For now, there’s no reason to worry about surreptitious Meta usage in bars and locker rooms.

The latest is Meta, an immersive 3-D headset layered on top of the real world. Meta wearers can interact with virtual games, architectural renderings and other 3-D objects by using their hands. The device captures gestures with an outward-facing camera (similar to Kinect or Leap Motion).

Meta launches on Kickstarter today, and is also announcing that it will be participating in the next Y Combinator batch out in Mountain View, Calif. Backers who commit $750 will be promised an early version to be shipped in September of this year.

Meta is a young company developed primarily by a Columbia University undergrad student and his adviser, with 12 more employees recently hired. But it is getting a leg up through compatibility with widely used 3-D game-engine maker Unity Technology, and it has a hardware partnership with Epson, and it aims to get devices to buyers this year. (Correction: An earlier version of this story said Meta already had a partnership with Unity. It does not currently.)

Meta will support the popular Unity 3-D software, so other developers will be able to build applications in an environment where they’re already comfortable. A developer kit is available today.

A Meta rendering shows a wearer adjusting 3-D landscaping in front of a virtual building.

If Google Glass brings your phone to your face, Meta aims to bring the computing power of a PC to your face, said Meta founder and CEO Meron Gribetz. “Before you can have the phone, you should have the PC,” he argued.

The “meta1” is not pretty; it definitely looks like a camera mounted to giant wraparound stereoscopic glasses. But it does seem like it’s at least close to working. Yesterday, I briefly tried a demo version that was tethered to Gribetz’s laptop, and there seemed to be minimal latency between me wiggling my fingers and moving my hands farther and closer to interact with the virtual spaceships and hovering balls I was seeing.

Gribetz said he is launching the Kickstarter campaign primarily to build awareness of the device, so he set his goal at a relatively low $100,000 in order to sell a few hundred or a thousand of them.

At $10.2 million and almost a year later, with 70,000 of 85,000 Kickstarter watches shipped to backers, and thousands more preordered on its own site, Pebble is returning to take venture capital on its own terms.

The company has now raised $15 million, largely from Charles River Ventures, led by CRV partner George Zachary.

Asked whether he would have changed anything about the Pebble design if he had access to this kind of capital from the start, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky said he doesn’t think so — just that production and hiring might have been quicker.

Plus, he’s proud that Pebble’s Kickstarter success made people pay attention to crowdfunding. “If we hadn’t been rejected by VCs, I don’t think Kickstarter would have had the same effect on early-stage startups that it’s had.”

So why did venture capital bite this time? Just because wearables are so hot right now?

“I just think they have a big lead. The revenue run rate is very substantial,” said Zachary, who usually invests in Web startups like Twitter and Udacity. He added that this, his largest Series A investment ever, brings him back to his roots working on Nintendo 64 at Silicon Graphics.

“Eric thinks the battle will be won with the developer community, so I decided to take a risk on that specifically,” Zachary said.

That’s not to say Pebble is a sure thing — not at all, since Apple and others are expected to soon compete for wrist real estate with devices of their own.

Not to mention competition from Google Glass, the other wearable device that’s making waves now. Zachary said he’s skeptical that people will want to wear computers on their heads, something he worked on 20 years ago at virtual-reality pioneer VPL Research.

As for competing on the developer front, Pebble is releasing staged access to functionality that’s already in the watch. Developers can make their own watch faces and games (5,000 of them so far, installed 300,000 times), and as of today they’ll be able to rig up two-way communication with smartphones.

That should open up space for people to build things like emergency apps (e.g., press two buttons to send GPS to loved ones) and to-do lists, Migicovsky said. Also: Weather, traffic, stocks and Bitcoin prices. “But we’re more interested in the use cases we haven’t been able to predict,” he said.

Why does Zach Braff need Kickstarter’s sympathy? Because the crowdfunding platform is beloved as a site that can turn independent passion projects into reality when fueled by the money and goodwill of fans and supporters.

So people get a little huffy when they see stars like Braff raise $2.5 million (with 14 days left to go) for his film “Wish I Was Here” that apparently could have been traditionally financed, if Braff had liked the terms. Or the “Veronica Mars” movie that raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter even though it was owned by Warner Bros.

Kickstarter, they say, is for the little people, not the celebrities who already have a whole industry built around them.

Braff, for his part, has gone on the defensive, saying in an interview posted on Mashable yesterday, “I’m making this movie for you and, ostensibly, with you. You’re coming along on the ride, you’re going to be a little GoPro camera on my shoulder experiencing how an independent movie is made … I owe [the fans] everything.”

But what about Kickstarter the company, which had previously gone out of its way to limit participation by hardware projects on its platform that might give people the impression that they are buying a product rather than supporting an endeavor.

Well, Kickstarter actually supports Braff, its founders said today in an open letter titled “Who is Kickstarter for?”

Kickstarter’s mission is to “help bring creative projects to life,” according to co-founders Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler. So the Zach Braff and Veronica Mars films qualify.

