Megaman has firm a place in the hearts of many, the evidence of which is blatant in the runaway success of its descendant — Mighty No. 9′s — Kickstarter campaign. The funding goal was ambitious, seeking millions, yet saw its milestones reached at a clipped rate, such as the unlocking of PS3, Xbox 360, and […]
A night out at the local watering hole can be a pain sometimes, having to elbow your way through crowds and struggle to catch the bartender’s eye, all for a tasty beverage. If only we could leave all the hard work to a machine. Fortunately, Monsieur, the “robotic bartender” that we first met at TechCrunch Distrupt a few weeks ago, is back to deliver a Jetsonian experience to those who thirst for more than tech. It’s certainly not the first of its kind, but the delivery method employed here is of a subtler sort, downplaying the anthropomorphic angle and hiding away the mechanism inside a streamlined casing. The home-bound version is significantly more compact (and less expensive) than the enterprise edition seen above, and it should be making its way to consumers soon. Grab a glass and join us after the break to see what’s in store.%Gallery-slideshow90894%
Filed under: Household, Robots
Source: Monsieur
We’re all living on borrowed time. Those on their deathbeds would kill to have just one more hour or one more minute or even just one more second to breathe the air and see the world before leaving it forever. So the big question for everyone who’s still here, alive and breathing, is: are you making every second count?
Sometimes, the obligations of life make some people forget what it means to live. Instead, they just exist – and as some say, that’s worse than death. There to remind everyone that the end is coming – and that they should live their lives to the fullest, instead – is Tikker.
Tikker is a wristwatch that’s unlike any other. Aside from showing you what time it is, it also counts down the time you have left before you croak. Of course, the watch can’t predict exactly when you’ll die. Instead, your “expiration date” is set after you fill out a questionnaire and deduct your current age from the results.
Creator Fredrik Colting drew inspiration for Ticker from his grandfather’s death, explaining: “It made me think about death and the transience of life, and I realized that nothing matters when you are dead. Instead what matters is what we do when we are alive.”
There’s wisdom in his words. If you agree and would like to support Ticker, then make a pledge to back the project. You can get your very own Tikker watch by making a pledge of at least $39(USD) over on Kickstarter.
One of the coolest products ever to hit Kickstarter was the 3Doodler pen. This is a pen that uses a meltable plastic material to allow users to draw three-dimensional artwork in the air. This particular Kickstarter project obliterated its fundraising goal on Kickstarter in only hours. Ultimately, it went on to raise over $2 million […]
Sometimes I see the kinds of toys being sold in stores today and I worry. Baby dolls with a diapered monkey pet, pole dancer dolls (apparently, these exist), shopping spree board games… Don’t get me wrong, these toys are probably fun and your kid will probably love them.
But I’d love to see more toys with better educational values on the shelves, because that way, they have tons of fun and actually learn something – like with the Robot Turtles board game.
Thought up by Dan Shapiro, Robot Turtles is a board game that teaches your kids the basic language of programming. The premise of the game is simple: the kids get a stack of action cards, while an adult reads the instructions and moves the turtle for the on the board. When they want to move the turtle in a certain way, they have to pick a card and lay it on the table.
Don’t you wish you played something like this growing up before you enrolled at, say, MIT or the University of Management and Technology, to take up some IT course so that basic programming would’ve been at least one of your first languages? Yeah, I bet you do.
Dan sums the entire game up pretty nicely: “The little programmers put instruction cards down, driving the turtles through the maze, but the grownup is the computer, executing commands on the board. At its heart, Robot Turtles is a game about bossing around adults. Just like programming is about bossing around computers.”
A lot of people think Robot Turtles is a good idea, because it raised over $630,000 on Kickstarter, which is many times over Dan’s $25,000 project goal. If you didn’t have a chance to make a pledge to get the game, then you can join the mailing list on the Robot Turtles website to find out when it becomes available again.
