This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

We all love capturing video on our iPhone and now thanks to Kogeto we can take amazingly awesome 360 degree video with the click of a button. It’s that simple. Not only is the video quality great but the interactive 360 views are unreal. Any serious iPhone user is all about innovative and well designed products when it comes to add-ons, and this one truly sets itself apart from the rest of them. When Kogeto says they’re trying to help you share the world around you…they’re dead serious.

The Dot raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter and is now in full force changing the way you see the world…one video camera at a time. And VentureBeat is going to help you get it at the low price of only $27.99!

(Note: This offer is available ot continental US customers only.)

Here’s what you can do with the Dot on your iPhone 4/4S:

• Shoot: Snap Dot onto your iPhone 4 / 4S, download our free Looker app, and press record. Dot will capture everything around you. Capture the crowd and the band. Film the beach at the same time as the sand volleyball team. Record a virtual tour of your dorm without missing a thing.
• View: The video on your screen is only the beginning. Swipe or click and drag across the screen to swivel around in 360°. Or switch modes and view all 360 at once in super-widescreen. You get to see everything.
• Share: Your Dotspot is ready to share with the world via email, Facebook, Twitter, or Kogeto.com with just a single click. Got a blog? Tumblr feed? Website? You can embed your videos there – or anywhere!

This Dot is specifically designed for iPhone 4/4S users. You’ll receive a black strap that snaps onto your iPhone and then you’ll be able to snap in the video lens which will allow you to capture your video. For more on this offer – including all important reminders – please visit the VB Store.

This offer won’t be around for long, so pick up a Dot for only $27.99 from the VB Store and start shooting the world in 360° today!

Nikola Tesla gets a lot of love these days — far more than he did when he was inventing all kinds of cool things more than a century ago.

A new Kickstarter campaign launched today wants to spread some of that love to Silicon Valley, home to many of the United States’ top entrepreneurs and inventors. Tesla is best known for his contributions to the alternating current (AC) electricity system and predicting many futuristic concepts that would later be realized.

The campaign is the brainchild of entrepreneur Dorrian Porter, who has been fascinated and inspired by Tesla for several years. Porter sold his company Mozes to ePrize back in January, so he is taking a break before moving on to his next venture. Getting this statue made has taken up a decent amount of his break.

Porter believes so deeply in the project that he has invested “thousands of dollars” to get the campaign going with the creation of a statue model, getting the video together, and other costs.

“Nikola Tesla is so relevant because he was all about choosing creativity and innovation over money,” Porter told VentureBeat. “He was a visionary.”

One of the most notable statues of Tesla resides in Niagara Falls State Park. But there is not one in Silicon Valley.

Porter has proposed that the statue be placed in Palo Alto because “it is the heart of Silicon Valley.” Specifically, he has received permission to have the statue in front of an office building located off of Page Mill Road, not far from California Avenue. He said thousands of people will see it every day.

The campaign will run for 30 days and has a goal of $123,000. Porter is a fan of Kickstarter and has backed 35 projects in the past two years, so that’s why he chose Kickstarter to raise money. Here’s how Porter breaks down the costs:

Artist-time, lost wax casting, installation: $67,000
Real-estate, maintenance and cost recovery to this stage: $15,000
Cost of goods for the rewards including fulfillment: $29,000
Kickstarter / Amazon fees: $12,000
Total = $123,000

The timing of today’s Kickstarter launch is especially appropriate given that a Tesla-focused organization has just completed the purchase of his old laboratory in New York state so it can be turned into a museum.

This museum project has attracted a lot of attention thanks more than $1 million being raised online by influential webcomic The Oatmeal to support it.

Check out the video below for more.

NEW YORK CITY — New York VC Fred Wilson always likes to share his insights to a wide audience. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, not only did he talk about why Foursquare is doing fine, but he also shared what he thinks makes a good entrepreneur — being a little crazy.

Wilson is the cofounder of Union Square Ventures and someone who has placed a lot of smart bets. He’s invested in companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy, and Dwolla.

“You don’t want a psychopath, but it happens,” Wilson said. “You want someone who is crazy but mentally healthy. … To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.”

Wilson refused to name “pyschopaths” that he has funded, but he was willing to name a few people who fit the bill of “good crazy.” Two entrepreneurs he thinks fit that are Kickstarter’s Perry Chen and Zynga’s Mark Pincus. “They just do things differently,” Wilson said. “Perry and Mark have some common traits. … Pincus can drive me crazy.”

What not to do in a pitch session

Wilson also gave insights into things founders and entrepreneurs had done in past pitch meetings that were ill-advised. Here are few tips of what not to do:

• Don’t give a lengthy background. Get to the point. (“Going through a long backstory is a bad idea.)
• Don’t pitch something incredibly derivative. (An example of what Wilson hates: “I’m taking a Pinterest model and I’m applying it to automobiles, and there will be flash sales.”)
• Don’t demo a product that doesn’t always work. (“I had a meeting yesterday with an entrepreneur and the product didn’t work. It was a painful moment for both of us.”
• Don’t talk for 20 minutes and then show off your product. Show your product for 20 minutes and explain it.
• Don’t show 20 slides when you can show one really great slide that explains your product.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

We live in the Golden Age of turn-based tactical strategy games. The Nintendo 3DS has the amazing Fire Emblem: Awakening and Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars. The PC has XCOM: Enemy Unknown and an upcoming Civilization V expansion. Now, Danish developer Full Control is bringing us one more title to cement a great couple of years for taking turns firing guns.

The studio opened up its Kickstarter campaign for Jagged Alliance: Flashback this morning. This new Jagged Allience aims to update the classic squad-based tactics mechanics of the series for a new generation of gamers on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Full Control set a goal of $350,000.

“The original Jagged Alliance was a thinking man’s game with a focus on characters, firepower, and strategy,” Full Control chief executive officer Thomas Hentschel said in a statement. “Our vision at Full Control is to bring back the tactical turn-based action that the original games were known for. We look forward to working with a community who shares our vision and wants to experience a new Jagged Alliance that returns to the classic turn-based action of the originals.”

Jagged Alliance: Flashback warps players back to the 1980s Cold War. The action takes place on San Christobal, a Caribbean Island that serves an important strategic purpose to both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. After a coup d’état knocks out an American-friendly ruler, a group of highly trained special operators are sent in to restore balance.

In other words: ‘Muricah!

Full control wants to retain the deep strategy the franchise is known for while expanding on its character role-playing elements, squad management, and base building.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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InXile Entertainment’s new isometric computer-role-playing game Torment: Tides of Numera recently finished its Kickstarter campaign, nearly quintupling its original goal with a total of $4.2 million.

Tides of Numera isn’t the first runaway success on Kickstarter, but it is the most funded video game in the crowdfunding site’s history. And it is just one instance among dozens where companies are ditching the traditional publisher model and handling development and sales their own way.

This is the future of video games. Whether it’s with Kickstarter or some other website — with fan-funding or other investment models — what’s certain is that indie developers thrive on independence. They have full creative freedom, can unconditionally make all the profit they deserve, and work in an environment that enables them to make the best possible game. 

So what’s keeping us from abandoning publishers completely?

Well, it obviously isn’t going to happen any time soon, but it should. And the biggest myth keeping us back is this: “big-budget games are better games.”

More money does not always equal better games. Too Human from Silicon Knights and Microsoft Game Studios had a whopping $60-plus million budget, but the product that emerged wasn’t anything special. And series like Call of Duty, which regurgitate carbon-copy spin-offs year after year, haven’t been on the creative edge since their first installment.

In fact, I’d argue that more often than not, big budgets aren’t doing much to help games.

Huge sums of a title’s budget these days go toward Hollywood-type effects. While everyone loves Mass Effect’s voice-acting and StarCraft’s cinematic videos, video games aren’t movies. Tides of Numera writer Colin McComb recently told PC Gamer that although voice-acting needs a higher budget, “You also have to get that script in early so you can get your actors early and you can commit them into the studio. Then, if you discover something has happened with the development of the gameplay, you are shackled unless you can get that same actor back in to voice the parts in the same voice. You’re basically stuck with the lines you’ve got, and you have to find a way to work around that.”

A game’s story suffers because developers are forced to use lines that aren’t necessarily relevant or fitting. The same can be said about cinematics. Meanwhile, both are a vacuum, forcing developers to place more time and resources into flashy features that aren’t conducive to better gameplay or story. Publishers will sacrifice both, knowing it will bring in gamers.

But the interference can go far beyond that. Just like Hollywood, which injects “popular” elements into a film to attract more viewers, publishers will often pressure developers to add features that aren’t meant to be in the game. Worse, they reject games that try to innovate and break the mold. When InXile’s founder Brian Fargo tried petitioning publishers to accept his idea for Wasteland 2 (another Kickstarter success due this year), no one would accept it.

Publishers are in the business to make money. Call of Duty generates revenue, not the Torments of the game world. The fact that the Battlefield franchise increasingly resembles Call of Duty proves this. Electronic Arts wants what Activision flaunts.

The problem is that the for-profit model hinders creativity. Developers want to earn an income, too, but they also want to make the best games they can. That sometimes means sacrificing their vision. If we were to abandon that model and maybe even some of the flashy features, gaming would experience a renaissance. Innovation — good gameplay and story — would fuel it.

Patrick Rothfuss, a fantasy author and writer for the new Torment game, told PC Gamer, “Think about how they did movies back in the day. Some of these real classics, they didn’t have a lot of special effects. How did they make a great movie? They had a great script and great actors. If you didn’t have both of those, you had nothing.”

That is the kind of environment we need for gaming if we want the best. Now is the time. Steam, Kickstarter, and the console-indie markets provide everything we need to start — the rest takes the will to break tradition and try something new.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Ecco the Dolphin was a spectacularly innovative, nonviolent video game when it debuted on Sega’s game consoles starting in 1992. In that classic, a generation of gamers discovered the visual wonders of the ocean while playing as a jumping, spinning dolphin who battled sharks and sang to sea life.

Now the creators of Ecco have launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a new game about life in the ocean after humans become extinct: The Big Blue. Ed Annunziata and Spencer Nilsen, the creators of Ecco the Dolphin, have pulled together a veteran team in a company called Playchemy to make the next-generation undersea adventure game. Their latest collaboration isn’t based on the Ecco property itself, but they consider it to be the “next evolutionary step in undersea adventure games,” Annunziata said in a video promoting the project. In other words, it’s a spiritual successor, without the Ecco name.

