Items tagged with crowd-funding
We would not have expected Amazon of all companies to take to crowdfunding, but here we are. The Seattle-based eCommerce, cloud, and internet of things company, among other divisions, has developed something called the “Build It” program. This program will let the customer weigh in on what products they want to see Amazon make by pre-ordering before production. It is an interesting concept, and the first products are out to vote on now through March 19th. First and foremost, the “Build It” program works by allowing customers to pre-order a product without having to pay. The pre-order is essentially just a spot reservation for a product. If enough people jump on board with...
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It's summertime in many parts of the world, and many people are left looking for ways to stay cool. In some places that means on certain days, you can't spend too much time outside. However, Sony has a new product that it is crowdfunding in Japan called the Reon Pocket. The device is a small portable air conditioning and heater unit that you wear in a pocket inside a special shirt meant to help people stay comfortable. The Reon Pocket promises to keep you cool in the hot summer and warm in the chill of winter; it's controlled by an app that runs on your smartphone. Sony is crowdfunding the project on First Flight in Japan and was seeking 66,000,000 yen for the project and has raised 104%...
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For the time being, gamers who've pledged their allegiance to the PC (or simply prefer it) will have to rock out to Rock Band 4 with their game consoles out. Harmonix wasn't able to raise its goal of $1.5 million—or even come close, really—through crowdfunding site Fig to make possible a port of Rock Band 4 to PC, so for now, the project is scrapped. The crowdfunding campaign ran for 35 days and gathered $792,817 from 1,674 backers, or barely more than half of what Harmonix was seeking. Had it been successful, Harmonix would have kicked in $500,000 of its own money, as it reckoned the PC port would cost in the neighborhood of $2 million to complete. Despite not reaching its goal and ultimately...
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For human beings and the vast majority of living organisms, oxygen is a good thing. The same can't be said for wine, the delicious, intoxicating nectar that begins degrading in quality the moment you pop the cork. That's a real problem if you have a discerning tongue and drink wine by the glass, not the bottle (or box). The solution? A smart bottle developed by Kuvée, a Boston-based startup. Kuvée's smart wine bottle solution is drawing inevitable comparisons to Kuerig, The system consists of a special decanter with a patented valve system that keeps oxygen from touching the wine. According to Kuvée, this allows wine to stay fresh for up 30 days after opening it, as opposed to degrading on the...
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Crowdfunding giant Kickstarter has been around since 2009. In that time, it's raised more than $2 billion in pledges from 9.5 million people, having crossed the threshold last month on October 11. To celebrate the occasion, Kickstarter revealed a whole bunch of interesting (and mind boggling) figures on its website.One of those details is that pledges contributed the second billion dollars to projects three times faster than they did the first billion dollars. That makes for a sharp upward curve when graphing out the crowdfunding site's growth since its inception on April 28, 2009.The second billion dollars has also seen a huge uptick in the amount of money being pledged per minute. For the first...
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I was really looking forward to Matchstick, the first HDMI streaming dongle based on Mozilla's open source Firefox OS. Unfortunately, its developers are putting the word out that they're cancelling the successfully funded Kickstarter project due to difficulties with digital rights management (DRM). On the bright side, if you can call it that, the Matchstick team promised to refund 100 percent of all pledges. Matchstick raised over $470,000 from more than 17,000 backers on Kickstarter. The developers set a goal of $100,000, and with the extra support, they committed to adding Local Play and Ad Hoc mode, two of the most requested features. Local Play would have allowed Matchstick owners to play...
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To quote Japanese game designer and producer Yu Suzuki, creator of the Shenmue series that last saw a title update 14 years ago, "The fate of Shenmue is in your hands now." Originally he might have been talking about whether or not Shenmue 3 would be made, but having surpassed the $2 million funding goal on Kickstarter in just nine hours, the true fate of Shenmue that's yet to be decided is how many stretch goals will be added on. Shenmue 3 now ranks as the fastest game on the crowdfunding site to reach $2 million, and the same goes for the $1 million mark. It had a bit of an advantage over other record setting projects, as it was announced on the PlayStation stage at E3 during Sony's press...
