Pennies from Heaven

Members of crowd-funding website demohour.com prepare to distribute "red envelopes" filled with one-yuan notes in Beijing to promote the idea of supporting creative people. Photos Provided to China Daily

A crowd-funding website helps make dreams come true by helping entrepreneurs raise money, a hundred yuan at a time, Xu Jingxi reports in Guangzhou.

Related: Who can qualify

When He Feng was a mathematics freshman at Swarthmore College in the United States, a group of warm-hearted old people in the small town raised $1,000 for the Chinese stranger to pay for his first piano course, encouraging He's interest in art.

Now He has taken up the torch to light up the dreams of more than 150 creative minds in China, by building a website where they can display their projects to the public and raise money from supporters.

Each creator sets the project's funding goal, at least 1,000 yuan ($160), and a deadline of between 15 to 60 days. Fans can put money into the fund the website holds for the creator.

If the project reaches its goal, the website charges 10 percent of the collected money as commission and delivers the rest to the creator. If the goal is not met, the website waives any fees and will return all the money to the supporters. The project must then look elsewhere for funds.

Demohour.com, the Beijing-based website that He co-founded in 2011, is China's answer to kickstarter.com in the US, the world's largest crowd-funding platform for creative projects founded in 2009.

He says his goal is to connect niche ideas with their niche market. "For example," he says, "if only 200 people nationwide like the book you want to write, you can still print it if each of them pays 100 yuan."

When He and his co-founders were seeking investors to build the Demo Hour site, some people advised them to set up a group-purchasing website instead because of there was a boom in such websites.

"China will be boring if we've got only group-purchasing websites. We want to make China interesting, so we must give it a try even though our crowd-funding website might fail as a business," He says.

The whimsical ideas shown on demohour.com include design, technology, movies, photography, music, publishing, activities, games and travel.

In only 15 days this August, 476 people on demohour.com put up more than 10,000 yuan to make a gold medal for Chen Yibing, China's Olympic gymnastics defending champion. Chen had to settle for silver on the rings after a controversial scoring at the 2012 London Games.

A high school graduate from Beijing has designed a gesture-recognition app that will let people manipulate a Macbook with their fingers away from the keyboard. They can flip through the albums on iTunes and enlarge a picture by swinging their fingers in front of the screen, just like Tom Cruise does in the movie Minority Report.