And second, celebrities have a halo effect for everyone else on Kickstarter. For this, they offered some numbers:

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

And third, both of the celebrity projects in question were fully in the participatory, all-access spirit of Kickstarter. The Zach Braff rewards included attending premieres and Q&As that fans normally wouldn’t get access to; the Veronica Mars rewards included star Kristen Bell recording for fans outgoing voicemail messages of their choosing.

P.S. It’s not like all celebrity campaigns succeed; a would-be Kickstarter film from actress Melissa Joan Hart is currently only 2.5 percent of the way to its $2 million goal, with 16 days to go. It just recently added more interesting rewards in the style of the other two successful campaigns.

Oh, wait. Scratch one more idea off the list. Now seeking funding via a just-launched Kickstarter, CatLand would give users the chance to care for a Tamagotchi-esque pet by sending check-ins to a location-aware mobile app.

So, if your cat is hungry, you can check in at a restaurant, and if it’s bored, you can take it to the park. CatLand’s creators said they’re still uncommitted to any one business model, since their first priority is just to get funded and get users. But it might eventually offer the ability for local businesses to sponsor special check-in hotspots that reward one’s digital kitty with more virtual points than check-ins at other, non-paying locales.

Silly? Yeah, a bit. But this piqued my interest for two reasons:

1. Foursquare, the former mayor of location-based gamification, is backing away from check-ins and moving toward local discovery; since it’s targeted at teenage girls, CatLand may be an interesting test case for check-ins as a niche product as opposed to a broad “Yelp-plus” service.
2. With the exception of a few apps like Quadstreaker and — more notably — Google’s alternate-reality game, Ingress, mobile games haven’t yet embraced location as an important element of play, either because it’s hard to implement or maybe because it’s just not fun for most types of games. So that’s two trends this silly Kickstarter project is bucking.

(And — unofficial third reason — just because this is about cute animals. We’re definitely gonna win that Webby next year, guys!)

CatLand’s Kickstarter page is here, and a video explaining the app in a bit more detail is below:

For instance: Jack Conte of the band Pomplamoose makes intricate remixes, mashups and original songs where the videos are an integral part of the experience because they depict how it was made. With Pomplamoose or independently, Conte releases about one new item per month. Here’s his latest hit, a mesmerizing Daft Punk-Skrillex remix with about 2.5 million views:

Conte thinks it would be a better model for his superfans to support him by committing to pay for everything he does. Say, $1. This isn’t a recurring monthly subscription; it’s a Jack Conte subscription.

So he’s starting a new site, Patreon, that launches today, for himself and other artists.

Patreon users will be able set the terms of the perks they’ll give to patrons at various payment levels. (They pay a 5 percent cut to the platform, with payments handled via Stripe.)

On the one hand, Patreon is yet another spin on crowdfunding that really only serves one particular form of fan-artist relationship. On the other hand, Conte is exactly that guy, and he thinks there are many more musicians, short filmmakers and bloggers like him.

“On YouTube, there are now tens of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of followers each,” Conte said in an interview yesterday via phone from Sonoma, Calif., where he is based. “This is the burgeoning artistic middle class. It’s not a Bono or a Zach Braff, but micro-demi-celebrities. So, power and fame, instead of being in the hands of the few, is incredibly distributed.”

But wait a second, isn’t YouTube announcing its own paid subscription plans any day now?

That’s totally different, Conte said, because it’s likely to be for premium networks and channels rather than creators themselves. It’s a way for YouTube to try to cut a deal with a Disney or an HBO, not a Pomplamoose.

Conte argued that for independent artists like himself payments shouldn’t be mandatory; they should be an option. If he were to set up a pay wall, nobody would share his content. “The backlash would be awful. Talk about adding friction,” he said.

And, on the other extreme, Patreon probably isn’t a fit for major stars, Conte agreed. If Lady Gaga or Louis C.K. were to ask fans to pay directly per new release, millions of people might sign up, and the Kickstarter-like transparency of Patreon would show just how much money they were making per new video. And Conte thinks that would turn people off at some high number.

So is Patreon a tech startup? Conte — who built the site with ChompOn and OurSpot founder Sam Yam, who happens to have been his freshman roommate — said he isn’t sure yet.

“I’m not part of Silicon Valley and I don’t intend to be,” Conte said. “Not that I have anything against it. I have a succesful band with one million downloads on iTunes, so I’m approaching this from a fan perspective.”

Here’s a video of Conte explaining the Patreon model, and here is his own Patreon page:

The Nairobi-based organization just launched a Kickstarter campaign today for the BRCK, described as “a backup generator for the Internet.”

Ushahidi Executive Director Juliana Rotich had dropped the news of the device at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference a couple weeks ago.

You can think of BRCK as sort of a hardier MiFi device. It’s built to automatically adapt to the changing availability of power and wireless signal by switching between AC power and an eight-hour battery, as well as Ethernet, Wi-Fi and mobile (via a SIM card). According to Ushahidi, the BRCK will support up to 20 devices within a generous signal area, with on-device software to help with collecting and managing data.