Funny thing is, this isn’t the first time turtles have been used to help kids learn how to program…
[via Dvice]
It’s not news every time a Kickstarter product starts shipping to backers, but in the case of 3Doodler, it’s worth a mention. At last count, the startup had raised $2.3 million to fund its 3D printing pen, and with a cost of $99 per device, well, you do the math: that’s a lot of people waiting for their new toy to arrive. And we mean it when we say “toy” — while you won’t be creating anything useful like a gun or a Van Gogh knockoff, there’s really nothing more addictive than “drawing” in the air with melted plastic, and watching it solidify. For those of you who ordered early, you already know what you’re in for. As for the rest of you, your next chance to get one will be in early 2014, though you can place a pre-order today if you like. Really, though, we suggest you revisit our hands-on video, embedded below; we’re descriptive writers, but nothing we say can do justice to a pen with molten plastic flowing out of it.
Filed under: Misc, Peripherals
There’s an increasing opportunity in helping hardware startups bring their products to market, and Toronto ecommerce startup ShopLocket has identified a key area in that process where they might be able to help out, and pick up some new business in the process. The company is introducing its new pre-order platform at the Glazed Wearable conference in San Francisco today, giving hardware startups and product-based companies a way to book sales of devices before they ever hit the production lines.
Often companies like Pebble will launch on Kickstarter, bringing in considerable interest from an early adopter crowd during a campaign that could span a month or two. But then there’s a big gap between the end of those campaigns and the actual ship date of their product, and in that gap you run the risk of losing a lot of the publicity steam built up during the crowdfunding phase.
Pebble launched its own pre-order portal, and others like the Thalmic Labs MYO armband just started right out the gate with an open-ended pre-order period, but often that can take a lot of work and building your own platform, as Lockitron did. ShopLocket wants to make all of those things easier, adding support for pre-order campaigns to its lightweight storefront platform.
“ShopLocket can either be used as an alternative to Kickstarter or Indiegogo for an initial launch, [or] it can be used after a crowdfunding campaign to allow companies to continue collecting pre-orders,” ShopLocket founder and CEO Katherine Hague explained in an interview. “When used as a replacement to traditional crowdfunding platforms, ShopLocket could be considered an elegant plug-and-play alternative to something like Selfstarter [Lockitron’s in-house tool, which it released for others to use].”
Already, ShopLocket’s platform has been quietly helping companies debut and build continued interest in their products. ECG identification tech wearable Nymi used it to fund their device Kickstarter-style, and others including Nomiku and GlassUp are now running their pre-order campaigns with it, after having successfully raised funds on other platforms. Selfstarter campaigns require ample setup and knowledge of code, while ShopLocket’s system is fully customizable with a graphic interface that even total coding amateurs can manage.
To power the payments part of its new service, ShopLocket has turned to Stripe, which it chose over competing options like PayPal and Amazon Payments for a number of reasons.
“For our sellers, the process of creating a Stripe account is incredibly easy [and] we are in the process of further optimizing the seller flow, so that sellers don’t even have to sign up with Stripe until they actually want to start charging on pre-orders — something not possible with PayPal or Amazon,” Hague said. “For buyers, Stripe is actually a more accessible platform than PayPal or Amazon, which generally require accounts to make a purchase. Stripe will allow buyers to checkout with a simple credit card form, no account required.”
Stripe also offers native design integration, so buyers aren’t shuttled away to a separate site and then shuttled back in to complete the transaction, which is a big advantage in terms of decreasing cart abandonment rates and generally providing an experience that businesses can control in every respect.
I wondered whether this emerging market segment might not be a little too niche for ShopLocket to focus much attention on, but Hague says there’s plenty of interest already, and that’s also growing at a rapid clip. So far, they’ve found over 500 projects launched launched in products and hardware every month, which represent tens of millions of dollars raised.
“This represents only a small segment of the overall market,” Hague adds. “For these companies, ShopLocket is a better solution than a traditional hosted storefront for the next phase of their business. We let them use any website, including their existing one, to grow from pre-orders to a full shopping cart over time. We believe that the next billion dollar storefront platform will be born from serving this rapidly growing market of new product creators.”
