Monday 12 November 2012

3 Kickstarter.com highlights

Kickstarter.com was launched in April of 2009 yet it was only this year when it has became extremely popular. It is a crowd funding website which means that start-up businesses and small companies can use the site to pitch their product and service and if people like it they can invest money.
All 10 of the most popular kickstarter projects have been this year and they have been everything from fun games to outstanding technology.
Here are the top 3 of my favourite projects which have came from this unique website.


Pebble Watch
I first did a post about this back in August and since then not much as happened as it is still under construction. It is a kickstarter.com record breaker as it set out to make $100,000 however it hit that target within 28 hours so by the deadline it had made over $1,200,000!
Basically, the Pebble Watch is like a normal watch from the aspect that it tells the time and the fact you wear around your wrist. However unlike a normal watch it has an e-paper display and it connects via Bluetooth with your iPhone or Android Phone. Once you have downloaded the Pebble app, your smartphone sends notifications such as new text messages and Twitter mentions to the watch!
Only downside is that they are currently only building it for Android and iPhone so Windows Phone and Blackberry users are going to have to wait or find an alternative. 

Memoto Lifelogging Camera
I first wrote about this in a post about Nano Technology as it uses extremely small sensors, processors and other parts to take a photo every 30 seconds and upload it onto the web so you can access the photo's from an app on your mobile phone. The photos can be organised by the time they were taken or the location as the Memoto has a GPS built in.
It takes 5MP wide-angle shots from it's water proof case. It isn't overly complicated to use either. For it to start taking photo's you literally clip it on and to get it to stop taking photos, you just put it in your pocket.
The company is originally from Sweden however they are hoping to make their product available world wide. They first set out to make $50,000 however that figure has been multiplied by 10 now and they have over 2000 backers. With 2 weeks still to go before the project finishes its time on Kickstarter.com the company has a new goal to make over $700,000 which they say is feasible and if they do that, then they will get the opportunity to add some awesome new features to the device.

Bright Eyes Kit
This Kickstarter project was launched on the 2nd November 2012 and the company behind it, 'Technology Will Save Us', was trying to raise £17,500. Their goal was to release a pair of glasses with 174 programmable LED's on them so people could look cool and learn code at the same time.
There are 3 ways you can program the glasses, a super easy way, an easy way and a hard way. The super easy way is extremely simple as you don't need to use any code, you just click buttons and save it on to a portable SD card. The easy way includes a fair bit of code on an open source piece of software however the results are better and the hard way is extremely difficult however extremely rewarding as you could program your glasses to have your Twitter mentions coming up, or they could tell you what the weather is like, or which way is north or anything you program the LED's to do. The possibilities are endless!
I personally think these are a really cool however I don't know how keen I am to carry a box around with me and have wire going from my back to my trouser pocket (however this is necessary for the batteries and the mini computer)

Kickstarter.com links:
Pebble Watch
Memoto Lifelogging Camera
Bright Eyes Kit