The impetus for the device came from frustration with Ushahidi’s own office connectivity, said Director of Software Philip Walton. “We envisioned the BRCK being plugged into our office network sitting silently until some aspect of our connectivity failed and then seamlessly failing over to its own connectivity and power ensuring that our resources stay productive.” Their concept grew to include connectivity for people working in the field and sensors and robots associated with “Internet of Things” devices.

Still, people who are working at offices in Kenya or in the field in a disaster zone may not compose a large part of the Kickstarter demographic. To compensate for that mismatch, Ushahidi is offering all sorts of schwag for backers, with the device itself associated with Kickstarter donations of $150 or more and the overall campaign trying to hit a goal of $125,000 to start manufacturing.

And people may think of other uses for the BRCK. As Rotich told us at D: Dive Into Mobile, Ushahidi likes to say, “If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.”

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

Instead, they raised that much in six hours. A month later, and the project closed more than $300,000 in funding.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Just over a year after the videogame Double Fine Adventure set records on Kickstarter, talk about the crowdfunding leader is in the air at GDC, the Game Developers Conference being held this week in San Francisco.

On the conference’s first day, ICO Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux laid out “real numbers and trends” he had researched for indie game crowdfunding. He hastened to say upfront, though, that when he said “crowdfunding,” he really meant Kickstarter: “It’s so big, it’s basically the thing that’s relevant. … This is where it happens at the moment.”

However, being big and popular also means that it’s noisy.

“Being on Kickstarter is no longer unique,” Bidaux said. “You need to have good [game] concepts.”

To date, $45 million has been raised for videogames on Kickstarter, vs. $2.4 million on rival site Indiegogo and $690,000 on European crowdfunding site Ulule, Bidaux said.

He noted that the “Double Fine effect” benefited all games trying to crowdfund (indeed, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes noted at the time that projects like Double Fine Adventure indicated Kickstarter had come into its own). Games raised $39 million out of their $45 million total in 2012 alone.

It’s not all good news, though. At both Bidaux’s speech on Monday and a panel session on “Kickstarter Lessons for Indie Game Developers” on Wednesday, the speakers indicated that leaving potential games at the mercy of the crowd has some little-talked-about drawbacks.

That crowd, for instance, has successfully funded less than a third of all game projects on Kickstarter. And the ones that do succeed are often the result of an effort that lasts longer than the built-in 30-day fundraising window. At the “Lessons” panel, Sportsfriends game designer Douglas Wilson said pre-campaign work was vital to his project’s eventual $152,000 success.

And Double Fine Productions — the poster boys for game crowdfunding — spent five months on preparation before its $3.3 million-raising campaign, said producer and brand manager Greg Rice. Despite their triumph, it’s not “free money,” he noted.

“Running a Kickstarter campaign eats your life,” fellow panelist and Drifter developer Colin Walsh said. “I wouldn’t say it’s harder than making games,” he added, but managing backers and worrying about the momentum of money flowing in imposed a significant work and psychological toll.

That said, it’s not as though other paths to getting funded are necessarily quicker or easier. Although not a participant in the crowdfunding sessions, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman praised the upside-down nature of seeking money on Kickstarter.

“Especially with a hardware product, you’re behind closed doors for two plus years, you build something, you put it out there with a ton of marketing dollars and you say, ‘Here it is. It’s great. It’s wonderful. Buy it. Love it. This is the best thing in the world!’” Uhrman said. “But you never know how it’s going to be received.”

In his Monday speech, Bidaux (who left the outlier $8.6 million-raising Ouya console out of his study) explained that crowds’ appetite for games follows a regular, paradoxical cycle: Developers need to have “everything that’s going to excite people at the very beginning” because projects do best when they first launch, but new developments and announcements are needed to “keep the momentum going.”

In yet another GDC session, “Pitching Secrets Revealed,” Kickstarter community director Cindy Au echoed Bidaux’s point, adding that that excitement also has to be conveyed quickly. “You’re competing with the entire Internet for attention,” she said.

Bidaux’s research showed a clear U-shaped funding graph, with many backers pledging their money upfront and at the end of a campaign, with days or weeks of middling progress in between.

To deal with that intermediate time, Au said her top advice to developers is “don’t panic,” followed by posting regular updates for backers to keep them engaged. Meanwhile, the “Lessons” panelists praised the power of social media, especially Twitter and Reddit — on the latter, developers can solicit questions from users in the “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) interviews that have increasingly become media stops for celebrities and even President Obama.

Bidaux, however, said formal PR outreach trumps what social media could do for campaigns. He and the panel session also split on the value of Kickstarter’s site and apps, which can recommend new projects to back. Walsh told the panel audience that more than half of Drifter’s funds came through the recommendation engine, while Bidaux insisted that “Kickstarter is not a discovery tool,” and not where many people actively look for new games.