“We want to make something epic,” Annunziata said. “Something with smooth game controls, a deep back story, and emphasis on exploration and artificial life.”

Source: Ed Annunziata

Ed Annunziata and his cohorts have put The Big Blue on Kickstarter. It’s the so-called spiritual successor to Ecco the Dolphin, a beloved game from the days of the Sega Genesis.

The Burlingame, Calif.-based Playchemy wants to raise $665,000 in the next 30 days to fund the project. Annunziata has had talks with Sega about doing another Ecco the Dolphin game, but so far nothing has come from that. So his team is forging ahead on Kickstarter, where they hope to bring out another title that will help people appreciate games as an art form.

Ecco the Dolphin has become a classic with a big following, and it has been republished on downloadable platforms, bringing the title to new audiences. But we haven’t seen a big undersea exploration title with state-of-the-art visuals for a while.

Nilsen is composing new music and sound for the game that will tie into the larger story. The music will be dynamic and run continuously through the game. Composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) is contributing to the soundtrack.

In The Big Blue, human life has become extinct. Dolphin, porpoise, and whale (cetacean) sounds become the only form of communication, and a kind of undersea Internet comes to life. Players will be able to “sing” new creatures to life and control how they evolve.

The Big Blue deals with themes such as climate change, mass extinction, evolution, and biogenesis. It suggests that the Earth itself is a living organism, à la the Gaia theory.

The player can create new life forms based on the information carried in “life songs.” The graphics feature special effects like volumetric water, surface deformation, sun rays, refraction, and reflection lighting. It meshes puzzle gameplay with science, nature, and science fiction. It is not about humans and it sports a lot of nonviolent story and emotion.

It will have hyper-realistic creature animation with flocking, swarming, and procedural animations. Creatures can evolve, and players can share their creatures via collectible cards and codes.

Annunziata still gets e-mail and fan letters more than two decades after the introduction of Ecco the Dolphin. (I played it with my oldest daughter and enjoyed it immensely). He worked at Sega from 1989 to 1997, and then he moved on to Nokia Games, AndNow, TwoFish, SmartyAnts, and now Playchemy, which was founded in October 2011 with angel-invester money. The company has 12 employees and seed funding from Rick Thompson’s Signia Ventures.

The challenge is to get people to “care” about a game that doesn’t include human interactions. It is also difficult to instill the right balance of “fun” in an expansive environment and gameplay style where it is easy to get lost or not clearly know how to proceed.

The Big Blue uses the Unity 3D game engine. It’s going to be for the PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. If it hits its stretch goals, the team will work on multiplayer cooperative gameplay and possibly add massively multiplayer online capability.

Annunziata and his team created Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: Tides of Time as well as a number of other titles. Jon Berg, who created the “Hammerhead” alien in the original Star Wars (this iconic space race are now known as “Ithorians), is the creature designer for The Big Blue. He is creating creatures in an “unlimited canvas” to create sea life. Laszio Szenttornyai is a programmer from the original Ecco team.

“We hope that you’ll support us and we’ll see you in the ocean,” said Annunziata.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s not the goal of Jimu, a new rapid development tool for Android apps that’s currently fundraising via Kickstarter.

“We want to make it possible for a lot more people to create apps,” Jimu founder Linkton Ye told me yesterday via Skype. “Everyone should be able to play with the software that surrounds us.”

But Ye doesn’t want to just build a framework for the n00bs: those of us who can’t program in Java and build our own apps. That’s part of the goal, but not all of it. The rest of it is all about those software developers who are already building Android apps today and dealing with the surprisingly repetitive and challenging tasks for each and every app they build.

The challenge lies in the fact that while there are many great tools and frameworks to help non-developers build apps — Andromo, AppyPie, AppsGeyser, and TheAppBuilder come to mind   —  they tend to be a little cookie cutter. Pick a style, select some features, choose a content feed, subscribe to Twitter updates, import a photo stream.

“We want to give everyone a jumpstart to create apps, but still leave room for developers to customize however they want,” Ye says. “There’s a lot of frameworks to let non-developers create apps, but it’s just a form to fill in. All their apps look pretty much the same, and you can’t customize very much.”

Source: Jimu

One app already built in Jimu that integrates Flickr, Google Maps, other web services, and local caching.

So Jimu not only enables drag-and-drop creation of app functionality, it also creates clean, commented source code for all your apps … which those with a technical bent can then take and customize or extend even more. At a minimum, then, it’s a rapid prototyping tool that actually works, rather than being a clickable model, a wireframe, or a set of screenshots.

Jimu does this by via what Ye calls “blocks:” chunks of code that insert objects like pictures, text, buttons, and actions. The framework is extensible, and the team is building new blocks continuously. Besides the basic necessities of an app, some of the higher-level ones include the ability to take a picture with the phone’s camera and use the image, the ability to connect to other devices via NFC, and the ability to take over a phone’s Bluetooth connection.

But it’s still early days in the project — hence the Kickstarter campaign.

“We wanted to see how many people are actually excited about this idea,” Ye told me. “Right now it’s a prototype, and we want to build a minimum viable product, so this is this is basically marketing research, and it will provide some capital to fund the project.”

The team is trying to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter. With 23 days to go, 54 backers have contributed $1,707, so there’s a significant way to go.

Assuming the Kickstarter works, Ye thinks they’ll have enough capital to finish the product. And having a successful fundraiser in his back pocket will help Jimu find additional funding. The ultimate goal is a subscription-based service by which developers who want to use Jimu pay for one or more tiers of service … and a programming blocks marketplace where developers who create a useful block can re-sell it to other mobile programmers.

Will the project get funded? Ye is optimistic.

“There are a lot of hardware and game companies doing well on Kickstarter,” he said. “For software it’s harder … but we still think it’s possible.”

Image credits: Jimu

Disclosure: one of the members of the Jimu team, Aras Balali, is a member in my coworking space.

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For at least 353 people who have tossed $134,551 in tip money towards the project on Kickstarter, that question has an easy answer: everyone. And with a project goal of just a little more, $135,000, it seems certain that “Bartendro” will see the bright lights of night-time parties.

What does it do?

Bartendro is a “precision cocktail dispensing robot,” the project founders say, that “makes tasty drinks quickly and repeatably without the mess.” Plus, it’s portable and can be taken to events and parties.

But, assembling one does require some hacker cojones.

A tiny Raspberry Pi serves as the brain, operating up to 15 dispensers, which essentially suck booze out of whatever bottles you’ve got handy, then mix it to your specifications. The specifications are input via any WiFi-equipped smartphone or tablet, which you can mount on Bartendro’s frame for easy access and super-1337 status.

Assuming you have not been overcome by the fruits of Bartendro’s labor, the entire device disassembles and cleans up in about five minutes, its masters promise.

Some assembly is required, and if you are a coder, the entire codebase is open-source and available on Github.

Feeling energetic?

Bartendro could have a Microsoft Kinect attached for more interesting order, the project creators suggest. Or, more practically, a credit card reader to pay for all the ingredients.

Image credits: Bartendro project

In fact, Scout Alarm crowdsourced that cash all on its own.

The Scout Alarm is a $120 “next generation” alarm system that is designed for renters as well as home owners. It’s clean, simple, doesn’t require wires or a landline, and it comes with you to your new home when you move. In other words, a Scout representative told me, it’s the perfect system for urban dwellers who may not be living in the same home for decades on end.

Scout says that Kickstarter wouldn’t allow it on its service as its product was not far enough along in preproduction yet, so the company followed in the footsteps of Lockitron, which crowdfunded its keyless lock solution, then open-sourced the needed software. A month later, the company has 596 backers who have pledged $159,180 for the new alarm systems, which start shipping in August.

“Scout has been the most successful project of its kind that we can find,” a company representative told me via email. “Even if you look at the top 15 projects of 2012 from Indiegogo, Scout would be in the top 10 … we believe we are the most successful independent crowdfunding campaign to date, excluding Lockitron, which was on their second product.”

The company put together two blog posts highlighting how to make a private crowdfunding campaign work. Here’s the short version:

1. You’ll need to do some programming. Even though Lockitron open-sourced its crowdfunding code, it may not be perfectly suited for you.
2. Press helps
3. This may be a well-duh one, but if you can get the attention of people that have others’ attention, it helps.
4. PR people help, too. Let me just put it this way: There’s a reason you’re seeing this article, and it’s not because I woke up this morning thinking I was going to write about Scout Alarm.
5. Sweat the small stuff. Distributors? Shipping rates? Know them.
6. Remind me later. Some people can’t buy right away. Some don’t want to. Give them a way to get you to remind them later.
7. Live chat on your site. Talk to people who hit your site — they’ll have questions.
8. Talk to backers early and often. Keep them informed, excited, and sharing.
9. Have a second angle on press. Initial press doesn’t last. Have a new angle for week two, three, and so on.
10. Retargeting from day one. Set up AdRoll or another retargeting solution on your site so that you can market to people who visit but don’t buy. “It’s cheap,” Scout Alarm says on its blog. “We’ve spent $340 to get 43,000 impressions and 81 clicks in two weeks.”
11. Video, demos, pictures. People don’t like to read; they like to see.
12. Ask for help. Other startups and entrepreneurs like to help startups and entrepreneurs.
13. Help backers go viral. Give them simple ways to share news and updates.
14. Hire a virtual assistant. Keeping up with the flow of information is hard.
15. Ask for the sale. Don’t be shy!
16. Track referrals and conversions from day one. Know what’s working … and what’s not.

The results?

In the first three weeks, Scout Alarm received 48,500 visitors, including 36,500 unique visits, from people who pre-ordered $140,000 worth of home security equipment. Now the campaign is near $160,000.

Scout’s campaign is continuing for another five days, and it’s looking for about $20,000 more in preorders.

Nice Laundry is an e-commerce startup that sells colorful designer mens socks. The company attracted 283 backers after just one day on Kickstarter, which the founders said is the record for a fashion project’s first day.

Socks are often relegated to the bottom of the fashion hierarchy as mismatched afterthoughts that pants and shoes cover. However, over the past couple years, a slew of e-commerce startups like Frank & Oak, Everlane, and Bonobos have used the Internet as a way to make men more stylish with minimal effort. These companies are predicated on the belief that most men do not enjoy going shopping and don’t know what to buy when they do. They provide a curated selection of high-quality, fashionable clothing that is easily ordered and delivered.

