Hasta La Gadget!

Making hardware is easy. Making sex toys and selling them on Kickstarter is, sadly, hard. Though sex toy makers have long been lumped in with pornographers and and other businesses of ill repute, there is a new crop of sex toy makers looking to get real and hit the mainstream. And we must remember that the sex toy industry isn’t some furtive little market. The industry is worth over $15 billion per year and, whether Kickstarter likes it or not, millions of toys are sold per year to millions of happy customers.

It’s time for Kickstarter to experience a sexual awakening. Here’s why.

These toys are far more interesting than some secret massager hidden deep in your dresser. Modern sex toy makers are enabling cloud features, adding powerful silent motors, and expanding their selection from the traditional to the downright exotic. But Kickstarter as a company still can’t figure out its relationship with these devices, despite the fact that many of them clearly fall within the stated guidelines of the crowdfunding platform.

A Brief History

In the past, Kickstarter has ejected a number of projects that went on to blow way past their funding goals on other crowdfunding sites. Yet other products, most notably this MUA sex toy storage box, are accepted on the platform.

For example, Kickstarter rejected Crave Innovations, a company started by serial entrepreneur Michael Topolovac who had previously raised over $35 million for his software startup. In September, some six months after Kickstarter rejected Crave, the company raised $2.4 million from more than 60 prominent angels and entrepreneurs. For the record, that was $400,000 more than Topolovac had asked for to fund his first batch of toys.

In fact, after launching the Duet (Crave’s first pleasure product) on an alternative crowdfunding site CKIE, Crave blew past its $15,000 goal in the first two days, landing $100,000 in six weeks.

Meanwhile, Kickstarter also rejected LovePalz, a Wifi-powered set of devices that mimic sexual behavior remotely AKA teledildonics. In other words, one partner could feel the movements of their partner with a boy version (Zeus) and a girl version (Hera). The company claims to have sold 10,000 pieces since February, when the product officially launched. Each sells for $189, which accounts for a little under $2 million in sales.

Vibease, a company that created app-controlled vibrators in 2012, first tried to go the Kickstarter route before being rejected and instead used Indiegogo. With a goal of $30,000, Vibease went on to raise $130k during the summer campaign with shipments heading out in January.

Vibease is currently raising a seed round.

It would be OK if Kickstarter were consistent with its no-sex stance. But even though sex toys are out, misogynistic pick-up artist guides are fine.

This summer, for example, Kickstarter allowed a seduction guide with ethically questionable advice for men. Kickstarter grappled with removing the book before letting it live on, deciding that the 2 hours left on the campaign wasn’t enough time to investigate.

It all started after a comedian named Casey Malone wrote a blog post about the seduction guide, posting offensive excerpts from it. The author, Ken Hoinsky, argues that these quotes were taken out of context and were meant to inspire confidence, not violence.
Kickstarter later apologized for letting that kind of content live on the site and banned seduction guides.

But it seems the cold winter of sexual squeamishness is thawing. A designer named Lidia Bonilla launched the MUA box. That product lived on Kickstarter and eventually reached its funding goal. In Bonilla’s defense, however, she paid careful attention to Kickstarter’s guidelines to ensure that the project would be accepted on the end-all, be-all crowdfunding platform.

So with all this back and forth and outright banning, what exactly do Kickstarter’s guidelines say about sex-related products?

Well, nothing actually.

Confused?

Privately, the company has told rejected parties that they don’t accept vibrators at all, but this isn’t stated anywhere in the guidelines. I spoke to Kickstarter representatives repeatedly about this and they refused to go on the record but suggested that they haven’t figured out the rules internally.

Kickstarter starts out by giving two overarching guidelines: First, everything must be a project, which means that it has a clear end, a completion date of some sort, and that something will be produced as a result of the project’s completion. The second is that every project must fit into one of the following categories: Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater.

Like any other hardware project on Kickstarter, the above sex toys would definitely be considered “projects”. They would also clearly pass muster of being either a technology or design project. Even both in some cases, as they evolve the original design of sex toys and include features never-before-seen in sex toys thanks to Wifi, various sensors, Bluetooth, and other improvements.