And what about the future? Bidaux predicts that crowdfunding will leave its current “early glory” phase and pass into “inevitable misery” as projects face delays and accountability becomes crucial. But after that, he said, the process will bounce back to reach new heights.

Bonnie Cha contributed to this report.

Especially, the irritating Google guy:

And certainly, more than a few projects live up to that dream, a notable recent example being the super-cool 3-D printing pen 3Doodler, which AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes wrote about earlier this week.

But as in the real world, democracy doesn’t guarantee success to those who seemingly deserve it — it only guarantees the opportunity of success. And in the gaming world, innovation doesn’t come easy, as Throw Trucks With Your Mind is learning.

Like the film “Snakes on a Plane,” Throw Trucks With Your Mind is exactly what it says on the can: Players wear a NeuroSky headset (pictured, left) that translates the brain’s electrical signals into commands for a multiplayer telekinetic battle.

Instead of guns, brain-powered modes like “throw,” “pull” and “high jump” are all players have to attack and defend themselves, and depending on how they either focus or relax their minds, those modes become faster and more powerful.

So, with a little bit of concentration, a player can lift a light barrel, but with concerted focus, it’s possible to stand on top of a heavy vehicle and levitate it off the ground. The titular trucks are extremely difficult to move, but guaranteed to kill targets in one hit.

VentureBeat’s Rus McLaughlin has written a much lengthier account (with some NSFW language) of his hands-on experience with the game. But I can say from having tried a limited demo of Throw Trucks With Your Mind last weekend that it is, indeed, a thrilling glimpse of what being a Jedi must be like.

In a more grounded sense, the game is proof positive that both wearable technology and novel game mechanics could underpin whatever the future of non-mobile games will be. In that way, it’s like the extremely well-funded Kickstarter project Oculus Rift, which Peter Kafka recently demoed live onstage at D: Dive Into Media.

But with less than two weeks left in its campaign, Throw Trucks With Your Mind is just barely over the halfway mark to its goal. If it’s so great, then why is it not blowing up on Kickstarter? A few reasons:

• The video: Kickstarter loves, loves, loves a good video, and Throw Trucks With Your Mind has a perfectly fine one (embedded below). But the difference between watching people play the game and actually playing it is like comparing apples and watermelons. And unlike other, simpler games, no one will be able to play a demo of the game unless they already have access to one of NeuroSky’s $80 MindWave headsets. Which takes us to …
• The price: $80 is already far more than you would pay for a game from an established, reliable series like Halo or Call of Duty. But here, that only gets you the hardware. The lowest tier for Kickstarter backers that nets them a copy of the game is the $25 level. Unlike the Oculus Rift campaign, rewards for cheapskate backers — like t-shirts and posters — are nowhere to be found.
• The headset: To put it bluntly, the MindWave is not a gaming device. At least, not without this game, it isn’t. NeuroSky’s online application store offers nearly 50 games, but they mostly seem to be crude ports or imitations of existing games, with some brain control tacked on. Throw Trucks With Your Mind’s creator, Lat Ware, readily admits that brain-controlled devices have earned a “bad reputation … over the years” with products like the Star Wars Force Trainer.
• Kickstarter itself: When it works, it’s great. But by design, Kickstarter’s powers to endorse specific projects are limited. The site’s editors named his game a “Staff Pick,” but Ware said it “hasn’t really provided much support beyond that.” Save for those few that explode into Internet phenomena, most crowdfunded projects are all about the people you know in meatspace and the ones you can reach online via social media.

On top of all that, browsing the rosters of successfully funded Kickstarter games suggests that backers are more readily drawn to nostalgic titles that revive game mechanics the big AAA publishers have long since left for dead. Point-and-click adventures, 2D RPGs and side-scrollers abound.

Of course, there’s still time for TTWYM to meet its minimum $40,000 goal. But at the time of this writing, it seems very unlikely that it will reach its “stretch goals” that include (at $100,000) Oculus Rift support.

Ware compares the whole process to a panic attack that lasts 30 days rather than a few minutes. And if it fails, he has already made up his mind: “I will have proven that there is not enough demand for it,” Ware said. “I will start work on something else.”

Here’s the video introducing the project:

Update 3/11/13: Throw Trucks With Your Mind has passed its $40,000 minimum goal. But, as noted above, its stretch goals of $60,000, $80,000 and $100,000, each of which would have offered more robust features, seem to be out of reach.

A “3-D printing pen” called 3Doodler is the latest sensation on the crowdfunding site. (Well, there was also “Inocente,” the Kickstarter-backed film that won an Oscar last night. Not too shabby.)

The creators of 3Doodler say they were totally unprepared for its success — but that doesn’t mean they’re not able to fulfill the demand, even as much more accumulates in the next 27 days before their Kickstarter campaign ends.

You could think of the 3Doodler as a hot-glue gun that makes sculptures in the air. The trick is that it both heats and then rapidly cools plastic strands, so they hold their shape.

