Kickstarter is a great crowdfunding platform that has raised more than $1.3 billion for new ideas. Only 4 out of every 10 campaigns succeeds, however, and that’s partly because there just isn’t enough awareness of the idea.
Here are 5 hot technology Kickstarter campaigns that bring innovation to new heights.
#1. SAM
One of the biggest obstacles to coding, programming, or building your own computer is engineering knowledge. It’s not always easy to know what fan goes here or what the GPU might even look like. With SAM, you can do it all. You can play games, learn engineering, or even create architectural models. Each component has a specific function and when you combine them together, you make something amazing with your own two hands. It’s easy enough for beginners to get started, but provides enough variation and fun that experts will enjoy creating something new too.
#2. AMPY
Imagine how often your iPhone would stay charged if you could have a power source that was based on your motions? You’d never run out of energy! That’s the concept behind AMPY. You wear the device and it captures the energy of your motion and turns it into a power source. You can then use the product to power any USB compatible device. Now there’s no way that I’m going to walk 10,000 steps [which is about 5 miles] to get 3 hours of extra power for my cell phone, but a 30 minute run or an hour on an exercise bike? It’s more than just clean energy. It’s energy that’s created through fitness and weight loss.
#3. Prizm
What if your speakers could automatically decide the best song to play for you at any given moment? That’s the goal of Prizm is to learn the music that you love and then predict what you’re going to want to hear. The music streams directly from the Cloud, so there isn’t a cellular or PC connection necessary. Press a button and the music starts from Spotify, SoundCloud, or Deezer. Power it up with any standard micro-USB connection and then let it detect how many people are in the room. How does it know who is in the room? It reads Bluetooth connections, Wi-Fi signals, or other signals from wearable tech and associates it with your profile. Then you get the perfect mood music!
#4. Darma
So maybe at first glance all that Darma seems to be is a butt sensor in the spirit of the Wii fitness games. In reality, what it is doing is measuring your posture. When you’re sitting at your computer all day, researching projects that are posted on Kickstarter, you can start feeling a lot of neck pain when you aren’t sitting properly. That pain then spreads to your hips, your knees, and can even cause a massive headache if you’re not careful. Darma measures your posture, gauges your sitting habits, and lets you know when that slouch is trying to enhance itself. It will also remind you when it’s time to get up and do something besides look at Kickstarter all day.
#5. Durio Sound
We’ve discussed the benefits of having a slice of Raspberry Pi in the past. Durio Sound helps take that experience to a new level with a fully compatible 24 bit, 192 kHz quality audio conversion. It’s super simple to install it. You just stack it on top of your Raspberry Pi and you’re ready for great sounds that have minimal distortions. Best of all, the design is open source so you can create your own version if you want and the diagrams are included on the campaign page.
Great things are happening on Kickstarter. These 5 tech campaigns are just a small sampling of the innovation that is in today’s market. Support them if you wish, keep track of their progress, and you might just see even more amazing concepts in the future.
