While crowdfunding is older than the Statue of Liberty in New York -- which incidentally needed crowdfunding from the American and French people -- the advent of web 2.0 and internet-mediated platforms has caused crowdfunding to gain a lot of traction in the last few years.

Industry estimates indicate that crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo funded over a million projects with more than $2.7 billion in 2012, an increase of 81 percent over 2011. The most successful examples of crowdfunding ventures include video game Star Citizen, smartphone Ubuntu Edge and smartwatch Pebble.

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