source) are pinning the launch date for the next iPhone, as well as the iPad mini, for September 12. Pre-orders would begin that day, with the U.S. release for later that month (September 21) and an international rollout in October.

We’ve heard for a while that the new iPhone will be the first to use a newly designed dock connector, finally ditching the clunky, large iPod socket. Now there are photos of what’s said to be the new connector, which sports eight parallel pins inside a very slender metal tine that itself acts as the ninth pin (probably the voltage ground point). There’s a mirror set of connections on the other side, which could indicate 17 pins in total–nearly tallying with early rumors about a 19-pin version.

But what’s really going on is that the plug can be inserted either way up, finally ending the awkward scrabble we all have to do to get the current plugs the right way up or even to get a micro USB socket inserted correctly–the new charger standard used on rival phones like the Galaxy S II. Apple’s basically putting good user-friendly design ahead of other considerations.

The new iPhone’s back shell seems to be milled out of a single piece of metal, including the short bosses that are dotted across it so that the motherboard, battery and other pieces can be screwed down. The shell’s design, strength and the thinner screen (as suggested by older rumors) means the phone may be up to a third thinner than the iPhone 4S.

It’s a relatively minor detail, but what Apple’s trying to do is make the phone feel thinner and smaller than earlier versions, though it’s actually taller to fit in the larger 4-inch screen.

We’ve been wondering when Apple will redesign its iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro computers, building in lessons from its MacBook Air line.

Now there’s evidence, from code fragments inside the new Mountain Lion OS X release, that updates for these machines are coming. They may even lack optical drives, as we’ve long expected. A 13-inch Retina Pro model is even on the cards.

Is Apple Going To Release Everything At Once?

Some murmuring among Apple suppliers suggests that Apple may be about to proceed with the largest launch in history. The theory is that Apple will reveal the new iPhone alongside a new iPad Mini and a refreshed iPad design that has the new dock connector and a few other improvements. A new iPod touch may arrive too, and perhaps even the updated Macs.

We’re not sure Apple would try this. It would leave the company’s unreleased product locker looking pretty bare–not good for keeping it in the limelight. Releasing a few of the products at once makes more sense–we’re guessing the new iPhone, iPod touch, and perhaps the iPad Mini (if it actually exists). The “refreshed” iPad will come early 2013 alongside the new version of the full-size tablet, and the new Macs could get a quiet release in the months at the end of this year.

Image: Flickr user twicepix

Crowdtilt is a platform anyone can use to raise money for anything.

Sound familiar? Kickstarter shares the same crowdfunding focus. But what sets Crowdtilt apart from its better-known competitor is something that one of its cofounders, James Beshara, picked up as a microloans collection officer in South Africa: peer pressure.

Instead of advertising a fundraising objective to the world, Crowdtilt encourages users to share them within their social networks. The objectives can be more diverse than Kickstarter would allow: renting a vacation house with a group of friends, buying a birthday present for a coworker or collecting money for a self-financed production. Crowdtilt makes public who chips in and, implicitly, who doesn’t. Want to avoid being known as that guy who went on vacation with the group but never paid for the hotel? Pay up.

Microfinance is built on the same type of social collateral. Here, Beshara explains how leveraging social pressure door-to-door helped him build Crowdtilt, which powered $1 million in transactions within its first six weeks of business and was recently named Reddit’s official fundraising platform.

FAST COMPANY: What was working as a microloans collection officer in South Africa like?

JAMES BESHARA: I didn’t have any guidebook or guidelines. My orientation for being a loans collector was literally, they told me, “you’re big, you’re pale, you’ll be somewhat intimidating … so you’ll make a good loans collector.”

To give some color to what that means, it’s where you go regularly house-to-house or shanty-to-shanty in the townships right outside of Cape Town, and you are telling delinquent borrowers that they owe “X” amount back to the organization. I went to South Africa for “on the ground” experience, and that’s about as on the ground as it can get.

What did you learn there that factored into Crowdtilt?

Instead of putting up collateral, in microfinance you put up your social collateral. You put up your reputation among your family and friends. That guarantees higher repayment rates. I was fascinated by social reputational collateral surrounding groups and money. That’s where the fascination started.

How is social collateral built into Crowdtilt?

The whole model hinges on that you and your friends can see who has, and implicitly, who hasn’t paid. It creates some pure motivation to pay up quickly, and that has been pretty remarkable to see.

Kickstarter you hope that as many people as possible sees your project, and their success rate is about 40%. Our success rate is 91%. I think the biggest reason for that is that with Crowdtilt, you generally know the network that you’re funding your objective with. And since everyone knows each other, there is an amount of peer pressure to pay your amount and make something happen.

I understand the idea of social pressure helping you get a trip to Tahoe paid for, but what made you feel that was what made microfinancing successful?

My academic background has been economic development with a focus on microfinance and microinsurance. And that element of reputational collateral has been widely studied.

Have you seen it, though?

As a loans collector, in all my bag of artillery, that was my biggest motivation in getting them to pay their loans back. I would say, “the rest of your group has paid their part of the loans,” and I would list off the names: “Tibe, Simon, they’ve all paid back their part of the loan.” If one person in a group that takes out a microloan does not pay his or her portion, the whole group is banned from taking out further loans.

The groups are completely voluntary, so it’s similar to a Crowdtilt campaign and the social dynamic that it’s not random strangers that are lumped together as a group. That group comes as a unit to the bank for a loan. They organize themselves and the bank just provides the financial side of it.

With Crowdtilt, you already know the group. You bring the group to crowdtilt, and our site just facilitates financial aggregation.

I’ve heard that when you started Crowdtilt, you intended it to be a platform for charities to raise money. What happened to that?

Studying economic development, I knew the non-profit world really well. But the realization was that in the most consequential and impactful events in the last few years, socially, have taken place on Twitter and Facebook. In the Arab spring, people didn’t use social networks built for social change. They didn’t use social networks built around revolutions or social activism. They used the too their friends were already comfortable using.

If you can build a platform that they’re used to using with their network and their group for trivial things, then you can basically onboard people, get them used to this system on a bigger scale and they’ll know it exists for them to use it for socially conscious objectives as well.

We’ve already started to see it actually. Our biggest use case in terms of number of campaigns are the fun thins like a party buses, like birthdays, tailgates, fantasy football, but he largest campaigns to date have been things like raising $100,000 in five days for a private school in Florida that was going to lose their charter.

So do you feel as good about helping people raise money for the party bus as you do helping people raising money for the school?

Well, I can say that we as a company, we believe the heights of our existence are the things we do as groups. So I would say in that respect, yea, it actually is as important for us to be able to go out and have the best birthday of all time because your friends all pitch in for a party bus for your birthday. I do think actually that it’s just as important.

I know most of the world might not think that’s as important, but we kind of see all of our campaigns as collective demand for something to happen. It’s hard to say which is more important than another.

You also own a fly-fishing store?

I own a fly-fishing company with one of my best friends from high-school. We started it in college.

Every product we sell provides fresh, clean drinking water to someone in the developing world for a full year. There’s a social bent to everything I’ve done so far. The one that’s been most successful to date, Crowdtilt, doesn’t have an explicit social bent to it. It’s kind of ironic.

Image: Flickr user Bolandrotor