New Client Work: OpenCV AI Kit – Lite
Phil Nelson Like last year’s campaign, I created the video for this amazing spatial AI device. Now available on Kickstarter.
OpenCV AI Kit Campaign Final Stats
6,564 backers pledged $1,358,318 to close out the OAK campaign at just a little over the pledge total of the other massive 3D sensor campaign I worked on in 2015… and 2x the number of backers.
Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander
A new game from Massive Damage:
A rogue-like sci-fi strategy survival game with base building, tactical combat, crew management and emergent storytelling.
90% of the words in that sentence make me so happy. Feels like equal parts X-Com, Civilization, and FTL. It looks great, too. The visual aesthetic is this kind of atemporal “18-bit” style that never really existed. The whole thing is really well done. I can’t wait.
The Structure Sensor is the first 3D sensor for mobile devices
So I joined Occipital in February of this year after they put me under NDA and showed me The Structure Sensor. We launched the Kickstarter campaign yesterday. $330k in under 24 hours. We’re beaming.
I built the website. It’s responsive as hell. Pretty proud of it. Thanks to my new friends at Mondo Robot in Boulder for the assist.
Plug: the brain of your devices
Trying really hard not to turn the ‘ol site here into Phil Links Kickstarter Projects All Day but I can’t help myself with this one. Plug is a little USB dongle that plugs into your network and shares content across all of your devices, sort of like having a personal Dropbox for your house.
Kickstarter’s Spam Problem
Garrett Murray on a troubling trend in Kickstarter projects:
At least once a week I receive an unsolicited request to fund a project. These messages are rarely offensive in and of themselves–they’re usually just information about the project and a paragraph or two of generic “please help us out” text–but they’re still spam. They’re usually sent to a blind carbon copy list, but occasionally someone will screw up and send it out via plain CC, exposing all the email addresses they’ve targeted.
This is spam, plain and simple. Kickstarter needs to decide if it’s the kind of company who wants to allow this (in order to potentially make more money in the short term, ala Facebook, at the expense of user satisfaction and damage to their brand) or come down hard on it (do the right thing for their users AND backers). I know what I hope they do.
Scott Wilson’s iPod Nano Watch Kits Raise $350,000 on Kickstarter
Obviously crowd-sourced patronage will never work. The project still has 3 weeks lefts to go, too.
Brooklyn Soda Works on Kickstarter
All you have to do is get me to hand you some money is use the words “artisanal” and “sodas” in the same sentence. If you expand it to read:
artisanal, handmade sodas made with fresh ingredients
Then my support can only be described as total.
Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design.
Written by Nick Disabato (nickd), soon to be self-published:
I’m writing a book called Cadence & Slang, due in late 2010. It’s about interaction design, which is the art and craft of making technology easier to use. There have been many products in the past decade that take generous advantage of good design – the iPod, the Flip Video, the Wii – and fortunately we’re moving more in this direction. Technology used to be an awful lot more complex and overwhelming, and we’ve since learned to make it simpler.
Back the project on Kickstarter, so I can read this thing. See also: the book’s outline (PDF), and it’s official site.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is an attempt at modern, crowd-sourced fundraising. Post a project or idea with a set timeframe, and people can pledge cash. If your fundraising goal gets reached, you get the money. If it doesn’t, then everyone gets a refund. Check out the introduction video.
I could really see using this in the future.