“We don’t curate projects based on taste. Instead, we do a quick check to make sure they meet these guidelines,” reads the website.

Then, the company moves beyond these main guidelines into more specific rules. None of them relate to sex toys at all, except for one:

No offensive material (hate speech, etc.); pornographic material; or projects endorsing or opposing a political candidate.

The pornographic material bit is unclear. One can assume that any Kickstarter video that shows sex or feigns sex of any kind is considered pornographic, but is a sex toy (independent from people or a sexual scenario) considered pornographic? And more importantly, should it be?

The MUA box, for example, shows various sex toys within the promotional video. They aren’t being used, but rather are stored in a pleasure product organizer. So what is the difference between the MUA video and, say, this video, submitted by Crave?

Both are informational, focused on the product, its design, and its viability as a business.

The LovePalz video is admittedly more racy than the other two, but does that mean that two people, fully dressed, in a bed together is pornographic?

Am I splitting hairs? Perhaps. But is Kickstarter’s policy on sex toys important? Absolutely.

Sex Toy Makers Are Makers, Too

It’s 2014, people.

There was a time when a woman’s sexuality was seen as a disruption to man’s harmonious relationship with God or the State. As recently as the fifties, Freud argued that women should only achieve vaginal orgasms. If they couldn’t, they were a failure. If they could achieve clitoral orgasm, on the other hand, they were considered masculine or immature. That is wrong.

Before vibrators were a key function of our smartphones or our sex toys, they were first invented to help male doctors treat female hysteria. Instead of wearing out their wrists masturbating women (yes, this happened), they just built a steam-powered vibrator.

And yet look how far we’ve come. In the U.S., we’re more sexually liberated than we’ve ever been. Sex toys are fun, flashy, and no longer objects of derision. Sex has driven almost every major breakthrough in technology in the past few decades. The internet speaks for itself — sex is everywhere. The invention of chat gave us cyber sex. The ubiquity of video on the internet started with the desire to digitize porn. Even new technology like Vine and Instagram and Snapchat left us with Vineporn and Nastygrams and Snap Spam.

So why should participants in the hardware revolution miss out?

Despite multiple requests to discuss the line between pornographic and not, Kickstarter offered no clarification. But that’s their right.

If they worry that a teenager might see a sex toy on the site, the company has every right to avoid that scenario, no matter how ridiculous the concern might be. (Most sex toy sites don’t have an 18+ gate. If a teenager wants to find sex on the internet, Kickstarter is the last place they’d go.) Still, if Kickstarter is concerned about sexual or adult content, the crowdfunding site can simply exclude sex toy makers from the service.

What’s not so cool is the fact that Kickstarter can’t give more insight into the line between too sexy and suitable. Why does a box that stores sex toys make it on the site but a discreet vibrator gets rejected?

Entrepreneurs for hardware companies have to be as frugal as possible because they’re building something physical that costs money to make and to distribute. Kickstarter has made that journey easier for many of them, who can afford to make a few prototypes, a nice video, and send in an application. But not for those who make sex toys. They are forced to go to other crowdfunding sites (and still succeed wildly) after wasting time and resources on Kickstarter.

Maybe Kickstarter isn’t the home for makers?

What Next?

The sex toy industry is worth $15 billion annually. Breakthrough technologies like the smartphone, various sensors, and the ubiquity of connectivity have paved the way for a true era of disruption in the sex toy industry, transforming what has long been a store full of awkward, dick-shaped vibrators into shelves full of connected, intuitive, design-centric pleasure products.

Kickstarter has the opportunity to be a part of this just as much as it has the right to avoid this sexually charged hardware revolution. That decision is entirely up to the company. Where Kickstarter shouldn’t have a choice is in the guidelines regarding what is accepted and what isn’t.