Nice Laundry is applying the same concept to socks.

“Guys have terrible relationships with their sock drawers,” said founder Phil Moldavski. “Anyone who has shopped for socks knows it sucks. It’s time consuming, expensive, and uninspiring. We solve all of that. We make it quick, affordable, and exciting to start fresh by offering colorful designer socks in packs of 6.”

Moldavski and his cofounder, Ricky Choi, based their prototype off of a $38 sock that they “obsessed over” to create the perfect sock. The company’s designer has worked for brands including Levi’s, Polo, and Vineyard Vines, and the socks are manufactured in the same factories used by brands like J.Crew. Nice Laundry charges $39 for six pairs of socks and shipping is free. Packs are themed with titles like “exec,” “wild child,” or “dreamer,” or you can replace your whole sock drawer for $90.

Furthermore, every order comes with prepaid shipping labels so consumers can send their old socks to be recycled, reused, or repurposed.

“We’ve always been big fans of the Buy 1, Give 1 model used by Toms and Warby Parker, but felt that it lacked that direct sense of connection,” said Moldavski. “As a customer, sending your old socks back for recycling is a tangible investment in the cause. They will take on a second life, either being reused or recycled into cool things like home insulation. The U.S. generates 21 billion pounds of textile waste per year, on track to hit 35 billion pounds by 2019. We want to do our part to help get that number to zero.”

Moldavksi and Choi met while working at LivingSocial, where they came up with the idea for Nice Laundry. They left to participate in DevBootcamp and are now spreading the gospel of cost-effective designer socks. Nice Laundry is based in Washington, D.C.

Kickstarter emerged the people’s winner at the 2013 Academy Awards, second only to Jennifer Lawrence, who earned millions of admirers (and several memes) when she tripped on her dress.

Kickstarter-backed Inocente won the Oscar last night for Documentary Short Subject (check out a promo for the film below). The movie raised a relatively modest $52,527 from 294 backers on the website, which lets people fund creative projects. On its Kickstarter page, the film is described as a heartwarming story of a “15-year-old homeless and undocumented girl in CA who refuses to give up her dream of being an artist.”

That’s an impressive win for Kickstarter, which raised $57.9 million for film and video projects in 2012, its second-biggest category after games.

Kickstarter’s founders originally envisioned it as a site dedicating to promoting and procuring funding for artsy projects, but it has expanded to include hardware and hi-tech. The site, founded in 2008, has raised more than $450 million for various crowd-funded projects ranging from quirky indie films to Android-powered game consoles and high-tech watches. It received widespread recognition when Olive, the first film shot on a smartphone, raised a bunch of money on the site.

Director Sean Fine (pictured, left, with his wife Andrea) told the Wall Street Journal that Kickstarter “helped galvanize the community and get the word out about the film, and it … kept us going basically through the post-production process.”

The film was already produced, but the new funding paid deferred costs and completed final deliverables (creating HDCam tapes, Digibeta tapes, Blu-ray discs, and DVDs in the correct formats) for TV and community film screenings as well as build a promotional website.

Inocente isn’t the only film to receive funding through a site like Kickstarter. Until its Oscar’s win, the most high profile film to use crowdfunding was Nazi space romp Iron Sky. The film invited the public to be shareholders in the film, and if it succeeded in the Box Office, they might make a return. Iron Sky received only lukewarm reviews, but it opened the floodgates of possibility for filmmakers.

Kickstarter launched a custom site today to celebrate the win. It’ll likely be a boost for dozens of other film projects that are currently raising funds.

Stone Blade Entertainment (formerly Gary Games), the maker of the deck-building game Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, is so confident that it can raise $125,000 for its new Kickstarter that it’s limiting the crowdfunding campaign to a measly 10 days.

A lot of companies need an entire month to publicize a project and convince would-be backers that it’s worth their money, but not Stone Blade. The team has already found huge success with the mobile version of Ascension on iOS, tallying 2 million play sessions in December alone. On top of that, its previous Kickstarter for the SolForge digital trading-card game amassed nearly twice its target goal of $250,000.

Now it wants to bring Ascension Online to Android and PC “by the end of 2013.” The audience is clearly there, and today — one day into the campaign’s launch — Stone Blade is already approaching half of its funding goal, with more than $57,000 in donations pouring in.

“The Ascension iOS app has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and players have logged over three million games played online,” the Kickstarter page reads. “We think it’s time to take Ascension to the next level.”

Stone Blade introduced the physical card game in 2010 and has since released three expansions (Return of the Fallen, Storm of Souls, and Immortal Heroes) plus an iOS version, along with supplemental promo cards. (The fourth expansion, Rise of Vigil, is due out in April and even earlier for backers.) The team is focusing on enhancing the Android and PC version with new features, including online tournaments, a campaign mode, and a base game that’s free to anyone who wants to play it — with in-app purchases in the form of additional expansions and bonus features (cosmetic changes, special event tournaments, and so on).

“Our programming team currently has their hands full making SolForge,” the campaign page reads. “With this Kickstarter, however, we will be able to bring on additional programmers to develop Ascension Online in parallel. We feel that Ascension Online deserves a dedicated team, one that can commit all of their time to developing for new platforms, creating new features, and ensuring timely set releases.”

Backers have access to rewards such as exclusive physical and digital promo cards and decks, unique avatars, free expansion downloads, and more — like a bobblehead, playmat, and much fancier incentives at the mid-tier and higher levels.

The game designer is working with iOS partner Playdek to add features like cross-platform play to the current game version or “transition users to a newly released app with all the features we are promising in this Kickstarter.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Continue, a small U.K.-based games magazine, turned to Kickstarter this week in an attempt to fund another year of its quarterly publication. What separates Continue from other publications is its slant on covering ”gaming rather than just games,” but with an industry already awash with print, online, and digital magazines, will it succeed in reaching its £50,000 target ?

A quick count reveals that there are some 11 well known and mainstream U.K. and U.S.-based print and digital publications alone that cover the gaming spectrum as a whole and culture (Edge springs to mind immediately) — and another 12-plus online games industry and culture sites such as Kotaku, Joystiq, GamesBeat, and 1UP. So there’s plenty around for everyone. This doesn’t cover the hundreds of smaller independent sites and blogs. On top of this, Continue’s quartlerly publication cycle may sound a little slow in an industry where there is always something going on, but it counters this by saying on its campaign page, “We’re really proud of the quality those first three issues showed — proving that a features-first games magazine really could work.” Could … .

It’s not the first time that a publisher has forgone mainstream and taken a more high-brow and intelligent look at the industry. In 2009, Jamin Brophy-Warren, a former culture reporter for The Wall Street Journal, created Kill Screen and charged an eye-watering $15 an issue. The first set of issues quickly sold out, and Time stated that the writing was so polished it would help convince doubters that games are worth taking seriously. From that success, Kill Screen has grown into a digital publication and and maintains the expensive print edition.

While many of us turn to websites for a quick daily dose of gaming action, reviews, and news, there does appear to be a niche market for mature reading on the subject, and Jamin knew this. The success of Continue’s Kickstarter campaign doesn’t rest with reaching a goal — it depends on the editorial team creating the same impression that Kill Screen did: that games can be taken seriously and that they matter. They are an essential fabric of future society as the pressures of reality demand a conduit of release. Not only that, but games are becoming integral in our schooling system and the workplace. Minecraft, for example, is being used as a teaching aid for physics, town planning, and architecture, and the application of game mechanics and engagement in work and business has led to “gamification.”

The games industry as a whole is constantly evolving, and publications need to evolve with it. And perhaps because of this, there is room for one more magazine to remind us of that.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Plopping $500 down on a game meant to be played on your phone or tablet may seem, perhaps, 500 times too much. But a handful of excitable (and apparently, well-off) gamers are doing just that for SolForge. The nutty thing is, this digital-only collectible-card game (CCG) is actually free. That’s right, you don’t have to dish out any cash play it — payments are purely for optional virtual goods. Even nuttier: SolForge isn’t even out yet. It’s due late summer or early fall for iOS and PC and then later for Android.

What would get people to drop a half-grand on an otherwise free game that’s still months away from being released? If you’re nerdy enough, then the names Richard Garfield and Stone Blade Entertainment might do it. Garfield is the famous designer behind the megapopular Magic: The Gathering CCG. Stone Blade (formerly Gary Games) created the also-popular Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer deck-building game, whose iOS version saw 2 million play sessions in December alone. The two have joined forces to create SolForge, which started off as a Kickstarter campaign looking for $250,000 in crowdsourced funding and ended with nearly double that at $430,000.

The project is now, of course, a go, and prospective players can preorder bonuses on the official website. Stone Blade won’t say exactly how many have opted for the most expensive buy-in (that’s the $500 package), only that “many have” — and that’s not including the 81 backers who pledged $500 or more on Kickstarter.

We talked to Stone Blade founder and Ascension creator Justin Gary to find out what exactly these game designers — who are relatively new to the digital business, by the way — are doing to put gamers into “please, take my money mode.” Here are his thoughts …

… on how he made a tabletop gaming experience work so well on iOS:

Justin Gary: It’s going to be a long time before people give up the value of sitting around a table and the tactile feel of having a deck of cards. But the fact that the iOS version lets you play it so much more easily and so much faster is great. It’s part of the designed intent: to make this game faster than any of the others that are out there.

Look at the other games in the deck-building category: Dominion, Thunderstone, or any of the others. With a typical match of Ascension, I can set it up, play it, and put it away in the same time it takes to set up one of those other games. I’m very proud of the fact that I could make Ascension playable in under 30 minutes in the physical version. When we finally converted it over to mobile, a mobile user could play it in less than five minutes.

… on whether $5 iOS sales can cannibalize $40 physical sales of the same game:

Gary: There’s a little more infrastructure required to build out the physical games, but we do make more selling a $40 game than we do a $5 download that Apple takes 30 percent of.

At the end of the day, I don’t believe it’s a cannibalistic thing. We’re able to expand the tabletop world in a way that’s never been possible before. There are hundreds of thousands of people now playing Ascension who never would have seen it otherwise. I find a lot of them actually tend to want to come over and try out the physical experience as well. We’ve seen a consistent increase in our sales of the physical game along with the sales of the mobile game.

There are people who never would have looked at a hobby game. They never played a trading-card game, never played a deck-building game, never played anything like it, and they discover Ascension on their iPhone or iPad and then get exposed to a whole new world. They don’t just buy the physical Ascension — they start looking into other games and other things in the space. It’s helping to grow the hobby that I love and that I grew up in.

