By Michael Ramos
In 2010, many sectors of the U.S. economy began to improve from the Great Recession—however, small businesses lagged behind, largely as a result of having trouble raising the capital they needed in a still tenuous financial recovery.
This led to the advent of a concept called crowdfunding. Crowdfunding—inspired by crowdsourcing—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.