Creative types can dream into existence whatever they like with the 3Doodler, while non-artists will be able to print out stencils to “draw on the lines” and make things like a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Max Bogue and Peter Dilworth of toy research and development firm WobbleWorks posted the project to Kickstarter on Feb. 19 at midnight in Boston. They haven’t slept much since.

Less than five hours after posting, 3Doodler had met its goal of $30,000. “We were jumping up and down — quietly, because my girlfriend was asleep in the next room,” Bogue said.

“We knew there was a market for it, but we weren’t sure,” said Bogue. “It’s a different kind of item.”

Bogue said the original Kickstarter goal was set up so that WobbleWorks would take a loss on the production. Where the company’s factory required a minimum order of 2,000 units, $30,000 would have only been enough to create 500 units.

“We were willing to take a hit because we believed so much in the product,” said Bogue.

The goal turned out to be ludicrously low. But there’s no penalty for underestimating yourself in Kickstarter-land; WobbleWorks continues to add more pens for new backers, with delivery dates pushing into 2014.

Still, Kickstarter projects have become notorious for delays, especially after unexpected demand. Popular crowdfunded gadgets like the Pebble smart watch have been woefully underprepared to manufacture and distribute as many products as they have promised to their backers.

It has gotten to the point that Kickstarter has publicly declared that people should not treat it like a store, and has banned projects from posting simulations and renderings that might overpromise something that can’t be delivered.

Bogue said he’s confident that 3Doodler will be an exception to that trend, given his extensive experience in developing and manufacturing toys. Kickstarter also gave WobbleWorks a rigorous back-and-forth before approving the project, which Bogue said he sees as a benefit, versus a more open crowdfunding platform, like Indiegogo.

To that end, Bogue and company seem to have an answer for every question and concern. Is 3Doodler toxic? Not any worse than a glue gun. How much plastic do you need? One foot produces about 11 feet of doodling. Does it leave a mark if you use it on a wall? Give us a second … yup, it does.

But now that they need to make nearly 20,000 3Doodlers — and likely many more — what will happen? Bogue insisted he’s not the least bit worried. “These are small numbers for factories; normally these things are hundreds of thousands of units,” he said. “We will never exceed what we’re able to do produce and supply.”

The real charm of having all this demand, Bogue said, is connecting directly with people who want his product, and involving them in its development. For instance, due to Kickstarter feedback, the 3Doodler handle is now planned to include a flat side so it won’t roll around.

“To be able to do product development so instantaneously — it’s just fantastic,” Bogue said. “We get to build a community for a product before we get it into people’s hands.”

Since then, Penny Arcade has became a launch pad for all kinds of entrepreneurial ventures.

The 15-person company operates out of an office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, which serves as a sort of incubator for hilarity.

Krahulik and Holkins mostly come up with the wacky ideas; as the guy who holds on to the company’s pursestrings, Robert Khoo says whether it’s all possible.

So far, Penny Arcade has been successful with the launch of PAX, a well-attended game conference that now has a handful of events around the world. It also has a merchandising business, which is not as widely known, but no less substantial. The company’s latest effort includes filming a reality TV show called “Strip Search,” about finding America’s next top comic artist.

The funding for the show, in part, came out of a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised half a million dollars. Most of the money went to eliminating advertising on Penny Arcade for a year, but since they exceeded their goal, some of it was also used to support the filming.

Here was the idea: Fly in 12 artists from around the world to compete for a $15,000 prize and a chance to work at the Penny Arcade offices for a year. Much like “Top Chef” or “America’s Next Top Model,” the contestants lived with each other in a house, and were put through a series of challenges, where they must “fight, claw, write, and draw until only one artist remains.”

While they were in the throes of filming, I talked to Krahulik and Holkins about what it was like to be the show’s creators. The infographic below gives you some clue as to the craziness factor: 16 hours of filming a day, six people who cried, two speeding tickets, and 46 trips to Starbucks. (Not to mention 47 poops recorded, and 26 condoms used.)

Krahulik and Holkins act more like brothers than business partners. And while you can rest assured that they strove hard to find the best up-and-coming artist, at the end of the day, everything was done to create the most entertaining outcome possible.

“We made it all up, so it’s hard to take it seriously,” said Holkins, who is the primary writer for the Penny Arcade comics. “But the responsibility became really serious when you show up every day and realize that only one person will walk away with the money and the chance to work in the Penny Arcade office for a year.”

Krahulik, the Penny Arcade’s illustrator, said that knowing that there will be one winner and 11 losers becomes “bad for your soul” when having to choose between two very qualified contestants.

But just because they were sympathetic, that doesn’t mean the duo acted as conscientious objectors. To the contrary: They wanted to make it as juicy as possible. ”Jerry was bad cop, and I was the asshole,” said Krahulik, who prided himself on how many times he made people cry.