The Kickstarter business is entirely dependent on entrepreneurs. By alienating certain entrepreneurs, or being unclear about the guidelines of the platform, Kickstarter is ultimately damaging the key to its own success, as well as the success of these sex toy makers.

People want to get off. Why won’t Kickstarter let them?

For those of you who have had a go with EverQuest before, being addicted to it like the person right next to you, so how about the opportunity to pay a visit to the past? A certain Brian McQuaid, who happens to be a longtime designer of MMORPGs such as EverQuest and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, have decided to roll out a Kickstarter campaign that will see the introduction of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

(more…)

Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Now A Kickstarter Project original content from Ubergizmo.

Portable battery packs and battery cases for the iPhone are a dime a dozen, but what about charging cables? Wouldn’t it be awesome if your cable could provide your iPhone with a quick charge when you need it? That’s exactly what Native Union’s Jump phone cable does. On the surface it just looks like a normal looking Lightning cable, but in the photo above, you might notice the middle section which is where the cable would be wound around when not in use. Well hidden in that area is actually a small-ish battery around 800mAh which should be enough to provide your phone with an additional 33% of battery in emergency situations.

How it works is that it connects to USB ports and power plugs as per normal, but once your phone is done charging, the power is then redirected to the hidden battery to juice up and store some power. Given that the Jump cable weighs only 40 grams, it’s small enough to fit into your pocket so that you can bring to work with you or take it with you on the go to locations where there might not necessarily have a power outlet for you to charge your phone with. The good news is that the Jump cable will be available as a Lightning cable for iOS users, or as a microUSB cable for Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone users, and will cost $40 if you were to pledge to its Kickstarter campaign, otherwise expect to fork out around $50 for it when it becomes available later in May.

The Jump Charging Cable Comes With A Tiny Built-In Battery Of Its Own original content from Ubergizmo.

Padlocks are useful since they help secure things such as your bicycle, cabinets, lockers, garage doors, the back gate, and etc. However for the most part they all require a different set of keys, meaning that you will need to keep multiple sets and sometimes misplacing them could prove to be rather troublesome. That’s the sort of situation that the folks at OckCorp are hoping to address with their TEO padlock, an electronic padlock that allows it to be locked or unlocked using your smartphone and through the use of Bluetooth technology as well.

Instead of carrying extra sets of keys, why not use what we have in our pockets, which are our smartphones, right? Not only can the TEO locks be unlocked using Bluetooth, but they can also be shared, meaning that if you’re not at home and you have friends or family visiting, you can tell them to let themselves in by sharing with them the “key” to your TEO lock. The accompanying app also lets you modify permissions, such as who has access, how long will they have access for, and at the same time lets you monitor who has been using the key which might come in handy at work places to know who is going in and out of the building, who was the last one to lock up, and so on.

So what happens when you lose your smartphone or if the TEO lock runs out of battery? In the case of the former, it’s as simple as re-pairing your new phone with the lock, and according to OckCorp, they are designing a special fob that can be used to “jump start” the lock in the event it runs out of battery. It is a pretty interesting idea and at the moment, the TEO lock is a Kickstarter project that is seeking funding, so if you’d like to learn more or check it out, head on over to its Kickstarter page for the details.

The TEO Padlock Can Be Unlocked Using Bluetooth original content from Ubergizmo.

Meet meMINI, a wearable videocamera that’s currently seeking $50,000 in crowdfunding on Kickstarter to help you save the best bits of your daily life for posterity without having to record everything and then edit the footage for highlights.

Wearable life logging cameras are nothing new, even if the idea of walking around with an all-seeing digital eye recording your daily life (and therefore other peoples’ too) still raises eyebrows. Whether it’s GoPro for adrenaline junkies, helmet cams for police or cyclists, or Google Glass for, well, Robert Scoble’s personal shower time, the hardware kit to capture your unique-snowflake first-person perspective on everyday life is already out there.

But — privacy issues aside — there are some problems with existing lifelogging tech. Not least, the too-much-data issue. Those cameras that take a record-it-all approach introduce the tedious and time-consuming problem of sifting and editing the reams of data generated to pull out the gems.

