Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) June 03, 2012

Crowdfunding is the process of getting a group of regular individuals (versus banks, venture capitalists or angel investors) to collectively fund a business venture. And according to Dave Lavinsky, co-founder and President of Growthink Inc., crowdfunding is the latest and greatest way to raise money for a new business, product or service.

“Crowdfunding is essentially pre-selling your product and typically at a slight discount to make it worthwhile for the ‘investor,’” said Lavinsky, who since 1999 has helped thousands of entrepreneurs start and grow their companies.

“This is what I call rewards based crowdfunding. An example of this type of crowdfunding platform is Kickstarter.com, which boasts that in 2011, over 11,000 entrepreneurs raised over $99 Million on their platform.”

And according to Lavinsky, “Crowdfunding offers a ton more value than just the initial funding it provides, pretty much making it a no-brainer for entrepreneurs to use.”

To help entrepreneurs become more aware of what crowdfunding can mean for their business, Lavinsky has revealed 5 hidden benefits of this form of fund raising:

1. Market Research

“Pre-selling your product is incredible market research. If people buy it, then your marketing message is on target and there is a real need for your product or service. If people don’t buy it, then maybe a market doesn’t exist, or you need to adjust your marketing message or target market,” said Lavinsky.

“In any case, getting this market research before raising or trying to raise a ton of money is invaluable. It allows you to test whether you have a winner before going through this process.”

2. Built-in Customer Base

“When you get others to fund you via rewards-based crowdfunding, you build a customer base. If you provide a good product or service, these customers will be prone to buy more products and services from you (the same products, upgrades and/or new products you develop) in the future,” Lavinsky says.

3. Case Studies/Testimonials

Lavinsky highlights the importance of obtaining testimonials from the customers gained from crowdfunding in order to help build trust and credibility with potential investors.

“In today’s world, with so much information and opinions, it’s hard to know who to trust. And at the top of the list of who and what we trust are the testimonials of our friends and others. So, by getting testimonials from the customers you gain from crowdfunding (assuming you delivered them the product/service and they liked it), you can influence more customers to buy from you,” he said.

“Likewise, if you’re offering permits, by offering ‘before and after’ profiles of your customers, you can develop Case Studies which influence future customers to buy from you.”

4. Word of Mouth Marketing

According to Lavinsky, “people who fund your company will tell their friends about it. Particularly if you make them feel like founders/initial investors (which you can easily do via email and on your website and/or via direct mail).”

“Played correctly, crowdfunding can result in thousands of customers, most of whom can tell numerous friends and colleagues about your products and services. This word of mouth marketing can be worth millions of dollars,” he says.

5. Public Relations

Lavinsky also believes that crowdfunding has the potential to generate significant media exposure for a company.

“Local media sources are enamored with crowdfunding as it’s new and unique. As a result, countless entrepreneurs who have raised crowdfunding have been profiled in local newspapers, radio shows and TV broadcasts. So, with little legwork, raising crowdfunding can get you lots of PR,” said Lavinsky.

In summary, Lavinsky encourages entrepreneurs to thoroughly investigate the crowdfunding options available to them due to the positive impact such funds can have.

“Crowdfunding can give your business a ton more than just funding. It can give you a massive marketing push and advantage that can ultimately lead to your company’s success.”

About Growthink:
Growthink, Inc. is a leading provider of business plan consulting services. Growthink has also developed several training products and tools for entrepreneurs, including The Ultimate Business Plan Template, Venture Capital Pitch Formula, and Crowdfunding Formula. To learn more about Growthink’s products and services, call 800-506-5728.

#

(PRWEB) June 03, 2012

Big4.com, the premier social networking forum for professionals and alumni of Accenture, Andersen, BearingPoint, Capgemini, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC, reports on new findings whereby healthcare spending in the United States is expected to grow at a historically low rate of 7.5 percent next year according to the Health Research Institute (HRI) of PwC US.

Big4.com notes the annual Behind The Numbers report on medical cost trend released May 31 reflects the sluggish economy, increased focus on cost containment by the industry, lower use of services by cost-conscious patients and efforts by employers to hold down expenses as some of the reasons for this new trend.    

Historically, healthcare spending rebounds with the economy. But, the HRI report identifies structural changes that may change that. A fourth year of relatively low growth suggests that the gap between healthcare spending and overall inflation may be narrowing to a more sustainable level.