Holkins said they had to try hard to create drama, especially in a house filled with aspiring artists who all seemed to get along and understand one another. Krahulik said he did his best by looking an artist in the eye and thinking to himself, “what’s the meanest thing that I can say.” Oftentimes, it was something like, “your hair smells like shit.”

Holkins explained, “We made them cry for your enjoyment — you psycho!”

Despite all the efforts put into to creating an entertaining experience, they assured me that there was absolutely no fabricating of any events. “As a culture, we are so pumped full of reality TV, we fall into the archetypes very quickly,” Holkins admitted.

The show cost roughly $250,000 to film and, in addition to the Kickstarter campaign, it was subsidized heavily by sponsors and advertising. There will be 35 to 40 Web episodes in all; they’ll run from 12 to 15 minutes each. After the entire season appears on the Penny Arcade website, they’ll put out a DVD. The first episode will air later this month.

The one thing both came away from after filming ”Strip Search” is that there definitely will be a Season Two.

Here’s the infographic:

So a gadget like Oculus Rift might be just the thing that’s needed to keep game hardware feeling fresh.

Shown off today at the D: Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif., the Oculus Rift is a virtual-reality headset that immerses the wearer in the videogame world playing around them.

Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe joined AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka to demo the headset, which was connected to a large computer monitor for audience viewing. Peter good-naturedly agreed to wear the Rift headset, showing a reaction comparable to the one he had during this erotic e-book demo last year at D: Dive Into Media 2012.

Iribe explained that the Rift could work with games ranging from shooting games to “my little pet games.” Right now, the company is working to get thousands of kits into the hands of developers.

The CEO said the Oculus headset represents the first time gamers can be fully immersed in a 360-degree videogame environment. He expects play time will increase gradually over time: “We’ll see when it gets to getting lost in the Holodeck.”

SoCal-based Oculus, which was created by Palmer Luckey, first launched back in August as a Kickstarter project. Oculus’ initial goal was to raise $250,000. It raised $2.4 million instead.

As explained when we first saw the Oculus Rift at CES, the Rift isn’t a computing device itself, and the games aren’t streaming inside the headset, so it needs to be attached to a computer to work.

Unlike past attempts at virtual reality (like, most notoriously, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy), the Oculus Rift works because “the hardware’s finally ready,” Iribe said.

The current asking price for the Rift is $300, but Iribe is hesitant to say when it will become available to consumers.

So, what did Peter think? “I’m a little queasy, but it’s awesome,” he said.

“You definitely don’t want to be drinking too much,” Iribe responded.

With reporting by Eric Johnson.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130212/oculus-rift-shakes-up-gaming-with-virtual-reality-headset/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20130123/pebble-smart-watch-starts-shipping-well-less-than-500-of-them/ http://allthingsd.com/20130123/pebble-smart-watch-starts-shipping-well-less-than-500-of-them/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:45:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=287755 One of the more closely watched little gadgets, the Pebble smart watch is finally making its way into the hands of its Kickstarter backers, according to an update sent to them today.

That means that the startup device maker — which was originally supposed to ship the watches last fall, before $10 million worth of demand derailed its plans — is actually hitting the deadline it set a few weeks ago at CES.

But there are caveats. Fewer than 500 watches will be shipped today (and some shipping confirmations are apparently accidentally going to people whose Pebbles aren’t actually ready), the iOS app hasn’t been approved by Apple yet, and only black Pebbles are available.

Pebble backers can’t yet visit the company’s site to see when their own device will ship. That’s also supposed to be coming soon.

Pebble is an e-paper watch that acts as a secondary display and control for wearers’ Android and iPhone smartphones using Bluetooth. Some 85,000 of them have been effectively ordered.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130123/pebble-smart-watch-starts-shipping-well-less-than-500-of-them/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130109/pebble-watch-will-finally-ship-on-january-23/ http://allthingsd.com/20130109/pebble-watch-will-finally-ship-on-january-23/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:15:10 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=283776 Pebble, the E-Ink “smart” watch that generated more than $10 million in preorders on Kickstarter last year, finally has a ship date: The company says it will go out Jan. 23, and that all 85,000 backers should receive their watches within six to eight weeks. The $150 Pebble is compatible with iPhone and Android, using Bluetooth to send alerts from smartphone to watch, and includes magnetic compass-like technology as well as light sensors.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130109/pebble-watch-will-finally-ship-on-january-23/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130108/kickstarter-channeled-274m-worth-of-funding-to-indie-projects-in-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20130108/kickstarter-channeled-274m-worth-of-funding-to-indie-projects-in-2012/#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:07:58 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=283582 We’ve written before about unreliable estimates for the size of the total crowdfunding market, but here’s one that’s a bit more concrete. Kickstarter, which is thought to be the largest player (some others, like Indiegogo, don’t release stats) said today that 2.24 million users provided $274 million in funding for 18,100 successful projects in 2012, with total funding up 238 percent from the year before. There were also a bunch of great Kickstarter parodies last year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130108/kickstarter-channeled-274m-worth-of-funding-to-indie-projects-in-2012/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130108/making-it-to-ces-on-a-kickstarter-and-a-dream/ http://allthingsd.com/20130108/making-it-to-ces-on-a-kickstarter-and-a-dream/#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:00:23 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=283335 For tech companies large and small, it’s never been cheap to show your wares at CES. It’s the trade show’s unofficial barrier to entry — front enough cash for a booth, and you’re welcome aboard.

