More Kickstarting

Two other projects have gotten a little nudge from me this past week: Everybody loves Reading Rainbow! Whether as the host of this show or a Giordi LaForge on Star trek, LeVaur Burton was a presence in my childhood. I applaud their goal of reviving the show and widening its distribution.

The PHD Movie 2. This could also be called "PhD Comics: The Movie: The Sequel". I started reading the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper back in college. I even met the author, Jorge Cham, at a robotics conference in Barcelona back in 2005 (we were both presenting on robotics). Amazingly enough, he's managed to make a go at a real living with this stuff, despite (in spite of?) having a doctorate from Stanford. It's funny stuff, and I enjoyed the first movie well enough to put some money towards the second. During the kickstarter campaign, you can check out the first movie for free.

Kickstarting Rockets

A friend and colleague of mine has a project on Kickstarter. He, like me, is an avid reader of Make: magazine, and builds a fair number of neat projects at home (he even has his own rapid prototyper!). One day, he was launching compressed air rockets with his kids, and thinking about a folding-wing balsa glider that he'd seen in a recent issue. The glider was launched with a rubber band - but why not graft it onto an air-rocket? He brought prototypes of this rocket glider to MakerFaire New York last year, and it caught the eye of the editors of Make. It's now a project in the latest issue of the magazine.

He and his collaborator are now working to do some mass production of the glider, and a new design of the compressed air launcher for them. Check out their project at Kickstarter.

Launch Something

Kickstarting Power

I like to cruise through Kickstarter and find neat projects that people are working on. Occasionally I'll pledge money to a project. Perhaps it is aspirational: I may have a project of my own some day, and would appreciate having backers.


This week, after dithering for a few weeks about whether I wanted to plunk money down on it, I have backed the Siva Cycle Atom bike generator. This little widget mounts to the rear hub and uses a fraction of your pedal power to generate electricity. That power gets dumped either into a lithium-ion battery or to a USB port on the device.

If Hilary and I ever make good on our hope to bike tour across Nova Scotia, this would be mighty handy. It would also be a useful backup for our phones it we lost power for a long while. Goodness knows Hilary and I crank out many watts on our bikes. In fact, maybe we'll use it to power the iPad next winter, where we'll spend many hours watching netflix while on the stationary trainer in our pain cave.

Or, who knows, perhaps it'll end up as a gift to a deserving two-wheeled friend.

Kickstarting a Bakery

There are several places downtown to get baked goods of one sort or another. However, the hours are a bit spotty (compared to our hectic schedule), and one could always use more choices. A new bakery, which had been using rented kitchen space north of Concord and selling through retail outlets, it looking to move into a vacated storefront on Main St. To do this, they have secured financing in a variety of ways, including raising over $4000 through Kickstarter.

Can't wait for our delicious brownies and bars!

Kickstarting Fireflies

If you aren't familiar with Kickstarter, it's a way to crowdsource funding for small-ish projects. For instance: a band wants to cut an album, but don't have the cash to get studio time. They put up a sampling of their music on Kickstarter and say "We need $X. If you pledge $Y towards our goal, we'll give you a band T-shirt. If you pledge $Z, we will give you a first-run CD when we finish it." Other kickstarter projects work along similar lines: soliciting pledges with various tiers of support.

Come to think of it, it's a lot like an NPR pledge drive. Like an NPR pledge drive, each project has a total dollar figure in mind ($X). Unlike NPR, if the goal isn't met within a specified time period (say, one month), no money changes hands and everyone walks away. Only if the pledge amount is met do credit cards get charged, and the entrepreneur gets their funding. Kickstarter takes a cut of a few percent.

Kickstarter is starting to make a splash. They've successfully funded some 20,000 projects to the tune of $200,000,000. They recently made a splash, covered in the new york times, when a project for a wireless watch shattered their initial goal of $100k by raising over $7 million. At the moment, with 10 days to go, that project has over $10 million committed.

There's no guarantee that you'll ever actually get your tchotchke, of course. This isn't venture capital, either - there are no ownership stakes involved. Some people just have bad business plans and fold before ever producing. Others drastically underestimate how much work there is in actually finishing something, and so instead of taking months it takes years. Some are just plain incompetent. A few might actually be scams. Caveat emptor.

As an engineer and occasional tinkerer, who happens to work with other engineers and tinkerers, and a follower of the maker movement, I've been following various projects on Kickstarter for a while. While the wireless watch seems neat, I'm not keen on dropping $115 on a watch I don't need, even if the project is really cool.

Instead, I've just made my first contribution to a more modest project: a circuit board with a solar cell that creates fireflies.