One great thing about sites like Kickstarter is this, you can more or less gauge its “success” even before the actual deal is manufactured, since the number of backers who put money on where their mouths are certainly depict their unwavering faith in a particular project. Sometimes, when they have hit their financial goal but the money continues to pour in, it is then time to introduce the idea of stretch goals. Sixense has already had its fair share of public support (read: money) to get started, but now they have announced a totally new stretch goal – support for Android as well as iOS platforms that will feature its future STEM System wireless motion tracking platform.
Apart from mobile platform support, it will also be able to power up the STEM System’s modular motion trackers. Take for instance, virtual and augmented reality applications which could be able to transform your mobile device into a VR head-mounted display or virtual camera. The STEM System will also pave the way for a pair of motion controllers o work with Android consoles. This updated Sixense software development kit (SDK) will only run on Android 3.2 or higher and iOS 6 or higher platforms. [Kickstarter Page]
Sixense Announces Android And iOS Support Stretch Goal original content from Ubergizmo. 
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While the cost of 3D printers are coming down, it’s unlikely we’ll start to see them invade everyone’s homes ’til they become much cheaper. That’s the idea, at least, behind the Peachy Printer, a device that’s promising to retail for less than $100. Unlike printers made by companies such as Makerbot, Peachy uses a laser to set objects from liquid resin. The laser is guided by a pair of mirrors that take instructions from your PC’s audio in / out ports, and the system even allows you to scan objects with your own camera. Having launched on Kickstarter three days ago, Peachy Printer has more than tripled its CDN$50,000 goal. We doubt you’ll find anyone trying to build an Aston Martin replica on one of these things, but it’s a neat idea that employs a different 3D-printing method to significantly reduce hardware costs. As usual, you’ll find the pitch video below and anything else you may desire at the source.
Filed under: Misc, Peripherals
Via: 3Ders
Source: Kickstarter
I spent my formative years using up AA batteries at a frenzied pace, and I can’t count the number of times my parents said they wished they could zap my trusty Game Boy dead. While there’s nothing they can do to salvage my childhood now, the folks at Vonkil Technologies have worked up something that should help a new generation of parents remotely kill toys at will.
Enter the Batthead, the star of a new Kickstarter campaign that wants to make your rechargeable AA batteries much, much smarter.
Here’s the concept in a nutshell: they have essentially taken a rechargeable AA battery and crammed a Bluetooth 4.0 radio and an accelerometer into it. You probably see where this is going — thanks to a companion app, users can remotely enable and disable those batteries in a bid to preserve more power for when it’s really needed. Of course, parents can don their troll hats and remotely shut down their kids’ toys from afar using their iOS devices (the Vonkil team says that Android support is in the works too).
The accelerometer adds a curious bit of awareness to the fold, as users can set the batteries to activate only when they’re moved or oriented in a certain position. I can already hear you murmuring about the questionable value that brings to the table, but the notion of a flashlight that turns on automatically when you pick it up still strikes me as awfully neat.
Now I can’t blame you if this all sounds a little familiar. A seemingly similar concept called the TetherCell was successfully Kickstarted earlier this year (although backers are still waiting for those first shipments to go out). The big difference though comes down to execution: while the TetherCell is also remotely controllable from an iOS device, the fact that the product itself is just a sleeve that wraps around a AAA battery means there’s only so much the team could physically squeeze into the thing. Since the Batthead contains a rechargeable cell in addition to that slew of sensors, we’re ultimately left with a more capable power source.
Of course, there are some caveats to be aware of. Don’t go expecting these things to outperform your trusty set of Eneloops, for one. The team hasn’t yet disclosed that rechargeable cell’s capacity yet (I’ve reached out and will update the post if and when they do), but I can’t imagine that longevity hasn’t taken a hit considering how much space all those other bits must take up. And then there’s the price differential to consider, too — a single, early-run Batthead without an accelerometer will set you back $19 CAD, while the fully tricked out version will cost you $40 CAD. Not exactly the most cost-effective way to power your myriad remote controls, but it just may be worth it for some tinkerers and connected home buffs out there.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