But while the prices may still be high, the ways inside are starting to shift. Instead of relying on VC bankrolls, some smaller outfits are taking funding straight from you, the people who want to buy their products in the first place.

How? Simple. The rise of Kickstarter, the privately owned crowdfunding platform company that debuted a little under three years ago, has democratized the fundraising process for thousands of would-be entrepreneurs. Pitch an idea for a prototype invention or service on Kickstarter.com, and the people can vote yay or nay with their wallets. It’s socialized venture capital 101, and it has been a boon for the relatively unknown creative tinkerers. And many have found their way to Las Vegas for CES this year.

Take the Hapifork, for instance, one of many small, goofy gadgets debuting at CES this week. In order to better control your eating habits, the fork will send slight vibrating jolts to you, the eater, if you’re scarfing down food too fast. The premise is so silly, it’s hard to believe the product wasn’t pulled from the pages of The Onion.

The iMusic Body Rhythm manages to trump the Hapifork in the department of the asinine. It literally looks like an electronic toilet seat cover, which you’re supposed to wear like a life vest around your neck. Plug it into your MP3 player, and the vest vibrates to the beat of whatever song you’re listening to. This, my friends, is frivolity unhinged.

But that’s the thing. Though I may think it’s ridiculous — and I’m sure I’m not alone in that thought — you, the masses, have already spoken. Folks are backing the Hapifork, the Body Rhythm, the Kogeto Dot iPhone camera and other wacky products in droves, using the Kickstarter platform. The people get to decide whether or not these pursuits are worthwhile.

While that grassroots popularity is important, it’s only half the battle. There’s still value in getting the item in question onto hallowed CES ground. It’s the event where distributors and retailers walk the floor, deciding what items may make it onto the crowded shelves of their stores in the coming year. It’s where big companies go to see what the little guys are doing, and how they can potentially work with them. It’s a breeding ground for partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. No Kickstarter campaign can offer that sort of networking value.

So yes, all roads still lead to Rome (or rather to the Bellagio, in CES’s case). It’s just that now those roads may be paved with the dollars and support of the many, rather than the few — no matter how crazy the idea.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130108/making-it-to-ces-on-a-kickstarter-and-a-dream/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20121227/as-apple-smart-watch-rumors-swirl-pebble-gets-fcc-approval/ http://allthingsd.com/20121227/as-apple-smart-watch-rumors-swirl-pebble-gets-fcc-approval/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:16:04 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=281022 The Pebble watch has been approved by the Federal Communications Commission as a wireless communication device, one more step in its process to arrive on its 65,000-plus Kickstarter backers’ wrists.

The smart watch, which displays information from Android and iOS phones via Bluetooth, was originally supposed to ship in September, but has been delayed after massive demand generated more than $10 million worth of Kickstarter backing.

The company has yet to set new delivery dates, but it obviously missed the holiday season.

The FCC approval comes just as rumors are swirling that Apple is working on a smart watch of its own.

Documents released with the approval include a user manual, but not proprietary information such as schematic diagrams.

Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky noted that Pebble was designed with a pre-approved Bluetooth module to ease the certification process.

The Pebble news was reported earlier today by Engadget.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121227/as-apple-smart-watch-rumors-swirl-pebble-gets-fcc-approval/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121219/start-up-behind-lumoback-posture-monitoring-gadget-raises-5m/ http://allthingsd.com/20121219/start-up-behind-lumoback-posture-monitoring-gadget-raises-5m/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:00:39 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=279148 Lumo BodyTech, which makes a wearable waistband that tracks posture and movement and vibrates when the wearer slouches, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up doubled its goal in a Kickstarter campaign this summer, taking in $200,000 and more than 1,000 effective preorders for the Lumoback.

The Kickstarter backers now have their devices in hand, and Lumobacks will start shipping to the general public in January.

Lumo CEO Monisha Perkash described the Kickstarter campaign as a “de-risking” strategy, saying that it provided market validation and feedback that helped pave the way for the venture round.

Perkash said that Lumo eventually expects to move beyond posture into other devices that “give your body a voice.” Versus other wearable sensors, Lumo is particularly focused on real-time, accurate feedback — currently, in the form of a gentle buzz that gets wearers to stand up straight, or to walk around after an extended period of sitting.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121219/start-up-behind-lumoback-posture-monitoring-gadget-raises-5m/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121213/ios-transit-app-refunds-its-kickstarter-backers/ http://allthingsd.com/20121213/ios-transit-app-refunds-its-kickstarter-backers/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:50:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=277367 Among the failings of the Apple iOS mapping app that replaced Google Maps (well, not anymore) was its lack of transit directions. And so New York-based OpenPlans launched a well-timed Kickstarter campaign this summer to make an app version of its trip-planning engine. It wasn’t a wild success, but the project raised more than $26,000, exceeding its goal.

