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Whether you call it the Power of Us, Customer-Made or Crowdsourcing, new business concepts continue to pop up that involve large groups of consumers pre-funding an artist’s album, pre-purchasing an olive farmer’s harvest, buying shares in a whiskey distillery, or colonising a remote island. Case in point, from the movie world: A Swarm of Angels. A British project, the team behind A Swarm of Angels has set out to make a GBP 1 million film and give it away to 1 million people in 1 year. The movie will be ‘open source’, using the flexible digital-age copyright of Creative Commons so people can freely download, share, and remix the feature film. The project was conceived and is directed by Brighton-based digital film pioneer, Matt Hanson (who is recuperating from a head injury, which explained why the project lost a bit of momentum over the last four weeks, but he’s feeling much better now and ready to get going again). It will be funded and developed with the help of 50,000 Angels joining the Swarm to offer feedback, expertise, and funding (GBP 25 each) to finance the project’s execution. The opportunity here? If you’re an entrepreneur, consider every service and every product that might be game for people-funding-power. And if you work for a Big Brand, consider these grassroots projects a fun opportunity to diversify your partnership strategies: get in at the beginning, sponsor, support and participate in what may well be the Next Big Thing in your neck of the woods. Sony to sponsor A Swarm Of Angel’s camera needs? (In a delicate manner, of course, these projects were not conceived with the goal of pleasing big brands.) Oh well, you get the picture.