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Life is full of uncertainties, and financial challenges can creep in at unexpected times. Asking for help when things fall apart may seem awkward, leaving you with doubts about people's responses. Whether you have medical bills, need capital to execute your business plan, or want a new Chromebook for schoolwork, crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe make it easier to seek help.
Grind, cook, weigh, and more: With 21 functions, the Omni Cook really is the Swiss Army knife of kitchen appliances
This article is sponsored by TOKIT
Although the world has begun to open up following the pandemic, many of us have grown accustomed to spending more time at home. And the more time we spend at home, the more likely we are to eat at home. Now you can easily make all kinds of tasty meals with the Omni Cook, now backable on Kickstarter for 9 (3 off).
AAWireless adapter that brings wireless to any Android Auto unit blows through crowdfunding goal
The Indiegogo campaign for AAWireless just started
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While compatibility with wireless Android Auto is expanding on phones, there are still many in-car head units and media players that are stuck using tethered connections. That's where a device called 'AAWireless' comes in, which aims to add wireless support to as many Android Auto units as possible.
Mobvoi's new Earbuds Gesture offer head-gesture control and 10 hours of playback
They're on Indiegogo right now for a special launch price of $65
Mobvoi just launched its budget Bluetooth buds with ANC a few months ago, but the company is already back with another pair of wireless earbuds. The Earbuds Gesture come with TicMotion capabilities that allow answering or rejecting phone calls with a shake of the head — and they're live on Indiegogo for a special early backer price of $65.
Back in 2014, a German startup successfully launched the Panono 360 via Indigogo. It's a little ball sprinkled with lenses that you throw up in the air to create perfect 360 degrees panoramas with a whopping resolution of 108MP. While other crowdfunding campaigns fall short of delivering a product altogether, Panono appears to become a failure in another department, five years after its product launch. Starting this September, the company will charge €0.79 ($0.88) for each photo stitched together on its cloud platform, and customers are enraged.
Remember when dreaming about modular electronics was all the rage? Even Google got caught up in the fantasy for a little while. Project Ara's notion of a modular smartphone might be dead for now, but there's still a smartwatch with interchangeable components to capture our attention in 2018. Blocks raised $1.6M in a Kickstarter campaign that ended way back in 2015, and there must have been concerns that the product would never make it into production. Some of its backers are thankfully starting to receive their watches now, as the company announces the official launch at CES.
PayPal has launched a new crowdfunding-type service called Money Pools, which enables users to set a fundraising goal, and share a page describing the nature of the fundraiser with friends. PayPal suggests using money pools for group gifts, planning trips, special events like baby showers, or collecting money for someone in need. Chances are it will be used predominately for the latter, as almost half of the billion raised on GoFundMe has been for medical expense fundraisers. Pages can be shared through email, social media, or messaging apps.
We've seen levitating Bluetooth speakers and connected smart cameras before, but the Moon, a fully funded Indiegogo project, melds those technologies in a $209 ($330 at retail) floating robotic eyeball and base that can also act as a smart hub for your home. That is, if it ever ships. The typical crowdfunding caveats apply. Some Indiegogo projects don't have much of a future, and this is 1-Ring's first.
Sleep as Android is a hugely popular app in the Play Store with more than 10 million downloads. The app uses sensors in your phone or certain wearables to analyze your sleep, but the team behind Sleep as Android is now looking to make a dedicated piece of tracking hardware, and it's a bit unusual. The Sleep Phaser on Indigogo is a bedside sensor that tracks your sleep without any direct contact.
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- The Frank team sent out this email to some backers and followers earlier today:
Earlier this month, two entrepreneurs from Ottawa, Canada launched a crowdfunding campaign for the "frank." phone. The main premise was that smartphones are too expensive, and there needs to be a phone priced competitively that does everything you need it to. The project had a very edgy tone, using phrases like, "It’s just another fucking phone but it’ll only cost you $180," and, "It’s about time to disrupt the shit out of the North American smartphone industry."
ZTE had an interesting idea a while back. What if consumers got to design a phone? I mean, there's no chance it would end up like The Homer, right? People made some unusual suggestions like eye-tracking technology and a case that sticks to things. ZTE's attempt to bring this phone to life as the Hawkeye have hit a snag. It's cancelling the Kickstarter campaign and going back to the drawing board.
If you've been a smartphone user for any length of time, you've probably thought that you could design a smartphone better than those hacks who had the gall to put the headphone jack on the top/bottom (delete whichever is inappropriate). Well now you can! Sort of. Chinese manufacturer ZTE is putting out press for "Project CSX," a program that will design products based on input from a community of users. The home of the project is over on the company's official forums.
Have you ever been part of a crowdfunding campaign gone wrong? No doubt some of you have, and some of you may well have contributed to such campaigns through PayPal for a reason that, until now, made it quite handy in the event of such a misfortune: purchase (formerly buyer) protection. PayPal's purchase protection basically is a "guarantee" that if you buy something through PayPal and never receive it, PayPal will reimburse you the cost of your purchase. So, instead of making you play a never-ending dispute resolution game of cat and mouse with an unresponsive - or in this case, likely non-liquid-asset-possessing - seller, you just get the money back, and PayPal can choose to go after the merchant.
What would you say if I told you a smartphone Kickstarter is experiencing a delay? Would you be shocked? I bet not. It's really just par for the course. Nextbit has announced that the CDMA version of its Robin smartphone won't ship next month after all. Instead, they're expecting it to be ready in April.
Kickstarter campaigns are not usually a good place to shop for your next phone. Hardware projects often end up massively delayed and the software becomes outdated before it even ships. However, Nextbit has updated its Kickstarter page with a new timeline for shipping the first finished Robin handsets—the first batch should go out on February 16th. Could it be a Kickstarter miracle?
The dual-screen e-paper/LCD YotaPhone 2 has a sufficiently interesting gimmick that it was able to rack up almost $300,000 on Indiegogo last month. However, the Russian smartphone maker has reached out to backers to share some sad news. It is unable to get the North American variant manufactured in a timely manner, so it's cancelling the device entirely.
We see a lot of questionable crowdfunding campaigns in the technology sphere. There's everything from magical multi-screen phone-laptop hybrids, to flexible wrist phones, to more dumb smartwatches than you can count. Now the people behind these outlandish projects might have a new concern to factor into the "risks" section of their pitch. The Federal Trade Commission has announced the first successful action against a fraudulent crowdfunding campaign.
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- A Double Fine employee reached out to us for some clarification: this edition includes both Act 1 and Act 2 of Broken Age. There are no in-app purchases - apparently a mistake was made when the game was initially published. Compared to the Steam price, it's a real bargain.
Point-and-click adventure games are experiencing a renaissance at the moment, spurred on in no small part by the ride of touch-based mobile platforms that make a natural fit with the games' simple interfaces. Surely no single adventure game has created more buzz in the last few years than Broken Age, the crowdfunded return to form for Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine Productions. Today Act 1 of Broken Age is available on the Play Store for ten bucks.
So your church group decides to pay for a new well somewhere that needs it. You'll have to collect $20 from each person, then bundle it all up and make sure no one's welching. That's a considerable amount of work for a big group, not to mention a lot of awkward conversations - you can only hear "I left my wallet at home" so many times before you snap, earning a scornful look from the deacon and a thrashing from your grandma after Sunday pot roast.