But this past week, OpenPlans announced that it would refund all the money its Kickstarter backers provided, a relatively unusual move in the crowdfunding world. Why? Even though it had already built and tested an app called Joyride, OpenPlans said its priorities were changing away from consumer-facing applications. It didn’t want to commit ongoing resources to supporting the app. Plus, alternatives have emerged, such as The Transit App and Moovit, that are based on the same OpenTripPlanner.

OpenPlans is also open-sourcing Joyride in case someone else wants to take it up.

Refunds aren’t standard practice on Kickstarter, despite the fact that some projects fail to complete whatever they were backed to do.

In a blog post from September, the Kickstarter founders said refunds are not a fit for their platform because “transactions are between backers and the creator.” The founders said their support team would help creators walk through aspects of the refund process.

Since Kickstarter doesn’t offer infrastructure for refunds, and it’s past the 60-day period that Amazon Payments supports them automatically, OpenPlans is using the emails it received from its backers to manually pay back their accounts on Amazon.

The non-profit is eating the cost of Amazon and Kickstarter fees so people can receive full refunds.

“There’s no way to automatically refund backers,” said OpenPlans principal Kevin Webb in an email. “This is something we think Kickstarter should fix. I imagine that it opens up doors in terms of expectations/liability. But it’s obviously the right thing to do in certain cases and there should be a mechanism.”

Webb noted that OpenPlans is in a better position than many Kickstarter project creators, who may find themselves having spent their backers’ money but lacking the resources to finish.

For instance, that happened to the developer of the game Haunts: The Manse Macabre, which also offered refunds after its Kickstarter cash ran out. However, only a few backers said they wanted their money back.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121213/ios-transit-app-refunds-its-kickstarter-backers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121206/christie-street-launches-a-kickstarter-for-products/ http://allthingsd.com/20121206/christie-street-launches-a-kickstarter-for-products/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:00:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=275635 Christie Street today launched a service that aims to ensure that people who buy fun new hardware products before they exist actually receive them — or get their money back.

In a very literal sense, it’s a Kickstarter for hardware products. Christie Street will evaluate the viability of submitted products, handle preorders (taking the same 5 percent cut as Kickstarter), and hold the money in escrow until certain milestones in the design, tooling and production process have been accomplished.

Though Kickstarter has become synonymous with crowdfunding, the curated platform is actually quite inhospitable for many people who would like to use it.

In particular, those building new hardware products have found Kickstarter increasingly hostile, with the company recently declaring “Kickstarter Is Not a Store” and putting restrictions around how users can market and which projects qualify.

(The new smartphone-controlled door lock Lockitron, for example, was rejected from Kickstarter for the seemingly arbitrary reason of being a home improvement product, before bringing in $2.2 million in preorders when it ran a crowdfunding campaign independently.)

Plus, people who “back” products on Kickstarter and hope and expect to receive “rewards” in return often find themselves waiting for such products to materialize. It might be more appropriate to directly preorder something, which is what many people think they are already doing.

Christie Street is a project of Jamie Siminoff’s design lab Edison Junior, which itself just raised money on Kickstarter for a hardware product called Pop (production is currently delayed while waiting for approval from Apple).

The site is launching today with another new hardware product from Edison Junior — the DoorBot — that’s a Wi-Fi video doorbell so people can see who’s outside their house. Once other products are contributed and made, Siminoff said he sees Christie Street becoming a marketplace for these products.

Siminoff noted that Kickstarter was originally built to support art projects, and that is still core to its ethos. Where Christie Street is perhaps less “scalable” than more open-ended platforms, it’s squarely built to support products.

Siminoff appeared onstage at LeWeb in Paris today with Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman, who said they are complimentary platforms. Where Quirky turns regular people’s good ideas into physical products, Christie Street is for people who want to be start-up hardware entrepreneurs. Or as Kaufman put it, “We’re the 99 percent; they’re the 1 percent.”

In fact, many platforms are now proliferating and evolving around the array of crowdfunded smart gadgets from the past year. Outside of the Kickstarter/Christie Street paradigm, there are also a ton of companies ready to do equity crowdfunding, rather than preorders, as soon as the SEC figures out how to implement the already-passed JOBS Act.

When I interviewed Indiegogo co-founder Danae Ringelmann on stage at LeWeb yesterday, she wouldn’t say how much Indiegogo is benefitting from Kickstarter’s limitations around physical products — but she did say that category is growing.

Ringelmann also noted that once it is legal, Indiegogo is raring to support equity crowdfunding — where regular people will be able to own a stake in the companies they back rather than just receiving a reward or perk.

 

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