I’ve been exploring Kickstarter recently, the site that allows the global community to share ideas and get them off the ground. It’s a funding platform for any sort of creative project you can think of.
Projects are supported by friends, fans, and the public in return for rewards. Most of the ideas are posted by people based in the US but Kickstarter seems to be spreading.
Alice Ning caught my eye – she needed $15,000 to launch TapCaps, which are stickers that you can stick onto any glove enabling you to use a touchscreen without losing your mittens or developing frostbite. A step forward from Ikea’s stitching I blogged about a while ago.
Then I landed on the Pebble e-paper smartwatch which has raised over $10million and is the most highly and quickly crowd-funded project in history. Pebble has accepted 85,000 pre-orders for the watch.
The watch looks like the sort of thing we will all have on our Christmas list (unless you have a Blackberry or Windows phone of course). Pebble connects to iPhone and android smartphones using bluetooth, alerting you with a silent vibration to incoming calls, emails, calendar alerts and alarms, facebook messages, new tweets, weather alerts, and text messages. All you have to do to dismiss these updates is shake your wrist.
And as it is made from e-paper, it’s waterproof and scratch-resistant, plus you can choose what you want the watch face to look like depending on your mood.
Of course they also have apps. The first ones to be available include a bike computer for cyclists which will access the GPS on your smartphone to display speed, distance and pace data; runners get a similar set of data displayed on their wrist and the music control app will play, pause or skip tracks on your phone with the touch of a button.
I love the fact that it has caught the imagination of ordinary people and it was community interest, rather than big business, which made it happen.
I will definitely have it on my Christmas list, and retailing at $150 I think it is a steal (take note friends and family).