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The Federal Trade Commission has left its stamp on the crowdfunding scene by taking legal action against Erik Chevalier, the Kickstarter project creator who raised more than $122,000 funds from 1,246 backers to produce a board game called The Doom That Came to Atlantic City. In the end, it was the backers who were doomed, as the project was cancelled without any refunds. Chevalier, who was also doing business as The Forking Path Co., issued a number of updates on the Kickstarter project saying that progress was being made. After 14 months, however, he announced that the project was cancelled and that he would refund money to the game's backers. It turned out to be an empty promise. Instead, the...
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The most successfully funded campaign in the history of Kickstarter (in terms of amount raised) belongs to a smartwatch. That was true a few weeks ago when the Pebble Time smartwatch raised over $17 million from more than 67,000 backers with 18 days remaining, and now that the crowdfunding period is over, the new record to beat is $20,338,986!Nearly 78,500 backers opened up their virtual wallets to support the effort, 142 of which contributed at least $5,000 for the "Distributor" reward tier, the highest tier available. In exchange, those 142 backers will all receive 10 Pebble Time smartwatches in each of the three available colors for a total of 30 smartwatches each. By our not-so-fuzzy math,...
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Mmm, pancakes! The love of pancakes is nearly as ubiquitous as the affection for bacon, which incidentally go great together. It also helps that making pancakes is pretty easy, unless you try to get fancy with artistic creations that go beyond simply stick figures. But that's okay, you can still woo your kids and guests with the PancakeBot, the first ever pancake printer that's blown past its $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter.It's at nearly $135,000 with still 27 days to go, and it's easy to see why. The PancakeBot is essentially a 3D printer with a nerdy level of sophistication to leveling up your breakfast. It comes with "user-friendly" software that allows you to design your own pancake...
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Records are meant to be broken, but who would have though a card game called "Exploding Kittens" would be the one to dethrone Ouya as the most funded project Kickstarter has ever seen? Well, it happened, with Exploding Kittens erupting to $8,782,571, beating Ouya's record by more than $213,000. It also attracted more than three times as many backers at 219,382. In case you're wondering, that's more than double the number of the backers for the second most backed Kickstarter project of all time -- Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere!, which attracted pledges from 105,875 people. As can happen when you pit cats against, well, anything and anyone, it was a bloodbath in terms of...
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Despite the tablet market being oversaturated, the Jolla tablet has gained quite a bit of attention. Built around the open source Sailfish OS, the Jolla Tablet’s Indiegogo campaign had a goal of $380,000 that was quickly reached. But since passing the $1 million mark, the company has added three stretch goals to its crowdfunding campaign.At the time of this article’s publication, the Indiegogo campaign has reached $1.3 million with the first stretch goal set at $1.5 million. Once that first stretch goal has been reached, Jolla will upgrade every tablet to support microSDHC cards up to 128GB. The device currently supports cards up 32GB in addition to the 32GB of internal storage. At $1.75 million,...
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We've reluctantly come to accept that we may never see a hoverboard like the ones featured in Back to the Future II. And if they do ever come out, we'll probably be too old to care by that point -- hip replacements aren't cheap or fun. While we're faced with that unfortunate reality, we're pretty intrigued by an a skateboard of a different. It's called the Marbel Board and it's supposedly the world's lightest electric skateboard. The Marbel Board is a Kickstarter project that's already blown past its $90,000 funding goal with still 23 days remaining. According to the description, the electric skateboard weighs just 9.9 pounds, is 30mm thick at its chunkiest point, and can scurry across the pavement...
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If you thought it was tough reading through a Shakespeare play back in high school, imagine if he was alive today and you had to explain the terms currently in use, such as "selfie" and "hashtag." The former might not be so difficult, though the latter could present a challenge. It's one that Merriam-Webster has taken on by adding the two terms, along with several others, to its 2014 Collegiate Dictionary. "These new additions to America's best-selling dictionary reflect the growing influence technology is having on human endeavor, especially social networking, once done mostly in person," Merriam-Webster explains. So, how do you define a hashtag? According to Merriam-Webster, it's a word or...