Michael Thompson, principal, human resource services, PwC comments:

“Slower growth in healthcare costs could be the ‘new normal,’” he said. “We’re seeing long-term trends that could keep cost increases in check. As employers shift expenses to their employees, for example, these workers are pursuing lower-cost alternatives. Even as the economy strengthens, changes in behavior by employers and consumers may help limit medical growth.”

About Big4.com
Big4.com is the accounting, tax, consulting and IT professions’ premier resource, and has been exclusively focused on Big Four firm professionals and alumni for 10 years, providing high quality content, connectivity and commerce. The Big Four Job Board offers fresh job opportunities – clients include the world’s leading companies. Big Four News covers key news, developments, events, survey results, press releases and appointments. The Big Four Blog provides opinion and insight on recent and key developments, news, happenings, management changes, regulations, acquisitions and capital market activities. Big4 Video is a professionally produced news covering key global developments in this space.
Big4.com has a strong presence on key social media platforms:
Youtube: Big4Video is a professionally produced weekly news magazine.
Twitter: twitter.com/big4 has 9,000 followers.
LinkedIn: The Big Four Alumni and Professionals group is the largest corporate and alumni group with 85,000+ members.
Facebook: The Big4 fan page has 5,500 fans at facebook.com/big4page.
Xing: The Big Four Alumni and Professionals group has 1,450+ members.

Share:        

Contact

Big4.com
(734) 481-0186
Email

#

Phoenix, AZ (PRWEB) June 03, 2012

Fountain of the Sun Home Listings Now Available via LREP Mobile and MyAzHomeSales.com

Luxury Real Estate Partners today announced a partnership with Smarter Agent to provide Fountain of the Sun Home listings on smart phones and tablets.

The app includes Fountain of the Sun Homes for sale and lease and includes property details including price, square footage, estimated mortgage, taxes, features, maps and pictures for all condos for sale in Fountain of the Sun.

Luxury Real Estate Partners Mobile is leading the charge on the growing mobile marketplace and helping our team own the mobile relationship with current and potential clients,” said Anthony Phillips, President, Luxury Real Estate Partners. “Luxury Real Estate Partners Mobile is unique in that it offers downloadable apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and standard cell phones across all carriers, as well as a mobile web search version, enabling our network to virtually reach all homebuyers that use mobile devices, in Scottsdale.”

Luxury Real Estate Partners Mobile features includes a Refine Search capability that allows users to narrow their search by selecting a price range, property type and number of bedrooms and bathrooms. If a user has questions or wants a tour of the property, the Call feature immediately connects them to a Luxury Real Estate Partners representative. A new Contact feature allows them to either call or e-mail the agent for additional property information from within the app. Additional enhancements include the ability to save a search or favorite properties to view later, send a property to a friend via text or e-mail and forward the Luxury Real Estate Partners Mobile app to any cell phone user via text message.

To download the app, consumers can text “888LP” to 87778, or click on the Luxury Real Estate Partners app link found on MyAzHomeSales.com to send a text message to their phone with a link to download the app. Those using their smart phone can download the free app directly from the Apple, Blackberry, Android and Palm stores.

The Luxury Real Estate Partners Mobile app was created by Smarter Agent, the leading mobile real estate provider in the United States, to create innovative ways for buyers to search for homes and interact with their agents.

For more information on Scottsdale Homes, please visit MyAzHomeSales.com

#

Suiting your requirements buy life insurance through a real person instead of over the internet http://ksoc.tk/9p

CHICAGO—Medical science efforts to harness the power of the immune system against cancer are beginning to bear fruit after decades of frustration, opening up a hopeful new front in the long battle against the disease.

In studies being presented Saturday, researchers said two experimental drugs by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. significantly shrank tumors in some patients with advanced skin, lung and kidney cancers.

Especially promising was that the drugs worked against several types of cancer, researchers said of the early findings. Most of the patients whose tumors responded significantly to the treatment saw long-term results.

The new drugs empower the immune system to recognize cancer cells as an enemy and attack them, although the treatments can have serious side effects.

Researchers are looking beyond traditional chemotherapy and radiation treatment to new strategies.

• Targeted therapy: Drugs designed to attack specific genetic abnormalities that drive the growth and spread of tumors. When they hit the precise target, the drugs can have dramatic initial results, but tumors often develop resistance.
• Immunotherapy: Drugs or agents not intended to attack tumors but to activate the body’s immune system, allowing it to recognize cancer cells as the enemy and attack them. Some of these therapies promise longer-term results.
• Guided Missile: A strategy in which antibodies, including drugs like the breast-cancer treatment Herceptin, are armed with toxic chemotherapy to deliver a more potent punch directly to the tumor while reducing side effects associated with chemotherapy.
• Chemotherapy and Radiation: Long-standing treatments against most cancers, aimed at killing fast-dividing tumor cells. The treatments also kill the body’s healthy cells, causing a host of side effects.