… on whether digital-first SolForge can become a physical product:

Gary: While I will tell you that it is something we do have on the table, one of the design directives for SolForge was to do things with a trading-card game that you could never do in a physical space. That’s why the main mechanic of SolForge is that cards evolve and transform and get new powers and new art when you play them. Stuff can … modify cards permanently, changing the nature of the game. These are things that are really difficult to do physically.

I know this because when we were first working on SolForge, we didn’t have programming in. We had to mock everything up physically. In order to simulate leveling-up cards, we would put multiple little pieces of paper inside the card sleeve and move those out and change them. It was a pain in the butt. It would take an hour to set up and play a game as opposed to now, where it’s five minutes to play. I wouldn’t subject anybody to that exact experience.

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Updated at 5:25 p.m. Pacific with additional information on publisher interest.

Updated at 7:37 a.m. Pacific with response from Chris Taylor.

With four days left, and still short of its goal by over half a million dollars, Gas Powered Games pulled its Kickstarter project for Wildman. Add another game to the pile of Kickstarter projects that never met their funding goal.

As website Joystiq reports, Gas Powered Games cancelled the project and posted the following message on the Kickstarter page for Wildman:

Greetings Kickstarters.

We have some news today. We are canceling the Wildman Kickstarter.

At this point, it makes sense for us to focus our attention on other ways to keep Gas Powered Games running. Unfortunately, we are unable to share any specifics in public. When we have news to share, we will be posting it on our site. If you want status updates, or if you want to continue discussing Wildman and/or this Kickstarter, please consider migrating over to forums.gaspowered.com.

We are profoundly grateful to those of you who backed this project and Gas Powered Games. Your passion and hard work put us in a position to write this exciting new chapter in the history of GPG.

In the video he posted, studio head Chris Taylor said that he’s been working “in the background” as he figures out ways to keep the studio running. “If all goes well, which I think it will, I’ll be able to give you all some great news in the weeks ahead,” and Taylor added, “If it wasn’t for all of the hard work, and the passion and the support that I’ve seen this last month, I would not be in a position where I could be looking at some of the opportunities that we’ve got today.” Furthermore, in a recent Three Moves Ahead strategy-gaming podcast, Taylor explained that there was some interest from publishers.

In a recent interview with website Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Taylor said that Gas Powered Games received several calls from publishers interested in Wildman, “but they would love to see us raise the money on Kickstarter, and then they’ll take us the rest of the way.” In other words, those publishers wanted to see the project meet its goals before handing over additional funding.

Unlike most failed Kickstarter campaigns, the developer had hope for Wildman because Gas Powered Games is an established developer that has shipped notable titles such as Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander. It seems that Taylor expected success along the lines of other big-name developers that jumped at the Kickstarter crowdfunding trend. That wasn’t the case for Taylor’s studio, which reportedly cut 80 percent of its workforce, and is now focusing on keeping the staff it has left.

Based on how the campaign went, it doesn’t seem that Gas Powered Games maintained the best attitude on the project. At one point, Taylor asked fans whether or not he should continue with the Kickstarter. Yes, there’s more to this than crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, but being able to project confidence in your campaign will give others the confidence to help fund it.

GamesBeat reached out to Gas Powered games for comment, and Taylor responded, “Can’t quite talk about what’s next,” but said to “check in anytime.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The barbarians officially have enough money to take on those pretentious Romans with their gates, and their culture, and their polytheism.

Earlier today, designer John Shafer’s new strategy game, At the Gates, surpassed its funding goal on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Nearly 1,350 backers already pledged $45,500, which eclipsed the project’s modest $40,000 budget. The funding campaign still has 24 days left to bring in more pledges.

For the unaware, At the Gates is a 4X strategy game (where players explore a map, expand their territory, exploit resources, and exterminate enemies) for the PC. Jon Shafer was previously the lead designer on Civilization V, a prime example of the sub-genre.

But Shafer isn’t just re-creating Civilization. He hopes to reinvigorate strategy with a new take on 4X that sheds some of its longtime elements. For example, players don’t control a major historical civilization; instead, they command a barbarian horde that must destroy the Roman empire.

You can read more about how Shafer intends to shake things up in our story about him and At the Gates.

Shafer and his team of developers at new studio Conifer Games will now focus on stretch goals. The team already has tiers for mod support, a map editor, and new playable barbarian factions. It is also looking into adding support for additional platforms and a reward tier that would provide a physical copy of the game with a box, a manual, and a DVD of At the Gates.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There’s a glowing green circle on the dungeon floor. Should I stand on it? Of course I should. Green means go. Nothing bad is ever green. So I step into the circle, and it poisons me. But look, that’s OK. Hit points are falling off me in clumps, like hair off the elderly, but over there on the wall is a font of pure, life-giving water. I race toward it and drink: it is also poisoned. Stumbling and reeling, I step back from the vile stuff onto a spike trap and die.

I’ve been playing Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, which promises to deliver an infinite, procedurally generated fantasy world you explore in an old-fashioned first-person, grid-and-turn-based manner as in games like Eye of the Beholder and Might and Magic. It’s a work of passion for developer Alex Norton, who grew up playing those games with his father, naming the characters after themselves and working together to defeat traps and monsters. Malevolence is a work of modern polish as well as nostalgia, though, with Norton gathering a global team under the banner of Visual Outbreak Studios from his home in Australia, helped by a Kickstarter windfall of over $33,000.

Norton commiserates after I die on the spike trap. It’s claimed a lot of lives today. He’s showing this prerelease build at an indie game symposium in Brisbane, where it’s surrounded by mobile games. It stands out in this company, and so does he — both because he’s the tallest man in the room and because he’s casually carrying a plastic sword around. Fortunately, he doesn’t stab me with it when I start pestering him with questions. (It’s probably poisoned.)

I love turn-based games for the tension they build as you finally commit to your next action. What is it about them that appeals to you?

Alex Norton: For me, it’s the ability to have the adventure at your own pace. Some of my fondest memories from childhood have been sitting with my dad playing Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra, and us stopping at every corner with him asking me what we should do next. It’s harder to do that sort of thing in a real-time game, when the tension is always on.

Has your dad played Malevolence?

Norton: He has. He’s on the test team. He insisted, so yeah. He’s not the best tester in the world because he’s not the most techno-savvy gentleman. He would be if he had the time, but he’s a very busy man. He loves it, though. It very strongly reminds him of all the games that we used to play when I was younger, and that to me is a winner. If it reminds him of it right away, then my mission is a success.

I noticed another player approaching Malevolence like a Diablo-style click-frenzy, and you mentioned the combat speeds up if you do. How does that work?

Norton: Yes, many people die very quickly in Malevolence because they try to play it like Skyrim. You can do that, but you’ve got to be really mindful of your stats and know your character quite well before you can pull it off and survive. I’ve actually coded in monitors that watch how quickly you’re pressing buttons and moving around, and the game dynamically takes shortcuts to keep up with you. [It] took me a while to get the system working seamlessly,but the results work quite well. Regardless of this, though, Malevolence is a hard game. It doesn’t spoon-feed its players like most [role-playing games].

You’ve said the world Malevolence generates will be infinite, but the geographical details will be the same for everyone — so that I’ll be able to find something cool and then share the coordinates with someone else. What kind of cool things can we expect to find?

Norton: Well, the initial release is going to have all of your standard castles, dungeons, forests, et cetera, but also some extra coolness such as abandoned mines, caves, crypts, and tombs, and all that. Even the cities have sewer systems underneath that you can explore. Given the procedural nature of the generation, however, even I don’t know what people are going to find. On my romps through Ahkranox while developing, I’ve found some pretty amazing stuff. I really look forward to seeing what other people manage to find. And the expansion pack that we have planned will add even more to the game. We often make the joke that the expansion pack is going to make our infinite world even bigger.

Is the infinite world part of the game’s backstory? Do the people you meet there know they live on a world that stretches on forever?

Norton: Yes, indeed. The world in the game is actually inside the imagination of a sentient sword, the Sword of Ahkranox, which the people worship almost as a deity. What they don’t know is where the sword came from or why it’s doing what it’s doing. That part of the story people will have to find out for themselves.

You’re mostly self-taught. Did you study?

Norton: I am entirely self-taught. I studied special effects, so I know how to blow things up. Digitally, I didn’t do pyrotechnics. I did a Diploma of Screen specializing in animation — so all sort of explosions onscreen, speeding cars, that sort of thing, 3D animation for film and television. Then I’ve done a Certificate III in Multimedia. Then I got my job, my day job, and through that I did a degree-level aptitude course that went for two years to prove that I could do things at a degree level and passed that with flying colors.

I actually got hand-selected by Pixar when they were celebrating, I think it was 20 years or something? They came to Sydney, and they held a master class that went for two days. They hand-picked 200 people from around Australia and then culled it to 160 because they didn’t get the venue they wanted, but I still made the cut and flew down there to this masterclass and learned more in those two days than I did in the entire Diploma and Certificate III. It was just incredible. And to be picked by them when my main specialization is programming and not animation!

I was reading that before Malevolence actually became a video game project, you were working on it, or something similar to it, as a card game?

Norton: Malevolence is in existence because it was a card game. It started out with my wife — when we were first dating actually, we thought, “Why don’t we have our own go at making a board game or a card game or something like that.” We ended up going halfway. It’s not a collectible card game, you just buy a set of cards and that’s the whole thing, so it’s kind of like a board game. We thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could play a game like Dungeons & Dragons without a Dungeon Master, without having to organize somebody who knows all the rules, and let it create the world through random shuffling of decks?” We thought, “We’ll try and work that mechanic out,” and we did. After much, much experimenting and cutting up our own cards and things like that, doing scribble art, we eventually made a full, polished set. The whole thing. Rulebooks, cards, all the proper cardstock laminated, the works, as a prototype ready to pitch to investors to raise money to be able to produce it. It was done and ready. Nobody wanted to invest. We needed about $10,000 to actually get the first run made, and nobody wanted to put any money into it.

Filed under: Games

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Fresh launched its social product testing and review platform today that connects young hardware companies with people to review their products.

For a long time, hardware was out of fashion. Now, due to developments in design and manufacturing technology, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and the rise of trends such as the Quantified Self movement and the Internet of Things, it is back in style. It seems like cool and connected gadgets are infiltrating every part of our existence, whether it is to fix posture, protect your home, or play video games, or sous vide a pork chop.

