Hasta La Gadget!

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Last week’s Backed or Whacked covered light-related products that could be controlled by a smartphone. Beyond making their way in the dark, though, modern humans have many other basic needs — maintaining well-being, feeling secure, and enforcing as much control over their domain as possible while exerting as little effort as necessary. The ability to achieve them with the aid of a smartphone, though, has arrived relatively recently, and the ability to crowdfund them via Indiegogo as per all of this week’s projects, even more recently.

Backed: Amiigo. Amiigo, which is Spanish for “friend in good shape who spells poorly,” is a chevron-shaped shoe clip that monitors movement, enabling you to know precisely how many calories you’ve expended repeatedly lifting the Boston Creme donut until it has been reduced to sugary crumbs. Amiigo enters the increasingly crowded contest for survival of the fittest begun by early entrants such as Nike+ and Fitbit. However, the trendy joint between the hand and forearm is where all the wriststers hang out these days. These include the Nike+ Fuelband, Jawbone UP, and other forthcoming entrants such as CES debutante Fitbit Flex and the HAPIwatch from HAPI Labs. To enter that club, the Amiigo shoe clip neatly docks into a wrist strap.

What the Salt Lake City-based team is counting on to set Amiigo apart from these rivals is more intelligence regarding the specific type of activity you’re doing. The idea of diving deeper into the nature of your exertion has been previously espoused by the developers of the $199 Basis, which employs fancy sensors to monitor the body’s reaction to exercise beyond motion detection. Amiigo, which has more than tripled its $90,000 funding goal with about 25 days left in its campaign, dispenses with the extra hardware and is due to ship to Indiegogo backers in June for about $99.

Backed: iSmartAlarm. ADT has run a legitimate business securing people’s homes and businesses. Recently, however, bigger bosses like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have told their capos that they want into the protection racket, see? Extracting a monthly fee for peace of mind, though, has heretofore taken place mostly within the customer base of those in multi-room dwellings. There have been a few alternative approaches, though, like the apartment-friendly but nonetheless professionally monitored SimpleSafe system.

For those who are comfortable handling alarms — false and otherwise — themselves, though, Raymond Meng’s team proposes iSmartAlarm, which includes a base station/siren reminiscent of the old Power Mac G4 Cube. iSmartAlarm, set to ship in April and starting with a basic package of only $79 with no monthly fees, has big plans for expansion. The company eventually seeks to include features such as sprinkler controls and GPS pet trackers.

For now, though, it is starting off with the basics — window/door-open sensors, motion sensors and, most importantly, that inert sign that scares away the bad guys. Should brazen intruders disregard the latter, the system can initiate taking successive photos of the perp and will send alerts to the smartphone owned by you or the vigilante of your choosing. iSmartAlarm’s campaign has been plodding along with over $30,000 raised of its $50,000 target with about 20 days to go.

Backed: Tethercell. Now that the crowdfunding world has provided the gear to convince you of your health and safety, it’s time to take it easy. Perhaps you want to turn on that FM radio on the porch a few feet away, but the thought of leaning forward displeases you. Debuting at CES along with the ultra-thin, time-telling bangle CST-01 that a future Backed or Whacked will discuss in more depth, the Tethercell may be your only hope.

Designed by aerospace engineers, the cylindrical device stuffs a Bluetooth radio into a AA battery shell, leaving enough room in the cavity to insert a AAA battery. You give up some device stamina, but gain the ability to remotely enable and disable all kinds of products either manually or according to a schedule. Tethercell can also alert you when the AA batteries in a device are running low.

Adding Bluetooth to products never intended to be controlled by a smartphone creates a wonderful twist on backward compatibility. While a shrinking number of devices that you might want to activate remotely take standard cells these days, the campaign’s Indiegogo page depicts small lamps, radios and baby monitors as examples. As Tethercell also works with some videogame controllers and many toys, the non-confrontational parent wishing for their kids to turn that damn thing off and pick up a book already can still pick one up for only $35 (although pairs are also proving popular). Recently charged above 47 percent of its $59,000 goal capacity, the Tethercell campaign has about 20 days’ worth of juice left.

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Whether you rocked your New Year’s Eve Gangnam Style, fed your Bieber fever, or just took in a traditional Auld Lang Syne, there was an opportunity to get that music out of your smartphone and share it with the rest of the party. And as long as that party wasn’t larger than, say, a half-dozen people, any number of the more than dozen Bluetooth speakers on the market could help you with that task.

Indeed, despite being a poor vehicle through which to demonstrate audio quality, Kickstarter did its part in 2012 to fund a few such products. These included the stylish Hidden Radio in January, which raised nearly $1 million; Carbon Audio’s silicone-encased, tablet-gripping Zooka in March; and the weather-resistant Turtle Shell from Outdoor Tech in  October. With 2013 barely underway, though, three more Bluetooth speakers have set out not only to amplify tunes but crowdfunding’s unceasing cry for financial support.