Those bits of hardware where you selectively record your bits and bobs (so to speak), a la Glass, mean you’re inevitably going to miss some cool stuff — i.e. when you don’t manage to shout OK GLASS RECORD THIS SHIZZLE NOW fast enough.

Well meMINI’s makers reckon they have a neat solution to all these problems. Their wearable camera prototype records (and deletes) a continuous video loop until the moment something cool happens. At which point you press a button on the front of the device which tells it to save the last recorded loop — allowing you to capture that cool thing that just happened — just after it happened.

The size of the video loop that meMINI buffers will apparently be configurable to between five seconds or up to five minutes of past time, depending on your preference. The finished product will also include two RAM chips to ensure there’s no disconnect between when you press the record it button and when the hardware can start recording.

Now, depending on your perspective, all of this is either insanely cool, or rocketing off into a dystopian future where we are all inescapably tied to our transgressions, humiliations, failings and faux pas since these events can be forever recalled from the great all-seeing buffer in the CCTV-strewn sky, and replayed ad infinitum (until we are truly, truly sorry).

Mostly, though, meMINI’s awesome/terrifying qualities will depend on how slick its tech is. And, right now, the current prototype is very far from a smooth operator. It’s also rather large and heavy for something you’re supposed to wear on the front of your t-shirt – although its creators say part of the reason they are taking the crowdfunding route is to finesse and “dramatically” miniaturise the tech. (Exactly how small they are hoping it will end up is unclear.) 

The protoype also didn’t work as intended when I tested it. And the hardware button on the front felt like it wanted to fall off. Or fall in. But hey, crack open its two plastic halves and meMINI’s messy electronic guts, hacked together with glue and bits of metal, spill out. This is cutting-edge hardware, Kickstarter-style. So really, it’s a bit harsh to judge its creators for taking a DIY development approach.

It is worth noting that we’ve seen this sort of buffer recall ability before — for audio in app form, with the likes of Heard, for instance. And, even more pertinently, in Looxcie, a lifelogging camera with a retroactive recording feature that’s out in the market already.

So MeMINI is not the first mover here. And it’s not planning on shipping its hardware to backers until June — assuming it hits its funding goal (although that’s looking likely with, at the time of writing, more than $35,000 pledged and still 26 days left of its campaign).

MeMINI’s makers are promising a three-hour battery life for their camera, which is an hour longer than the Looxcie 3 will apparently give you. However the meMINI is currently a lot bigger and heavier so that extra juice may well add substantial additional heft to carry around vs the 1.3-ounce, 1.5cm-thin Looxcie.

MeMINI is designed to be attached through your clothing via a magnetic backplate, which doesn’t sit too well with its current size and weight — with the prototype dragging at thinner fabrics (yet the magnet requires fabrics that aren’t too thick to ensure a secure fix). So meMINI’s makers really do need to pull off a dramatic miniaturisation trick for this to be a comfortable wearable for everyday situations.

A smaller and lighter meMINI stuck in the middle of your t-shirt would also probably look less intimidating at the breakfast table, as you film your kids goofing around.

The meMINI will offer 1080p HD video recording, vs the Looxcie 3′s 780p. But it is more expensive, with a early bird Kickstarter backer price-tag of $150 (or $170 thereafter) vs $100 for the Looxcie 3. Plus, you have to wait til June (at the earliest) to get it — giving Looxcie a chance to work on uping the resolution of its range in the meanwhile.

Add to that, the Looxcie 3 is generally more fully featured, with the ability to simultaneously live stream and record content, live-stream directly to Facebook, and snap still photos. But meMINI’s makers look to be focusing on the retroactive recording feature — along with a cloud service that you can opt to save clips to — which isn’t a bad thing in itself.

If they can make a retroactive video camera that’s really simple to operate, with just the one big button to press, that could appeal to more mainstream users.

Judging by the current state of the prototype they do have a way to go to get to ‘effortless operation’, though.