10 Wacky Kickstarter Projects That Succeeded
Crowdsourcing site Kickstarter famously made Pebble and Oculus Rift possible -- but check out Kickstarter's weirder side.
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Two years ago, a company developing a smartwatch took to crowdfunding website Kickstarter to raise money for its project. Within two hours, the company surpassed its $100,000 goal and, by the end of the campaign, had raised a whopping $10.2 million from nearly 70,000 people.
"You, our backers, have transformed our little project into a worldwide phenomenon," Pebble's team wrote. Today, Pebble has sold more than 400,000 watches, which retail between $99 and $199.
Pebble isn't the only tech success story to come from Kickstarter, which launched in 2009. It's also where virtual reality company Oculus Rift got its start, raising more than $2.4 million on a goal of $250,000. Earlier this year, Facebook acquired the company for $2 billion.
For the past five years, Kickstarter has served as a space for people to test their ideas on everything from games, art, and design projects to films, gadgets, and technology inventions.
The way it works is simple: Page creators set a funding goal and a deadline to meet it, plus incentives to backers, such as a copy of the finished work. If a Kickstarter campaign doesn't meet the goal, they don't receive any of the funds. Kickstarter says this model is effective -- 44% of projects have reached their funding goals.
But among the wildly popular projects like Pebble and Oculus Rift are even more wacky and weird ideas that have made it big on Kickstarter. Take this summer's breakout hit, for example: a campaign to raise money for potato salad.
Zack Brown of Columbus, Ohio, famously launched a Kickstarter campaign in August to raise $10 to fund a batch of his favorite side dish. "I really wanted to make potato salad, but am not at a point in my life where I could assume that level of risk," he jokingly told ABC News.
Brown's potato salad pitch went viral: Nearly 7,000 people pledged a total of $55,000 to make his culinary quest a reality. Last month, Brown made good on his campaign and threw PotatoStock 2014, a party paying homage to the spud that promised "peace, love, and potato salad."
Potato salad isn't the only strange campaign to meet its funding. Tech projects, including a steam gauge that displays Internet usage, a mock mission to Mars, and wearable devices that pantomime an imaginary marching band, have also raised the money needed to make their projects a reality.
Here's a look at some of the strangest tech projects to hit Kickstarter that met -- and often exceeded -- their funding goals.
Sixty million years ago, in a climate 6 to 8 degrees warmer than today, roamed a 50-foot snake named Titanoboa. The warm climate it lived in, which sits at the upper end of climate change projections, allowed the snake to grow to monstrous proportions, scientists say.
In 2011, 82 people pledged more than $10,000 on Kickstarter for Vancouver's EatART Lab to construct a "hydraulically actuated and semi-automatically controlled," life-sized replica of the snake, made of aluminum and powered by lithium polymer batteries. The purpose: to provoke discussions on climate control.
With the project fully funded, Titanoboa's team debuted its creation at Burning Man, with subsequent appearances at Google I/O and CES. Today, Titanoboa sits at 37 feet long, weighs 1 ton, and features five different modes of motion, 24 high-strength aluminum vertebrae, peak power of 25 hp, 40 hydraulic cylinders, and animated eyes and jaws, according to its website.
It all started with a tweet to former Detroit Mayor David Bing: "Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky's butt. He's a GREAT ambassador for Detroit," the tweet read. Shortly after, Mayor Bing replied that there were no plans to erect a statue after the 1987 movie, but "thank you for the suggestion."
The idea went viral, and soon came a Facebook group dedicated to the effort, along with a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $67,000 from 2,700 backers.
Detroit's Robocop statue hasn't yet come to fruition, but according to its most-recent update, the statue is expected to be completed later this year.
Earlier this summer, Ed Konowal, a network operations supervisor for the Lee County School District in Fort Myers, Fla., launched a Kickstarter campaign to reconfigure a brass pressure gauge from the early 20th century to show Internet usage.
"It's a physical representation of both old-world technology combined with our current virtual lifestyles," he wrote in the description. Thirty-six backers pledged nearly double his goal of $1,500.
Konowal's Internet SteamGauge uses a program he wrote, which runs on a Raspberry Pi computer, to poll an Internet router every 10 seconds. This data is sent to an Arduino microcontroller, which is connected to a servo that moves the needle on the gauge, he says.
The SteamGauge debuted in August at Vancouver's Siggraph Art Gallery.
Artist Ian Etter's work had been influenced by space for a few years prior to turning to Kickstarter to fulfill a unique project idea: He planned to use his experience during a two-week stint aboard the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah to influence his own simulation of life on Mars, then turn it into an art exhibit at CSPS, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, contemporary art museum. His goal to raise $1,750 was met, thanks to 50 backers.