Backed: Boombot Rex. What happens when you take a bunch of hip San Francisco product designers and put them into a neon-lit studio from which they can call their tattoo-covered bros? Boombotix, a startuptopia where the world is nothing but tasty surfin’, solderin’ and spearphonin’. The hexagonal Boombox Rex has a similar perforated exterior to the Turtle Shell and is also ruggedized. But while some of the feedback on that earlier weather-resistant project have found its audio quality lacking, the Rex aims to achieve a rich sound by integrating two 36 mm drivers and a small woofer within its frame.

Deep bass requires deep pockets. The more than 1,100 backers eager to encourage the mostly healthy-living, product-development equivalent of The Real World — and perhaps pick up one of the $80 powerhouses — have contributed more than three times the compaign’s $27,000 goal. And that’s with about six days left in the campaign. The Rex is due in March; that is, assuming the team can tear itself away from the lives you wish you had.

Backed: CoverPlay Mojo. The rectangular CoverPlay Mojo may not have as creative a shape as the Rex, but it squarely beats it in at least one dimension: thickness. The 7 mm speaker is such a natural accessory for svelte tablets that CoverPlay has designed a case that can hold both as a $30 accessory. Offering something like it as a stretch goal would have been a nice bonus for the campaign, but the Mojo held on to its own mojo by a margin nearly as slim as the speaker itself, reaching its $30,000 funding goal with less than a grand to spare. Instead, the company introduced a mid-priced reward tier in its last 10 days ($95 as opposed to the $105 previously offered), which helped it get over the edge. Austin Powers may have been able to claim his mojo in less than two hours, but backers are slated to get their Mojos in March.

Whacked: XyloBeats. The last time someone offered something as cute, wooden, and capable of remote audio as the cylindrical Xylobeats was at the end of Terry Fator’s arm at The Mirage. The small “eco-friendly” XyloBeats are roughly as tall as their diameter and are available in six wood finishes. The top end of the rewards included a set of all six for $160.

But the campaign is in its final days with less than 20 percent of its goal reached. It’s difficult to see where the XyloBeats campaign went wrong. The goal was not outlandish at $10,000, and the reward prices were downright cheap – not only by Kickstarter standards but even in comparison to the overall market for Bluetooth speakers. People may have been turned off by needing to add a second unit to achieve stereo, but that was also true for the pricier and more powerful wooden 1Q that raised nearly $200,000 last summer.

Editor’s note: This weekend we’re running a new column called Backed or Whacked by Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, focusing on consumer technologies, and writer for Engadget. Every week he’ll address two crowdsourced projects from the view of an investor, analyst, and gadget fiend. He’ll look at what made one a success and the other, well, a whack. 

Cloud-connected smartphones and tablets have become vast repositories of our information. Still, there’s more to be done to facilitate getting data into and out of them, at least according to a couple of Kickstarter projects having different degrees of success.

Backed: Jorno keyboard

Foldable keyboards saw a modicum of popularity during the heyday of the Palm V and the clever Stowaway keyboard. Curiously, though, they haven’t made much of a comeback, even as smartphones have become ridiculously popular though frustrating to use for entering large quantities of text. After a warm reception at CES 2011, the Jorno keyboard seemed to be the modern-day cure for frustrated thumbs, but repeated delays led to an apparent cancellation earlier this year before it popped up on Kickstarter.

The Jorno keyboard is a bit thick at an inch of girth but folds into a pocketable square. That includes a detachable stand that can accommodate a 7″, or perhaps larger, tablet — including the rumored miniature iPad, particularly since rumors don’t take up any room. With its ability to accommodate smartphones and tablets of nearly every stripe, the Jorno is well on its way to meeting its funding goal, which should allow it to finally enter mass production.

Whacked: AirBridge

If the lack of a keyboard is one of the main input hindrances of a smartphone, the size of the display is one of the main output limitations, especially for content designed for group viewing such as movies or presentations. Many phones can wirelessly connect with a DLNA-enabled TV or AV component. For iPhones, however, the Apple-supplied solution is AirPlay to an Apple TV.

AirBridge has a few advantages over Apple TV. In addition to being battery-powered, its Pro version can create a Wi-Fi hotspot that allows someone to send a presentation to the screens of other iOS devices running AirBridge’s app and even send files to them, kind of like a conference room version of WebEx or GoToMyPC. These advantages may have marginal relevance to a lot of folks versus the stock Apple TV, particularly since the AirBridge relies on its own radio technology for screen broadcasting that requires the addition of an adapter into the iPhone’s dock (or potentially Lightning) connector.

But ambition will be the main reason AirBridge will miss its funding goal; the team is asking for half a million dollars. Such a sum, while not unjustifiable, is simply atypical for product design products. For example, the CruxCase add-on keyboard for iPad has met 250 percent of its goal, but has collected less than $250,000, whereas the Touch Time, an e-paper watch created by Donald Brewer, former CTO of Fossil Watches, raked in over $314,000. And so the team behind AirBridge will need to float another campaign or find alternative funding. At least it can use the prototypes in investor pitch meetings.