What do Metamorphic Ventures, Justin Bieber, Eric Schmidt, Ellen DeGeneres, Ryan Seacrest, Baron Davis, Bain Capital Ventures, Google Ventures, CrunchFund, Tom Conrad, Scotter Braun, Brian Lee, Columbia Records, The New York Times, TIME, and New York Magazine all have in common? They are all investors in Stamped.

Stamped, as in stamp of approval, was unveiled today, offering a fun, simple, and useful way to record and share your favorite things. Stamped displays the best of your friends’ “stamps” in a visual and serviceable way, while integrating with third parties such as iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, Fandango, Netflix, Opentable, and Amazon. It takes a transactional media approach by enabling users to download music, buy movie tickets, add movies to their queue, buy books, and even view menus for restaurants.

Why is this important? Stamped plays in an area called local-mobile-social (LoMoSo). This means users with mobile devices that are connected to social networks can interact on a local basis based on their physical location and proximity. Strategically, 92% of consumer spending still happens at brick-and-mortar locations which are inherently local. Stamped bridges online to the physical world: users can stamp their approval where and when worthy and create their own social network of like-minded people. This is important because the local segment and everything related to social media continue to be the fastest growing categories of online advertising. As we say at Metamorphic Ventures, offline is the new online.

The value of someone’s personal crowd is evident: in contrast to the 14% of customers that trust advertisements, 90% of customers trust peer recommendations. Furthermore, there is an ongoing issue in local social media in which more people read reviews than write them. This creates a divide because reviewers generally fall into two categories: the first, who review every place they visit, and the latter, who only post a review when they have an extreme reaction. This begs the question: are these two sets of people systematically different? If so—and the obvious answer is yes—misleading reviews are a detriment to the general public. Stamp solves this issue by limiting the number of stamps new users may give out, gradually issuing more stamps through credit. A friend can give you credit when they thank you for introducing them to something or somewhere you stamped. Stamp’s core concept better organizes, localizes, and transcends social media than current offerings.

In addition to friends, as with Twitter, you can follow celebrities, tastemakers, and influencers…just like those investors who put their stamp on Stamped itself.

Post created with Lewis Gersh by Gavin Pelling, interning with Metamorphic Ventures.

A crowdfunded baby? An accidental crowdfunded retirement nestegg? A crowdfunded solar light solution for refugee camps in natural disaster tent cities? No one would have thought these things were possible just a couple of years ago. Crowdfunding is enabled by the web, whereby any number of people anywhere in the world can give money to worthy causes. This is fast becoming a very large market on a global scale. Here are a few interesting examples.

Jessica Haley married her high school sweetheart Sean Haley, whom she met when she was sixteen. After twelve years of marriage, the couple desperately wished to complete their family with a child of their own. The odds were not in Sean and Jessica’s favor. Doctors informed the couple that they had only a 1% chance of successful natural conception. Because their insurance would not cover the cost of in vitro fertilization, they debated taking out a loan or placing the procedure’s expense on a credit card. They are not alone. The number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is medical bills, with the number one category being medical procedures. With no other recourse, the couple turned to an online crowdfunding campaign, seeking $5,000. Jessica and Sean exceeded their goal by over 50%, raising $8,050. The couple was surprised to learn that their private struggle—which had long been concealed from family, friends, and the public—struck a chord with so many. It would be these same individuals who would help the Haleys make their dream a reality. In April, the couple received their miracle baby Landon, the world’s first crowdfunded child.

This wouldn’t be the last occasion crowdfunding impacted lives on a personal and touching level. A candid video of Karen Klein, a 68-year-old bus monitor, being mercilessly teased and tormented by students she was supervising, made waves last month. One viewer responded by launching an online campaign to send Karen on the “vacation of a lifetime.” The results? Unprecedented. The campaign has surpassed its $5,000 goal to raise over $680,000 from over 31,000 contributors in 80 countries and counting. Now, not only does Karen have the ability to take a greatly deserved vacation, she has inadvertently been afforded the option of retiring. Karen’s story touched a nerve on an international scale. Spotlighting the rampant issue of bullying and appealing to a universal sense of humanity, Karen’s campaign garnered media attention in over 2,500 news outlets. Moving forward, the implications suggest that the traditional notion of charitable fund raising has been democratized to enable anybody in the world to raise money for anything.

While changing the world for one person is a feat in and of itself, crowdfunding has gone a step further to help emerging growth companies revolutionize the world at large. LuminAID is a solar-powered light “designed to fulfill the basic need for light in post-natural disaster situations.” Andrea Streshta and Anna Stork focused on affordable renewable light because of its potential to vastly improve the comfort, safety, and survival of earthquake victims. The LuminAID light is simple to use, buoyant, features no movable parts, and works for up to three years without the need for replacement batteries. Its proprietary design inflates the device to diffuse light like a lantern and solves a pain point in that it shields eyes from glare and saves space: for every eight conventional flashlights, one can pack and ship approximately fifty LuminAID lights. The device is ideal for disaster relief, outdoor activities, or, as my children have discovered, the perfect nightlight/reading light. Andrea and Anna sought $10,000 to help give the gift of light, a goal eclipsed by raising nearly $52,000 on LuminAID’s crowdfunded campaign page.

These examples are a testament to crowdfunding’s potential, and explain my grounds for investment in IndieGoGo, where these three campaigns took root. We were the lead investor on IndieGoGo’s first round of capital approximately eighteen months ago, now joined by Insight Ventures leading their most recent round. The company is democratizing the fund-raising process in the same way that eBay democratized online selling. IndieGoGo’s open minded ideology has set it apart from other crowdfunding sites and has served as the backbone of the company’s success. As CEO Slava Rubin says, IndieGoGo is completely open to any campaign, any dollar amount, and any idea in the world without any judgment. The first ever Crowdfunding Industry Report (Massolution, May 2012) revealed that $1.5 billion was raised in 2011, instilling my belief that this space is huge and poised for continued growth.

Post created with Lewis Gersh by Gavin Pelling, interning with Metamorphic Ventures.