Product reviews are a key part of the consumer electronic industry. Retailers, journalists, and expert reviewers test out new products and share their feedback as a reference tool. However, community-generated reviews are growing in popularity as people begin to doubt the veracity of ‘expert’ recommendations (CNET). Amidst all these changes, fresh founder Stephan Svajian saw an opportunity.

“We are disrupting the way traditional companies launch physical products,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Changes in the manufacturing process make it easier to produce hardware, but it is risky for these companies to go to market without customer reviews. In order to cross this chasm, we need a much broader signal about the quality of the products.”

Fresh partners with hardware startups that are interested in putting their products in the hands of product reviewers. People interested in working as a reviewer sign up and receive a notification if they are invited to test out a product. Testers must be verified through their Facebook profiles and can move up in the line by digital referring their friends. Manufactures send their products to the people at the front of the line. They then take the products for a test drive and provide their feedback.

The most popular products featured on the site now include highly buzzed items like Pebble, Lytro, Leap, Lockitron, Fitbit Flex, LUMOback, and OUYA gaming console. Users can “be the first kid on the block” to access hot new gadgets and hardware startups get the benefit of direct user feedback and exposure. After just three months, the company already has 36 products on the platform and the financial backing of Yammer’s CEO and CPO, David Sacks and James Patterson.

There is no business model on the horizon. Rather, Svajian and cofounder Geroge Truong are committed to bringing as many “amazing products” on the platform to add ensure that the popularity of hardware startups isn’t just a passing fad, but rather an established and thriving corner of the tech world.

Video games dominated Kickstarter last year, with over $83 million pledged to games-related projects, according to the year-end report the company released early this month. And out of the 16 blockbuster campaigns — those that raised more than $1 million — seven of them were for new games.

That’s no small accomplishment for the industry, but it also shows that video games are ripe for crowdfunding efforts. A lot of factors contribute to success on Kickstarter. So what made these seven projects — Star Citizen, Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Planetary Annihilation, Homestuck Adventure, and Project Eternity — such breakaway hits? (The role-playing game Project Eternity earned the most with close to $4 million, and that’s not even counting campaigns for hardware like the Android-based Ouya, which brought in over $8 million.) We spoke to the proud developers and a professor at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to find out.

The right ‘ingredients’ for success

What makes a good Kickstarter? Professor Ethan Mollick, who coauthored the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, told GamesBeat in a phone interview that the most successful projects are run by people with established backgrounds, which leads to success in two key ways.

“It builds a social network of fans, which helps a lot,” he said. “And second, it invites credibility.”

Virtually all of the developers behind last year’s highest-earning Kickstarter games are already well known in the industry. Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun, returned for Shadowrun Returns — one of the reasons Harebrained Schemes studio founder Mitch Gitelman gave us for the campaign’s success.

And Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions found an audience for his campaign by way of his other acclaimed games, like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango. Double Fine Adventure raked in a generous $3.3 million when the asking price was only $400,000.

“I think the success of our project can be attributed to a perfect explosion of good timing, a rabid fan base, and the fact that adventure games are a genre that fans have wanted us to revisit for a long time,” Double Fine producer Greg Rice told GamesBeat.

Mollick explained that the best projects use preparatory material to demonstrate what the developers are going to do and how they’re going to accomplish it. The studios put together established teams, acquire outside endorsements, and know how to use social media effectively — all easier to do when people already know your name and your credentials. That gets you faster and more widespread press coverage, too.

Chris Roberts (the creator of the Wing Commander space-flight simulator series) and his team at Cloud Imperium Games took their task seriously, treating crowdfunding like a product launch and promoting the game even before it hit Kickstarter.

“For Star Citizen, I knew I had to raise a significant amount of money as a minimum — $2 million — a higher hurdle than any other crowdfunded game at the time,” he told GamesBeat. “Because of this, I decided that despite having a well-known ‘brand’ in space sims, I needed to go beyond nostalgia and reputation and show people what the game would look and play like.”

Roberts spent a year building a prototype and doing research so he could deliver on his pitch. Cloud Imperium even launched a teaser site a month before the campaign’s launch to spread news of the game virally.

“Over 30,000 people had signed up and were interacting on our forums before we even announced Star Citizen,” he said.

Kickstarters engage three core groups and follow predictable patterns

The best Kickstarters appeal to three populations of people, according to Mollick. They are patrons, who give money because they want a campaign to succeed; customers, who use Kickstarter as a preorder system and purchase low-end rewards packages; and investors, who want to be a part of what’s happening and tend to buy higher-end packages.

Psychologically, the interests of patrons and investors overlap — they want to feel like they’re a part of what’s happening.

“I think you see the most successful projects engage all three of those [groups] with different sets of packages,” said Mollick, although he wasn’t able to specify whether physical or digital rewards (or a combination of both) mattered more.

“I think what you see here is generally a lot of realism from these folks also,” he said, mentioning that over 75 percent of Kickstarter projects deliver late (85 percent for large projects). “Their delivery times are quite far out.”

Most Kickstarters tend to succeed by small margins and fail by large margins, according to an article that Mollick contributed to on Appsblogger.com. And campaign length and goal size matter, too — you have a better chance for success when operating within a 30-day time period and setting a realistic funding goal. Most of these seven projects fell in that category, lasting for about a month and far exceeding their minimum financial needs.

Video games are a good fit

Video game Kickstarters have two main advantages working in their favor, according to Mollick: The existing, broken funding model through traditional publishers, and the capability to handle preorders cheaply.

With a product like the Pebble watch, he said, the company might lose money on each copy itself. But for games like Double Fine Adventure, each copy sold doesn’t cost anything aside from a potential future sale, so developers can feel more comfortable moving some of that cost up to fund development.

Why else do video game Kickstarters do so well? Community plays a big role.

“Games invoke a lot of passion, just like music and other entertainment,” said Mollick. “So you want to help your favorite artist produce something you love, and especially something pure, and Kickstarter lets them do that.”

He also pointed out that these seven projects were almost all sequels of some sort — like Shadowrun Returns. They don’t all necessarily have the same name attached, but known developers are involved and the audiences for them already exist, so these successes aren’t surprising.

Key advice: Shape your campaign around the community

The developers behind last year’s biggest game projects shared a few of their mistakes and tips for those looking to launch new campaigns in 2013.

Rice stressed the importance of interacting and communicating with the people who will be playing your games.

“My advice to all future Kickstarter projects is to try and think like a fan,” he said. “Figure out what story you’re trying to tell with your project, why a fan should be excited about that, and what kind of things a fan would expect from you. After that, it’s all about being very clear and concise with messaging, having a direct and open line of communication, and coming up with a reward structure that is enticing but won’t break the bank.”

Adam Brennecke — one of the directors on Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity, which hit its target goal in a day — told us that the best advice is to be adaptive to how your campaign is progressing.

“Back a few projects and get a feel for how crowdfunding works,” he said. “Take a close look at projects that get funded and try to figure out why they get funded. Look at successful projects and read their updates. Kickstarter is a great place to test the waters with your idea. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back with a revised plan without any real risk to you or your backers.”

Mistakes happen: Here’s what you can learn going forward

“Your time is limited,” said Marc Scattergood, a producer on Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation project. Use it wisely.

“Unless you’re already famous, the most important thing is convince people how awesome your concept is,” he said. “Show the game or the product you’re envisioning, and show it quickly. Then talk about the team and all the extra things that will guarantee its success.

“It’s not done till you run out of time. Keep releasing updates, keep building momentum, and don’t let a single day go where you’re not talking to your community, developing new content and updates to release, and getting people excited.”

In a press world that’s increasingly burned out on Kickstarters, said Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment’s Wasteland 2, finding ways to gain support is more crucial than ever.

“You have to do work on the front end to create awareness and understand your audience before launching,” he said, adding that without the press, “it is very hard to [get funding] unless you have some kind of built-in audience.”

Fargo described “the only drama” he experienced during the campaign: “In my excitement, I used the word ‘social,’ which had negative connotations to Facebook and the new breed of game,” he said. That’s not a word you want to throw around with core gamers.

“I quickly found out that ‘social’ is a four-letter word with two extra letters and had to explain my use of the term,” he said. “The main point with that was that I stayed tuned in with the audience every moment of the campaign to make sure our message didn’t get confused.”

Developers must spend time analyzing the full scope of costs as well, said Mitch Gitelman, who informed us that Shadowrun Returns is now open for preorders.

“Make sure you understand all your costs when planning your campaign and creating your reward tiers,” he said. “In addition to the cost of any physical goods you’re using for rewards, don’t forget to include the cost of picking, packing, and shipping. Depending on the state you’re in, you may be responsible for taxes on the pledges you collect, and you’d better plan for it because when Uncle Sam holds out his hand, he expects to be paid.”

Shadowrun Returns reached its funding goal after 28 hours, which caused Gitelman and his team to get a little too excited. They released a quick follow-up video in response, mentioning the possible addition of multiplayer and cooperative modes.

“The level of excitement in the community went through the roof at the thought,” said Gitelman, “but we quickly realized that adding these additional modes was a bridge too far and would heavily distract from the single-player game we had envisioned.”

The solution? Harebrained Schemes posted a written update saying that, after a bit of thinking, it had decided those features were “beyond the scope of the project and would cause us to lose focus on the game you reacted to so positively (and the game we really want to make).”

“Backers — and potential backers — told us that this statement increased our credibility because it was transparent, direct communication and showed that we were professional game developers who knew how to focus their project,” said Gitelman.

‘Crowdfunding is a full-time job’

“People need to see something tangible — not just on launch but during the campaign,” said Roberts.

“Even with Star Citizen, where I prepared for a full year, I felt like I didn’t have enough content to share during the campaign,” he said. “If you keep your community engaged, checking in for updates and new cool stuff to see, they are more likely to tell you ways you can improve your campaign and connect with an even wider base.”

The start of the campaign was rough for Cloud Imperium. Roberts recalled how the servers for its dedicated community site, which also acted as a secondary crowdfunding platform, crashed for four days because too many people were trying to back the project.

“Today’s world has a very short attention span, and there was no doubt that we missed out capturing some backers due to the difficulties on our site,” he said. “We reengineered our site to be more robust and also added Kickstarter as an additional option for potential backers. Then we just put our heads down and worked doubly hard to provide updates and engage with the community.”