The immune system’s ability to fight off the body’s invaders has long been recognized against infectious disease. But cancer has largely escaped its reach and for decades fended off researchers’ efforts to find a weakness. It turns out cancer shields itself by essentially putting the brakes on the human immune system.

Recent discoveries have led to advances in how to unleash the immune system, though one challenge has been to jump-start the body’s defenses without injury to healthy, normal cells.

Researchers say the latest advances are beginning to trigger this process, and a host of other companies, including Roche Holding SA’s Genentech unit, Merck, & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC, are also pursuing the so-called immunotherapies.

In the studies released Saturday, only a minority of the more than 500 patients treated in the two studies benefited. But researchers considered the findings remarkable because the patients were in advanced stages of the disease, a time when sustained benefits are normally hard to come by.

David Gobin, a 62-year-old retired Baltimore police officer was one beneficiary. After being diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2008, he twice underwent surgery, followed each time by radiation, as well as two rounds of chemotherapy in clinical trials. The cancer kept coming back.

In February 2011, he enrolled in the clinical trial at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for one of the Bristol-Myers therapies, which are infusions given every two weeks. Within two months, his tumor began melting away. “My energy is up, my stamina is up, I’ve gained weight,” he said. “I can only speak for myself, but I’ve gone from looking at life a month at a time to looking at it a year at time. This has kicked the heck out of the cancer.”

The study results followed regulatory approval last year of Bristol-Myers’s Yervoy for advanced melanoma. That drug, which also employs the immune system, astonished researchers with its ability in more than 20% of patients to provide long-term survival in a disease that typically is fatal within months.

Taken together, the findings are provoking excitement among researchers and the drug industry that immunotherapy has finally arrived as a viable cancer-fighting strategy.

“Those of us in the field really see this as a breakthrough moment,” said Suzanne Topalian, a researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and lead author of one of the studies. Both are being presented by Hopkins researchers at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Other advances in recent years include so-called targeted treatments that take aim at the underlying genetic mutations that fuel tumor growth—drugs like Roche Holding AG’s Zelboraf for melanoma.

Encouraging data are also expected this weekend for an approach in which potent doses of chemotherapy are linked to antibody drug such as Roche’s Herceptin to deliver chemo more directly to the tumor like a guided missile, to reduce the toxic side effects of chemo.

Ultimately cancer researchers expect that many of these treatments will be used in combination. Adding immunotherapy offers the hope of making treatments applicable to a broader range of cancers with longer-lasting results.

“The immune system isn’t like any drug out there,” Dr. Topalian said. “It has memory, similar to when we were vaccinated against infectious diseases” like measles. “You retain that memory pretty much for life. The same should hold true for cancer immunotherapy.”

Among 31 of the patients who were followed for more than a year in one of the studies released Saturday, 20 people had tumors that either partially or, in a few cases, completely responded to the treatment, known as an “anti-PD-1 inhibitor.” The disease was stable for an additional group of patients for more than six months.

Many other patients didn’t respond. Some experienced serious side effects, including three people who died likely because their immune systems attacked healthy tissue. Researchers said treatment strategies, including the use of steroids, were devised to help offset those reactions.

This new approach is named after the PD-1 pathway—for programmed death-1—which illustrates how the immune system and cancer cells inadvertently conspire to support some tumors. PD-1 “receptors” sit on the surface of immune-system cells when they’re activated and on the hunt for enemies. But some tumor cells have proteins that bind to the PD-1 receptors, shutting the immune cell down. “It’s like a shield that protects cancer cells,” Dr. Topalian said.

The new anti-PD-1 inhibitor therapy, in essence, blocks the process that inhibits the immune system. The new studies were the initial human trials of the two PD-1 agents. Drug companies would normally advance to a second trial before mounting a study that could lead to approval. But Bristol-Myers said the data are strong enough to move to larger phase 3 trials, expected to launch by year’s end.

Write to Ron Winslow at ron.winslow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 2, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: New Cancer Drugs Use Body’s Own Defenses.

In order to save money, one in four Americans would consider canceling their life insurance policy http://ksoc.tk/9o