"People really seemed to want to support me and this slightly absurd project," Etter told InformationWeek. "I think that the MDRS experience and MMMM tap into our desire to explore this new frontier. I was playing the classic role of explorer and bringing back what I learned in the form of an exhibition."
Etter worked as a journalist at MDRS and documented the experience, then adapted some of what he learned to conduct his own simulation in the Loess Hills of Iowa, he said. Funds he raised on Kickstarter went toward building a portable space station and space suit.
During the simulation, Etter conducted geological studies and collected data on the life forms in the area. His exhibit at two nonprofit spaces in Iowa included documentation from the simulation, the station, suit, and "paintings, drawings, and prints that tell the story of my experience on Mars as a 19th century cosmonaut."
Etter's work was later awarded a Project Grant from the Iowa Arts Council and a VAN residency through the National Performance Network. You can read more about his project on his website.
Phillip Weicker, a Los Angeles-based technical consultant, said his idea to build the world's fastest hot tub started in 1996 with an abandoned car, a keg of beer, and a quote from Ernest Hemingway: "Always do sober what you say you'd do drunk, that's the only way you'll learn."
Eighteen years later and with more than $11,000 raised on Kickstarter, Carpool DeVille was born -- a fully functional 1969 Cadillac with a hot tub built into it.
Transforming the rusted-out Cadillac into a moving hot tub was not easy. The design called for installing steel reinforcements to support thousands of pounds of water, designing a custom-fit fiberglass tub insert, building an air-ride suspension system, and "about a zillion pieces of chrome," he said on his Kickstarter page.
Weicker and his team planned to debut Carpool DeVille and race it at Michigan's Bonneville Salt Flats at Speed Week 2014. Due to rain, however, the event was cancelled. Carpool DeVille has since been on tour at various locations across the country, including Kickstarter's Film Fest 2014.
One thing the world doesn't have enough of: bearded babies.
Nearly 100 backers pledged almost $1,000 to fund Beard My Baby 2.0, an updated version of an app that lets you add a "digital facial folicular treatment for infants" featuring more than double the beard options of its previous version.
The app was the latest project from Ridiculo.us, a company that also published a book of gray shades, created the world's first fake marathon, and plans to fake an adventure race, according to its website. Though Beard My Baby 2.0 was fully funded as of February of last year, there is no sign of the app in the App Store or Google Play store.
Zac Manchester, a graduate student in aerospace engineering at Cornell University, launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2011 to promote the personal space age by launching tiny spacecraft into low Earth orbit.
"KickSat grew out of research that had been going on in our lab for several years," Manchester told InformationWeek. "We had basically been trying to shrink a spacecraft down to the smallest size possible. One of the many benefits of super tiny satellites is lower cost."
Manchester hoped to raise $30,000 to fund this project -- a goal that was met twofold. More than 300 people backed KickSat, pledging nearly $75,000.
"KickSat was the first spacecraft project on Kickstarter," Manchester said. "Space is still really exciting to a lot of people, and putting something in space is still difficult and expensive. We're trying to put space within reach of average people."
KickSat's first launch happened in April, which Manchester calls "partially successful." Plans for KickSat-2 are underway. You can follow KickSat's progress through its Kickstarter update page and website.
Juan Rodriguez made a crude prototype of light-up masks for himself and his wife for Halloween two years ago.
"I received such a reaction from people and got so many customer requests that I continued improving on the designs," he said on his Kickstarter page. "Within three months, I was picked up by a national fashion show touring the USA."
Along the way, he met with designers who worked on custom costume designs for Hollywood shows like Cirque de Soleil and Cavalia, but needed help keeping up with the demand for his masks. He sought $15,000 to increase production -- a goal that more than 750 backers met, pledging three times that amount.
You don't need to be a composer -- all you need is an imagination to take part in the future of music, according to Scott Peterman, creator of The Imaginary Marching Band (IMB).
Peterman took to Kickstarter to raise $10,000 for a series of open-source wearable instruments that let people create real music through pantomime. More than 100 people met that goal in 2011.
"The Imaginary Marching Band proposes a reality where technology helps us interact with the real world in more memorable, unique, and ultimately fun ways," Peterman said on his Kickstarter page. "It is also a performance piece -- an actual band of skilled musicians can use these new tools to craft a one-of-a-kind stage experience."
Peterman's IMB features six imaginary instruments: trumpet, trombone, tuba, snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals. Each mirrors its real-world counterpart and reproduces the full range of notes using MIDI data output from the gloves via USB, he explained. These wearable devices can be used with any audio-editing software and can be created for under $70 worth of parts.
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