Because of the extra effort, Roberts feels that the team managed to make up for their losses by the end of the campaign.

“Maybe the biggest factor in our success was that we actively listened and tailored the campaign based on the feedback we got from our community,” he said. “Launching on Kickstarter, a lot of the additional tiers and add-ons that helped drive our fundraising total up came directly from suggestions made by our community. If your community feels like you are listening to them they back the project with incredible passion.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Chris Taylor has everything riding on his crowdfunding effort to raise money for his next game. On Jan. 14, Taylor kicked off a Kickstarter to raise $1.1 million for the real-time strategy/role-playing game Wildman. But just four days into the fundraising, he has had to lay off most of his team at studio Gas Powered Games.

The layoffs will help the company keep its cash reserves while it awaits its Kickstarter fate. In an emotional video update this evening, Taylor explained that he had to cut back on the team before the Kickstarter completes in 27 days or face the possibility that he would — if it fails — shut down his 15-year-old game development studio entirely and let the remaining employees go without severance pay.

Then he put the fate of Gas Powered Games and Wildman up to the community. He said that the community can decide through its comments and donations whether Taylor should continue with the Kickstarter or shut it down immediately.

Wildman has raised $176,000 from 3,577 fans so far. It has a long way to go to get to its goal, and donations have to pick up the pace. Taylor said he has gambled the future of Gas Powered Games many times in its history.

“But today is different. I really felt it was a crazy idea to gamble in this economy,” he said, pausing and fighting back tears. “To gamble with the people here, who are the most talented and loyal people. To play a card game with their livelihoods is not smart. So I made a very, very tough decision.”

“But I have another tough decision,” he said. “That’s why I am here on this video update. Now that the team has been laid off, should I continue the campaign to see if the numbers do improve and hire them back at the end of the campaign — if they still want to come back and if they haven’t found jobs? Or do I shut the campaign down, tonight or tomorrow, and call it done. So help me make a tough decision. Vote with your comments. We’ll tabulate them. Kill the campaign. Or keep it going. It’s up to you.”

So far, all of the comments are overwhelmingly positive, asking Taylor to keep it going. Taylor knew that the finances were coming down to the wire. He said a couple of weeks ago that he was cutting the staff from around 60 to 20 people. And tonight, he said in an email that the staff had been downsized even more to about 10 people, depending on who is sticking around with reduced wages.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The CST-01 is just .8 millimeters thin — an astounding .0314 inches — and weighs just 12 grams, less than half an ounce. And it does precisely nothing but tell time, sort of the opposite of the other famous watch to hit the big time on Kickstarter, the Pebble.

“Everyone has crowded around this smart watch market,” project cofounder Jerry O’Leary told me. “But there hasn’t been any innovation in the actual timepiece itself. We thought: What if instead of adding as much as we can, we took as much as as we could?”

So with cofounder Dave Vondle, the two IDEO designers built an intensely minimalist watch. It’s nothing more than a “time embedded in a band,” as their Kickstarter project page suggests.

Source: Central Standard Timing

The CST-01 sits on its charging station.

Where Pebble, which raised over $10 million on Kickstarter, went big on customizability and apps and APIs and features, Vondle and O’Leary wanted a wristwatch that was thin, flexible, robust, and stylish — and not much else. In fact, nothing else.

“We wanted to redesign a timepiece from the ground up,” O’Leary says. “So we went back and looked at what’s unique about E-Ink … and we fell in love with those qualities.”

The previous thinnest watch in the world, the pair told me, was a .98 millimeter watch by Concord, created in the 1970s. Called Delirium, it was fully mechanical, not electronic, and so delicate that it could not be worn: The case would bend if you strapped it to your wrist. It was an “engineering marvel,” Vondle says, but it also cost about $15,000. And, of course, you could never wear it.

In contrast, the CST-01 is made of durable stainless steel, with its tiny components shoehorned into a tiny .5 millimeter “pocket” etched into the band. It’s electronic, powered by a micro-energy cell that can be recharged 10,000 times and lasts over 15 years. It has no buttons or knobs of any kind (all time-setting is done on the charging station). And it costs only $99, if you get in on the Kickstarter campaign.

Which happened almost by accident, according to the project leaders.

“We kinda backed into the Kickstarter campaign,” O’Leary says. “We were invited to CES by E-Ink, so we thought we had to time it and actually launch something in conjunction with the show. Essentially, we used it as a deadline.”

Source: Central Standard Timing

Also available in black …

The initial goal was $200,000 in funding, the “bare minimum,” according to Vondle. At that amount, the pair would have been able to built the watch, but they would have had spare components littering their homes and workshops afterward due to minimum order quantities for some of the components. As a result of going over $500,000, the project is starting to hit its sweet spot, and the projected quantities are now actually closer to what Vondle and O’Leary wanted to produce.

The watch will be assembled in the U.S., O’Leary told me, and some of the components will be produced locally as well.

“Right now, we’re talking to several US-based manufacturers, and signing non-disclosure agreements, so we can start doing some assembly,” Vondle said. “The majority of the product will be manufactured here and assembled here.”

The pair won’t disclose how high they think the Kickstart funding will eventually grow (“we’re superstitious about that stuff”) but they did say that they are considering other product options, such as sizes.

Whatever amount the campaign raises, backers can expect to get their world’s-thinnest watches in September of this year.

Image credits: Central Standard Timing

The crowdsourced funding platform remained true to its artistic roots. Despite many well-known gadget Kickstarter campaigns like the Ouya gaming console, which raised $8.6 million, the biggest categories included games at $83 million raised, followed by film and video, design, then music, with technology coming in fifth place with $29 million.

1. Games: $83.1 million
2. Film & video: $57.9 million
3. Design: $50.1 million
4. Music: $35 million
5. Technology: $29 million
6. Publishing: $15.3 million
7. Food: $11.1 million
8. Art: $10.5 million
9. Comics: $9.2 million
10. Theater: $7.1 million
11. Fashion: $6.3 million

Almost 600,000 people backed two or more projects, with 50,047 backing 1o or more, and a very dedicated 452 people backing an incredible 100 or more projects: essentially one every three days.

The category with the most funded projects was music, with 5,067 projects funded, but games took in the most cash: $83 million. An astonishing 17 projects took in over $1 million each.

Highlighted projects include:

• Double Fine Adventure (a game that collected $3.3 million)
• Balloon Mapping Kits (DIY mapping efforts that Google included in Maps)
• MaKey MaKey (an invention kit that received over half a million in pledges)
• Safecast X Kickstarter Geiger Counter (an open-source Geiger counter)
• The Edge and Back (6th graders who raised $5,100 to send a camera to space and bring it back)
• 3G Space Suit (a civilian’s space suit)
• Pizza Brain (the world’s first pizza museum)
• 1,000 Student Projects in Space (1,000 student experiments in ping-pong balls, sent to space)
• Baghdad Community Hackerspace (the name says it all)
• OpenROV (an open-source underwater robot)

18,109 projects funded? I think we can safely say that’s 18,109 chunks of awesome.

Image credit: Crowdsourcing

Update: The open beta for Akaneiro: Demon Hunters is underway from now until Jan. 16. Interested participants can click the “Open Beta” button on the official website to sign up. It tests advanced character training, weapon improvements, and the in-progress Shivering Pines, which is home to a tribe of frost-magic-casting imps.

The developer also confirmed two new locations, “Ghostclaw Caverns” and “The Temple Road,” and added a Linux version as a stretch goal. The Kickstarter has now passed the $50,000 mark.

Original Story: You’ve probably heard of game designer American McGee — the creator of the mature-themed series Alice (as in Wonderland). But you might not know about his Shanghai-based studio Spicy Horse and its small collection of online games for mobile and social platforms like Facebook.

Its latest project is Akaneiro: Demon Hunters for PC and Mac. If you’re heard of this before, that’s because it’s nothing new — the free-to-play action-role-playing game has been in development since mid-2011 and entered closed beta in October. As of last Friday, Spicy Horse is bringing it to the popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter with a $200,000 funding goal. But why is American McGee’s studio asking for help now?

“It wasn’t always the plan [to do a Kickstarter],” McGee, the chief executive officer of Spicy Horse, told GamesBeat. “A lot of the inspiration has come from our fans. We get messages pretty constantly telling us to push our new or existing products to specific platforms. It wasn’t an easy decision because it’s difficult to position the idea of ‘starting’ a nearly finished game. Nearing the end of development, we realized there were — as there always are — many cool things we’d still like to include but don’t have time or resources for. So the Kickstarter idea came to life.”

The big additions for the Kickstarter campaign are Android and iOS tablet versions, co-op multiplayer, an equipment-crafting system, and improved community support. Spicy Horse also has a number of smaller features and stretch goals.

But success or failure on Kickstarter doesn’t mean the end of Akaneiro. “If the campaign doesn’t reach its goal, the game will survive — and those features might someday see the light of day,” said McGee. “Funding just means we can focus on new features prioritized by backer demand and bring those things to life much faster.”

McGee originally conceived the idea for Akaneiro after reading The Lost Wolves of Japan, a historical account of the hunting of wolves to extinction in Northern Japan. That laid the groundwork for Akaneiro’s landscape and conflict — “classic man vs. nature vs. pissed off demon/spirits,” says McGee — but his studio lacked the resources to continue development. It wasn’t until Spicy Horse pivoted toward online and mobile games and received backing from investors in 2011 that it could pursue the game in full. The studio then handed over design and production responsibilities to Ben Kerslake, who drove creative direction on Alice: Madness Returns, and the CEO says that Kerslake and his team brought “a lot more depth and imagination to the game.”

That’s a level of depth that Spicy Horse is promising will make Akaneiro: Demon Hunters an ARPG “that doesn’t ever end,” according to the Kickstarter. But games like Blizzard’s Diablo III have shown that creating a sustainable endgame isn’t easy. Runic Games approached the issue in a different way in Torchlight II, adding postgame randomized dungeons in the Mapworks area.

“It’s all about being able to constantly deliver more and more content [through] expansions,” said McGee. “Compared to Diablo III, I guess the biggest difference would be that we can produce our expansion packs really fast — which means they are economically viable even if the audience isn’t huge and the revenue isn’t massive. Torchlight has been and remains one of our biggest inspirations.”

The good news for backers is that Akaneiro is already a finished product, and McGee says it has plenty of room for more content.

“With the features we’ll add if the Kickstarter hits its goal, the game can become one of the deeper, more interesting examples of the genre,” he said.