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Just how popular is Kickstarter’s crowdfunding site? Or perhaps a better question is how important is Kickstarter to those raising funds for grassroots projects? The answer can be found in this stat that the company announced today: Backers have pledged a billion dollars on the site, as of today. We’ve covered our share of Kickstarter projects, which include a mix of sort of adorable and fun ideas, longshots, and serious projects that have become Real Things. For example, there was the Moment smartphone lens and smartphone-controlled electric paper airplane; an inexpensive 3D scanner and a holodeck gaming device; the OUYA game console, MiiPC family computer, and the Pebble smartwatch;...
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If you’ve read this site even casually lately, you know that crowdfunding is here in force. Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo offer entrepreneurs, startups, and otherwise unfunded techies with a prototype and a dream the chance to engage the world and excite backers to front some money for their projects. It’s a powerful, grassroots way to both gauge the potential success of a given product and raise cash in the meantime. Of course, like any new technological or financial paradigm, crowdfunding has also created some problems. PayPal, after some public flogging due to its freezing of a few campaigns’ money, has openly acknowledged that its payment platform is not equipped...
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When the Pebble smartwatch hit Kickstarter looking to raise $100,000, nobody could have guessed that it would annihilate crowdfunding records and end up generating $10,266,845 in pledges. It’s far less surprising to see Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge superphone--a smartphone with tantalizing features--rack up the dollars in crowdfunding support on Indiegogo, and in fact the Edge has beaten Pebble’s record, according to Canonical. At the time of this writing, the Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign has generated $10,485,825--with 6 days to go. That’s a staggering amount of money, to be sure, and the fact that it’s all crowdsourced is all the more impressive. Still, there’s...
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Looking for something new from Logitech? How about something via one of the companies it just acquired? In what can only be seen as a sign that Kickstarter has major staying power, Logitech has just acquired a company that first saw the light of day via a crowdfunding mission. TT Design Labs is just a two-person operation, but they had good enough ideas to attract major attention from Logitech, one of the world's most notable peripheral makers. Derek Tarnow and Zahra Tashakorinia began developing TidyTilt less than two years ago, and they launched their eventual product on Kickstarter. The initial project focused on solving the issue of tangled earbud cords that countless smartphone users regularly...
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Great news for fans of Eternal Darkness; it looks as if the game's spiritual successor 'Shadow of the Eternals' will be a reality -- well, if it can secure a whopping $1.5 million in crowdfunding. As sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter completely revolutionize the way companies receive seed funding, even the arts are turning to that method to fund their dreams. Developer Precursor is hoping to launch a crowdfunding campaign to kick this week off, looking for enough money to shoot an entire major motion picture. According to the company: "Our primary goal for Shadow of the Eternals is to raise 1.5M dollars. Any money raised beyond this will contribute to stretch goals that go beyond the first...
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A couple of months ago, we covered a story that appeared straightforward enough at first but took an odd turn just a day or so later. When the story first gained traction in the media, it appeared as though Apple had hamstrung a Kickstarter project for a mobile charging device called the POP Charger. The item was supposed to be a charging station for every mobile device under the sun, but Apple apparently hadn’t played nice and refused to license its new Lightning connector to the group. Effectively, without the ability to offer charging capabilities to users of the latest iPhone (not to mention future iPhones), the project would fail to live up to its billing. Faced with a bad situation,...
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Crowd funding site Kickstarter has been host to some compelling endeavors, and the site offers a beautifully democratic way for people to back the kinds of products, technologies, and services they care about. The fundraising portion of these projects can be thrilling, as we saw with the open source gaming console Ouya, but of course once a project has enough cash raised, the originators still have to execute their plans. Thomas Edison would say that the post-idea, post-fundraising phase of a project is about 99% of the work. There have been some rumblings about what happens to backer money if a developer fails to deliver on a promised project, and Kickstarter has clarified its position on some...
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