Items tagged with KickStarter
Kickstarter is the largest crowd funding website in cyberspace, and it's managed to raise millions of dollars for promising projects. One of them is Ouya, the $99 Android game console that originally had a goal of soliciting $950,000 but ended up with nearly $8.6 million in pledges when the dust settled. It's not the only project to blow past its goal, but it does bring up an interesting question. If the project fails, will backers receive a refund? It's a question NPR presented to Ouya, which admittedly didn't know the answer. "Technically, from a Kickstarter perspective, I don't know the answer to that," Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said. "But from a doing-the-right-thing perspective, we will treat...
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If you’re at all interested in space exploration, you’ve probably already heard of LiftPort, the company behind the Space Elevator, which has been in the works for the better part of a decade. The plan is to build an elevator that travels along a high-tech ribbon between the Earth and a platform in space, and another that tethers a platform to the moon. Ships could then move from one to the other. Far-fetched as it might sound, the elevator has received plenty of attention from the burgeoning space industry – including NASA, which provided the initial research. Now, LiftPort is asking for your help achieving an important step in the overall project: Tethered Towers. According...
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Kickstarter is proving to be the place to go if you have an Android concept in need of funding. Exhibit A is Ouya, a $99 Android console that blew by its original goal of raising $950,000 in funds and ended up with nearly $8.6 million instead, and now we're seeing similar excitement for Ubi (Exhibit B, if you will), a ubiquitous Android PC that is always on and responds to voice commands. Ubi's developers only sought to raise $36,000 to pay the bills, lower costs, and pay for safety certifications, and with 26 days still to go, the project has more than doubled its funding goal with over $81,000 in pledges from 500 backers. So, what exactly is Ubi? From a hardware standpoint, Ubi is an Android...
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More than 63,000 backers pledged a grand total of $8,596,475 to the Ouya project, which is supposed to be a low cost Android console that's small in size but big in functionality, including media center capabilities courtesy of support from XBMC. Ouya is one of Kickstarter's most successful projects to date, at least in terms of generating funds and excitement, and though the campaign is over, things are just now getting started. What happens next will be watched very closely by not only those who pledged their hard earned dollars, but the Kickstarter community at large, along with the entire Web. With around $8.6 million in free money to play with -- far more than the $950,000 that was initially...
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Ouya's developers started off with a relatively simple concept: build an inexpensive Android console for the living room funded by $950,000 in pledges on Kickstarter. Well, here are with less than 40 hours to go before Ouya's Kickstarter campaign comes to a close, and the project has generated more than $7 million from over 53,000 backers. Will it be worth it? That's the $7 million question that has yet to be answered, and in the meantime, Ouya's team keeps upping the ante. The latest development is that Ouya will be more than a low priced console, it will also be a full fledged media center courtesy of a partnership with XBMC. "That’s right. The award-winning, open source media player...
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The Ouya project on Kickstarter isn't without its skeptics, but don't count Square Enix among them. In an update posted today, Ouya's developers announced a partnership with game developer Square Enix that will see Final Fantasy III among the growing number of launch titles, assuming the Android console ever comes to fruition in the first place. Assuming all goes to plan, Final Fantasy III on Ouya will represent the first time gamers outside of Japan can play the title on their swank HDTVs through a console. "But that’s not the end of it: We’re promising to deliver Final Fantasy III like you’ve never seen it before – Hironobu Sakaguchi’s third installment in the...
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Wouldn't it be great if game consoles didn't cost several hundred dollars, and if the games were free to play, at least to try them out? Well, that's the central idea behind Ouya, a new game console for the TV and powered by Android. Ouya's open-source foundation is the key cog in what the developers hope will be a game changing machine, one that revolutionizes the gaming landscape and turns the industry upside down on its head. In less than three days, Ouya has raised roughly $4 million on Kickstarter from more than 30,000 excited backers. A discounted reward tier of $95 in exchange for a finished console and controller was capped at 1,000 donations and sold out on day 1. Over 25,000 backers...
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Although mobile and social gaming is all the rage, gaming on a living room console connected to your TV has always been a thoroughly enjoyable way to while away the hours alone or with friends. In recent years, the Xbox (alone and with the Kinect), Wii, and Playstation have dominated living rooms. Now there’s another contender, the Ouya, which costs $99, runs on an open platform, and is built so that hackers and devs can tweak it and create for it. Here’s the group’s Kickstarter video: The team behind Ouya believes that game development for consoles is spiraling away from independent developers due largely to rising costs associated with game development. By producing a hackable...
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Although we expected the Pebble smartwatch’s SDK to emerge sometime in August, the team released a developer preview of it at Google I/O. The document will help devs get cracking on configuring apps to play nicely with Pebble and includes code to push and receive notifications and data to and from Pebble. The document will continue to evolve between now and the final SDK release. Pebble became an overnight Kickstarter sensation, demonstrating the power of a compelling idea to elicit grassroots support through the fundraising site. Though requesting just $100,000 in funding, Pebble eventually raised more than $10.2 million with 68,929 backers. The device works with devices on both the iOS...
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Tablets and smartphones and Windows 8, oh my! In case you haven't noticed, touchscreen computing is a big deal, and it's only getting bigger. Unfortunately, gaming on a tablet pales in comparison to fragging your friends on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, or even on a console using a controller. Tapping and dragging is about all you can do. But what if there was an accessory that allowed you to do more? That's where Ringbow comes in, a neat little gamepad that you wear on your finger when using a touchscreen device. You operate the ring with your thumb while using your finger to tap the touchscreen, the combination of which opens up a world of possibilities. Ringbow is compatible with Android,...
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My, how these tiny PCs-on-a-stick are proliferating. The latest flash drive-sized mini computer is the Pocket TV from Infinitec, a dedicated HDMI dongle designed to convert any TV into a Smart TV with Android 4.0. The device fits neatly into the palm of the hand and features a 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor, Mali-400MP HD 1080p graphics, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot supporting up to 32GB of additional storage, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi. Ports include mini USB, HDMI 1.3 out, and a USB 2.0 input for connecting all manner of devices, including a keyboard, mouse, or the Infinitec air remote. If the videos posted on the Kickstarter page (50 bonus points if you can spot the Hot...
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When the team behind the Pebble smartwatch launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, they were looking for $100,000. To date, and with just over a month of fundraising time to go, the group has already raised over $3.7 million with over 25,000 backers. They claim it’s the most-funded Kickstarter project ever. The Pebble is a smartwatch that uses e-paper for its screen, and the device is both compatible with iOS and Android and capable of running its own apps, which users can load via Bluetooth. The little four-button device is waterproof and offers customizable faces, an application switcher, 3 axis accelerometer, and an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. Although the Pebble is itself...
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The prevailing wisdom is that adventure games are dead, and maybe they really are, or perhaps there just hasn't been anything to get excited about in a long, long time. Like a new Leisure Suit Larry game. You're probably thinking, "Been there, tried that, and the new Larry games stink," a fair assessment, but it's also worth mentioning that Larry creator Al Lowe and his original team of programmers and writers were in no way involved with those titles. However, they are involved with a Leisure Suit Larry remake that will sport brand new graphics and updated humor, provided they can raise enough funds. In just one week, Al Lowe and company have raised nearly half the requested $500,000 funds on...
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