Some backers have taken well to Spicy Horse’s unusual try-before-you-buy Kickstarter approach since Akaneiro is entering open beta this week. It uses the in-game currency Karma, which players can purchase or accrue naturally through play. They can exchange it like gold for items, spirit-pet summons, area unlocks, new abilities and upgrades, and more. The developer says that most of these purchases “will be for cosmetic reasons.” It added that whatever players buy during the open beta will convert back to Karma at launch; anything purchased after that point belongs to them.

Backer incentives include beta access, exclusive in-game items, and additional digital and physical rewards for those willing to pump even more money into the game than they might during play. The campaign has reached nearly 25 percent of its goal so far, with 25 days remaining.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There’s no such thing as bad press. It’s a cliché, and — even worse than that — it’s not even true.

If you want evidence that the public spotlight is a bad thing on occasion, you should acquaint yourself with the story of Ocean Marketing. As our article points out, an angry customer asked someone mildly famous to publicize a few emails he exchanged with the owner of Ocean Marketing, and it destroyed the company. Or how about this advertisement Sony ran for the PlayStation Portable, where a white woman is holding a black woman by the throat with the caption, “White is coming”?

Yeah, that was ill-conceived.

Now that it’s the end of the year, we are gonna take a few minutes to reflect on the terrible examples of game-related advertising, marketing, and public relations in 2012.

Sony says the PlayStation Vita is like a woman with two extra breasts on her back

Oh, Sony, you poor darling. You don’t know what is edgy, what is offensive, and what is just damned stupid.

Let’s recap: Sony — or its marketing partners — ran an ad in a French magazine that had a picture of a woman from the neck down with two large breasts on her chest and two more on her back. The caption on the ad, in French, reads, “Twice the touch screens, twice the sensation.” The idea is that since the PS Vita has a touch screen on the front and the back, it’s as much fun as a deformed lady with growths on her shoulder blades.

Where to begin?

Let’s ignore that this offensively compares a woman’s body to a piece of consumer electronics. Let’s ignore the juvenile stance on the touching of boobies. Let’s ignore that touch screens actually aren’t nearly as fun as this comparison suggests. But I can’t ignore that this advert promotes the idea that a woman’s back is somehow boring because it lacks bosoms. I’ve been to France. The women in that country have just as nice backs as anywhere else. I would suggest that if you feel like a woman’s back is useless because it doesn’t have breasts, then you have a bigger problem than deciding whether or not to buy a new gaming device.

Most things related to promoting Hitman: Absolution

Edgy gone wrong describes everything about Hitman.

Publisher Square Enix started off the marketing campaign for its assassination title with a trailer showing the titular hitman punching a cadre of “naughty nuns” in the face. A loud chorus of confused fans wondered why the publisher would glorify sexualized violence. When I watch the video, the parts of my brain that react to “sexy nuns” and the parts that react to bloody noses don’t intermingle in the slightest, but I also wouldn’t use the punching of women in lingerie as a main selling point for a game.

Then, earlier this month, Square Enix unveiled a new marketing website for Hitman: Absolution that invited fans to put make-believe hits out on their friends on Facebook. The fake hitman would ask for a distinguishing feature of the “target” and would present the user with a drop-down menu that included things like “her hairy legs,” “her small tits,” and “his tiny penis.”

Since you could only send the messages to your confirmed friends on Facebook, this might not offend everybody. But the marketing team was obviously going for shock value, and it did shock people. Square Enix removed the website hours after introducing it.

“Have you heard about my Kickstarter?”

A big part of marketing involves PR people pitching products to the press. They try to get the media to cover the product in an attempt to create excitement. This means we get a lot of emails about boring stuff that no one wants to read about — and nothing epitomizes that kind of email like the “Hey, have you heard about our Kickstarter?” press release.

I am all for Kickstarter. I think it’s a viable alternative to the established publisher system, but it’s not good for Kickstarter when my main interaction with it is to groan while I archive an email that pretends like a developer asking for money is news.

Now, I wouldn’t include this on a list of terrible marketing ideas if the problem only affected my inbox. Internet forums like Reddit and NeoGAF have established rules against “Kickstarter reminder posts.” That’s because developers bombard everywhere they can think of when they have a campaign. It’s understandable to a degree. They’re trying to fund their work, but annoying people isn’t going to help.

The problem is that when Kickstarter first hit the big time, the concept itself was news. That’s not true anymore. Now, if developers want to grab attention for their crowd-funding campaigns, they need a deeper hook than the fact that they’re asking for money.

The War Z debacle

As much effort as publishers and developers put into marketing their games before they release them, it doesn’t matter if something goes wrong when the game launches.

Or in the case of developer Hammerpoint Interactive’s The War Z, if everything goes wrong when the game launches.

GamesBeat extensively covered this catastrophe, but let’s recap the major events:

When the studio released the open-world zombie game on Valve’s Steam digital-distribution service, its store page noted a handful of features that simply weren’t in the game. When irate players began to demand refunds, Hammerpoint said it couldn’t do anything to help them.

This only enraged gamers further. Those customers raised hell until Valve could only respond by removing the game from its store and granting refunds to anyone who wanted them.

Now, the developer is deep in a public-relations hole that will be nearly impossible to climb out of when it’s time to rerelease the game.

Most in-game ads on mobile

Free is dope.

I love not paying for games on my phone. It means I can try out a bunch of different titles without wasting my very limited funds, but I also understand that developers need to make money.

The most common monetization solution for mobile studios is to implement in-game advertising. Many developers have generated a great deal of revenue using these ads, so it works — but it’s usually done terribly from the player’s perspective.

Let’s take the very last game that I played on my phone before I got out of bed this morning: Family Feud.

I didn’t pay for the adaptation of the long-running television game show. In between each full play session, the game halts and throws up an empty screen while it loads an ad. When the ad finally appears, it is invariably oriented incorrectly. If I have the phone in landscape mode, the ad loads vertically, and vice versa. These commercials are also ugly as Web 1.0. The advertising people don’t put a lot of effort into designing ad spots for mobile devices. Instead, they just repurpose banners built for websites and slap those into places they don’t really belong.

You end up with an ugly and confusing mess that interrupts gameplay, and then, you’re lucky if the “skip ad” button works the first 20 times that you tap it.

No one has really figured out how to do in-games ad well. Some of the Angry Birds titles place a small ad unit over a portion of the screen during gameplay, which naturally leads to users inadvertently clicking the ad. That’s good for the developer, but it’s annoying for the gamer and costly to the advertiser.

Maybe this issue doesn’t have a neat solution, but it would be nice to see developers and advertisers working together a bit harder to improve the user experience.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Four days ago, the popular Kickstarter project to provide portable power for almost any mobile device — Apple, Android, or other — was canceled when Apple refused to allow any accessories to incorporate both its old 30-pin connector and its new Lightning connector.

But the Christmas spirit is alive and well in Cupertino. Three days ago, Apple reversed that decision — and project leader Jamie Siminoff told VentureBeat that the project was likely back on.

Now that’s official, as Siminoff told project backers at Kickstarter:

As you know on Thursday, we sent you an update that because of Apple’s rules around Lightning we would be canceling POP. The story got A LOT of news and reactions, way more than we could have ever imagined. In fact it became such big news that 24 hours after we posted Apple changed their guidelines for Lightning.

It was an incredible turn of events for us. We never could have imagined that we would be able to change Apple’s rules.

Based on Apple’s change we can make POP the way we had promised and the project is back on. We will not be processing refunds and are going full speed ahead to produce and deliver the product to you ASAP.

We hope to do another update in the next 7-10 days to give you a new estimated delivery date.

Happy Holidays and thank you to everyone that has stood by us and helped us through this process. We are thrilled to finally be able to bring this great product to you.

Jamie

Apple had told VentureBeat that technical reasons prevented combining 30-pin and Lightning connectors on the same device, which Siminoff violently disagreed with. In any case, the project is back on, and anyone who didn’t kick in at the Kickstarter stage can still preorder a unit at POPportablepower.com.

Merry Christmas!

It’s the holiday season! But news never rests.

We’ve got Apple bracing for the holiday download rush, two companies shutting down, and big data machines that may one day think like brain. And if you’re expecting an iPhone in your stocking, you should read our story on open-source Instagram alternatives for your to download on one of the the biggest download days of the year — Christmas!

Instagram freaked users out this week when it changed its terms of service this week. How did you not already know that?

Need more distractions from your (very sweet, we’re sure) family? Check out the Editor’s Pick page.

Now, let’s get on to the stories you need to read:

Open-source alternatives to Instagram

After Instagram, the photo sharing app recently purchased by Facebook, made some concerning changes to its terms of service, VentureBeat reporter Jolie O’Dell checked out some alternatives. Open-source alternatives. Thankfully, Instagram wound up rolling back some of its privacy changes, but these app are still worth checking out.

U.S. visa system helps stifle early stage startup Taploid

Here’s the sad tale of how one startup went down. Taploid, a DEMO company that hoped to be the tabloid of the social world, is shut down after running out of money, hitting walls with U.S. immigration, and failing to get acquired. In the aftermath, the founders have some advice for entrepreneurs.

Apple kills a Kickstarter project: Portable power project POP refunding $139,170 to backers

Edison Junior, the technology and design lab behind the POP portable power station, is returning the full $139,170 in funding it received from Kickstarter backers to develop the device. Unfortunately, Apple has refused to give the project permission to license the Lightning charger in a device that includes multiple charging options. Check out Apple’s reaction here.

Palm founders are back with Grok, a neuroscience-inspired big data engine

Imagine a world where every machine — from the smart meter to the cell phone — is designed to mimic the human brain by getting smarter over time. A new “big-data” product called Grok promises to make those brainy machines a reality. It’s the first product from Numenta, which Palm cofounders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky started in 2005.

Apple freezes the App Store in advance of the holiday app-downloading bonanza

Console video games see their peak sales from Black Friday through Christmas. But for mobile game and app buyers, the big season for app downloads begins tomorrow. Apple told developers today that its traditional holiday shutdown starts tomorrow, with a big impact on who comes out =on top for the holidays.

Top Santa image, Man with camera image, Apps image via Shutterstock; Taploid image via Meghan Kelly; Numenta image via Numenta; POP project image via POP

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The full story may not be quite as straightforward.

Update December 24: the project is back on

I had contacted Apple for comment, but Apple was only able to respond today to offer its side of the story. A few minutes ago, Apple released the following statement:

Our technical specifications provide clear guidelines for developing accessories, and they are available to MFi licensees for free. We support accessories that integrate USB and Lightning connectors, but there were technical issues that prevented accessories from integrating 30-pin and Lightning connectors, so our guidelines did not allow this. We have been working to resolve this and have updated our guidelines to allow accessories to integrate both 30-pin and Lightning connectors to support charging.

From Apple’s perspective, it had released the Lightning spec as soon as the new connector was announced. Everything that was possible and not possible was clearly in the open in a published and freely available spec, for licensees in its hardware developer/integrator program. That happened well back on Sept. 12.

More importantly, Apple is saying that it is simply due to technical reasons — not political, economic, or strategic — that the old 30-pin connectors and the new Lightning connector could not be combined. That’s a somewhat different story than I heard from Edison Junior CEO Jamie Siminoff, who said that the group worked with Apple for months on this with inconsistent and confusing answers.

“We didn’t get a yes or a no up front,” Siminoff told me. “But as we kept going back and forth it was clear that it was getting harder.”

That’s now a he-said-she-said situation, but perhaps more importantly, in this statement Apple is announcing that it has resolved the technical challenge and has found a way to use both 30-pin and Lightning connectors on the same accessories … which means that the POP power station project could actually now continue, and build the universal charging device that Edison Junior wanted to make in the first place.

So I chatted with Siminoff today about exactly that. First, I asked him for a comment on the spec being freely available since September.

“Bullshit,” Siminoff answered. “Sure, they’ve had the spec out for a while, but there’s no way it talks about what we’re doing.”

Siminoff then confirmed with me that he and his team had multiple conversations with Apple and heard multiple stories, including that it was possibly a problem, probably OK, and that Apple was going to tighten the spec to make what Edison Junior was trying to do impossible.

Of course, it turns out Apple did the opposite: opening the spec up.

Which begs the question: Was it really a technical challenge in the first place? Just changing the spec doesn’t, after all, magically change millions of shipped devices. And no iOS system update has been issued in the past weeks with a release note specifying new compatibilities. So Siminoff doesn’t buy the “technical issues” argument at all.

“It’s pretty simple that you could build to separate power sources on the same device,” he told me this afternoon. “I don’t see how that’s a technical issue.”

Either way, however, Siminoff is happy. ”I’m thrilled that this happened,” he told me. “I think that it makes sense for the customer.” So does this mean the POP portable power station project is back on?

“Probably. Now I need to confirm between their PR and the actual MFi group that this is possible. If this is the case, for sure … if we can make the product that we promised, it’s back on,” he said. “If Apple lets us do this, we’ll make that product and we’ll make it fast.”

Whether it will be on Kickstarter or not is another question. But there’s one other piece of good news that Siminoff shared:

“We have not actually processed the refund yet … luckily!”

photo credit: unten44 via photopin cc

POP was billed as “the intersection between charging and design” and featured connectors to charge iPads, iPhones, and yes … Android devices. Its four retractable cord reels would have powered anything using micro-USB charging connectors.

That’s a problem with Apple. In fact, even combining Apple’s new Lighting connector with the old 30-pin connector in a charging device was verboten; Apple would not approve, forcing the team to abandon the project.

“We are pissed,” Edison Junior CEO Jamie Siminoff told me on the phone today. “I think they are being a bunch of assholes, and I think they’re hurting their customers.”

Apple finally speaks — here’s their side of the story

Another update (December 24) — the POP project is back on

The team will provide full refunds, meaning that it will absorb credit card fees and Kickstarter fees, totalling eight percent of all the funds collected — over $11,000. Edison Junior is asking Kickstarter for the five percent Kickstarter fee back, however, which would limit the loss. Whatever Kickstarter does, however, an Edison Junior representative informed me that all backers will receive 100 percent of their money back.

“We would have loved to have made the product,” Siminoff told me. “At the same time I feel like we’re making the correct decision … I’m not willing to compromise on the product.”

The dispute has been ongoing since September, when Apple announced the Lightning connector.

“We didn’t get a yes or a no up front,” Siminoff said. “But as we kept going back and forth it was clear that it was getting harder. Then, when we saw that they weren’t even going to allow a Lightning connector and a 30-pin connector together, we knew it was over.”

He also said that, while Apple is a private company and can do whatever it wishes, it should watch out. “When you do things that are bad for the customer … I think it will be bad for them.”

Siminoff issued this letter to all project backers:

I’ll never forget the moment when our campaign passed the $50,000 goal and our dream of powering dying batteries became tangible. Our promise was simple: provide a portable charger that was capable of charging ALL of your devices including the anticipated iPhone 5, which at the time, had yet to be released.

When Apple officially announced the move to Lightning we determined the best course of action was to incorporate two Lightning chargers, and two 30-pins (along with the four micro-USB’s). After applying to Apple (which is now required for Lightning), we learned that they are no longer willing to approve a product that uses the Lightning charger alongside any other charger (including their own 30-pin — seriously). Just like that, POP could no longer fulfill its true promise.

As we struggled with Apple we realized that Kickstarter did not have a mechanism for refunding everyone their money. Since we are not willing to compromise and build a crappy product, refunding the money is the only acceptable thing to do.

This sparked the idea that crowdfunding of physical products needed a place that was built around the intricacies they present, so a few weeks ago we launched our own crowdfunding site, Christie Street. Built from the ground up around product, Christie Street is designed to handle needs that can arise from products — such as refunds — in order to prevent compromised products from being delivered.

In order to process your refunds efficiently we are going to set you all up with Christie Street accounts, and there, you will be able to process your refunds. Since payment processing has little to no room for error, we still have some final testing to do before we can send out the instructions, so the plan is set for mid-January. Conversely, had we manually sent out the refunds to all 1,000 backers the process would probably have gone longer.

Providing full refunds means we will have to absorb a hit for both credit card (3%) and Kickstarter fees (5%) totaling over $11,000. Today we asked Kickstarter for the 5% fee they collected based on the circumstances, however regardless of their decision YOU WILL RECEIVE 100% OF YOUR MONEY BACK.

We don’t believe in selling a substandard, compromised product that only satisfies the needs of a few backers, as that was not our promise. So we can’t thank you enough for your incredible support and awesome feedback – we hope to collaborate again with you soon. If you have any issues please email me directly.

All the best,
Jamie

P.S. If you know anyone at Apple please send them coal for their stockings, on behalf of us

I’ve asked both Apple and Kickstarter for a statement or comment on the matter. I’ll update this post as I hear more.

This is not necessarily the end of the Edison Junior’s portable power project. Siminoff told me that the team will be re-focusing on a device that supports Android phones, tablets, and Apple products, if backers wish to use a Lightning-to-USB connector, or an older 30-pin connector. They’ll only build that device, however, if the crowdfunding community wants it.

Which is why refunding everyone’s money — including credit card and Kickstarter fees — was the right thing to do to retain the community’s trust.

Here’s the original POP video:

If you’ve ever had a gadget break less than a year after you bought it, congratulations — you’ve experienced one of the worst things about modern electronics.

For years, companies have created products designed to conk out — it’s called “planned obsolescence”– and it’s become a vital way to keep customers coming back. It’s how your grandparents have been using the same television since the 80s even as your Galaxy S II is already on its last legs.

Swedish design firm People People, however, wants to bring back those days of timeless electronics. Its newly-Kickstarted Transparent Speaker is built from the ground up to be not only modular, but completely user repairable — meaning that owners won’t have to replace the whole thing if a single component breaks.

“Our ambition is to make it a future classic. We don’t want to make something that’s thrown away when it becomes outdated in a few years,” People People co-founder Per Brickstad told me.

While the idea of a  repairable, modular speaker has obviously attracted the attention of hackers and tinkerers, it’s also interested pop superstar will.i.am, who featured the speaker in a recent video right before blowing it up. That’s the kind of promotion you oftentimes can’t even pay for.

Here’s the thing, though: People People has no idea how its speaker got in the video. “It’s strange, and it’s funny, and it’s nice, but we had nothing to do with it,” Brickstad said.

People People may never find out which of the Transparent Speaker’s features caught will.i.am’s eye, but if he’s like most people, chances are he’s a big fan of its design. The Transparent Speaker is, after all, a simple yet highly attractive device. “People just see it and love it,” Brickstad said.

But it also sounds fantastic, a reality that became clear when Brickstad used it to blast a particularly bass-heavy version of R. Kelly’s “Ignition.”

So lets recap: Not only does the Transparent Speaker have a beautiful design and sound great, it’s also built to last more or less forever. And in consumer electronics, it’s rare to find a value proposition quite like that.

Kickstarting a gadget is one thing, but what happens when you actively court your backers to help you design what you’re selling them?

That’s what Satarii, the team behind Swivl, is attempting with the second revision of its personal cameraman. Built for motion video capture, the device can rotate 360-degrees, giving users a powerful tool for use in a variety of recording applications, including teleconferencing and lecture recording.

But as unique as the original Swivl is, owners have had quite a few suggestions on how to improve it. Which is why Satarii is looking to tap into Kickstarter once again  — this time with a heavy focus on backer feedback.

“We find that the people who put up the dollars tend to be the ones with the best feedback,” Satarii co-founder Vlad Tetelbaum told me.

This feedback, Tetelbaum says, was essential to the inclusion of support for both the iPad and DSLR cameras, which Swivl owners practically begged Satarii for.

But what’s really interesting about the new Swivl is that Satarii isn’t quite done designing it yet. “The final feature set isn’t quite defined,” Satarii co-founder Brian Lamb said.

And this is where the Swivl community steps in once again. Rather than create a device that doesn’t consider what features buyers want the most, Satarii plans to ask them directly. What exactly do you want to see in the Swivl? A better battery? A smaller footprint? By speaking directly to customers, Satarii aims to create the perfect device. It’s crowd funding meets crowd design.

Sounds simple in theory, but there are a few concerns. For one, Swivl is a hugely complicated device. “We’re not a watchband. There are over 400 components here,” Lamb said.

For Satarii, this means lots and lots of product testing, which is why the team is launching Swivl’s Kickstarter over six months before it plans to deliver the final product. Welcome to the less sexy side of crowdsourcing: Sometimes it just takes a long time to get a device out the door.

Timeline concerns aside, what Satarii is attempting here is a complete upheaval of the traditional design process. And I’m eager to see how the project goes for that reason alone.

Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat