Hasta La Gadget!

The GlassUp, an ambitious Indiegogo project that wanted to take the concept of Glass and make it more about passive consumption of content than about privacy-treading recording, video and photography, was in danger of losing a full third of its funding earlier today due to a PayPal rule, but is now on track again after the payments giant reversed its initial decision.

In what was potentially a disastrous development for hardware companies and others that use Indiegogo to fund projects and collect money from backers to help devices enter production, PayPal had at first stated that any backing pledges made via its service would have to be withheld until after GlassUp delivered its hardware to buyers. That’s fine and dandy when it comes to traditional e-commerce endeavours, where a product is generally shipped before someone is charged, but awkward when the whole point is to fund the creation of something that doesn’t exist with money freely offered up front.

GlassUp had managed to raise over $100,000 when it found out that PayPal had locked its account and made a third of its funds (those pledged via PayPal, as opposed to the other payment methods on Indiegogo) unavailable to the creators, which understandable put a bit of a dent in their plans. The project still has some ways to go – it needs $50,000 more in just a week – and it turns out that the PayPal donations were turned off around a week ago, with GlassUp creator Francesco Giartosio finding out only when a prospective backer notified him that his pledged didn’t go through.

PayPal has resolved the issue as of today, and offered the following statement to TechCrunch via a spokesperson:

We looked into what was happening with GlassUp and corrected the situation earlier today. GlassUp now has access to all of the funds that they’ve raised on Indiegogo through PayPal. We think they are developing a fascinating product and don’t want to impede their innovation in any way.

So from PayPal’s perspective, this was a simple screw-up and the company even goes out of its way to commend GlassUp’s “innovation.” But the fact remains that for up to a week PayPal had locked the GlassUp account, meaning it’s not clear where exactly the funding would be at this point had that not happened.

GlassUp could still make its goal by the deadline, but there’s always a chance that future crowdfunding programs face similar difficulties. Perhaps the answer lies in looking elsewhere for handling pledges to these kinds of campaigns, but keeping PayPal off the list of available payment methods would definitely limit the ease with which contributors can offer up funds, so hopefully this issue helps make sure similar problems don’t happen with other projects down the road.

Additional reporting by Natasha Lomas

It’s been a crazy 36 days since Plug started its Kickstarter campaign. First, Plug is now called Lima due to some trademark issues. But everything else stays the same. The $69 adapter will seamlessly transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. And now it will support Chromecast.

As a reminder, here’s how Lima works: you plug your router into the little adapter, as well as one or multiple USB drives. After that, you launch the app on your computer and then everything will go through Lima thanks to a deep filesystem integration. All your files will be moved to those drives and available on all your devices, at home or away. The only limit of this Dropbox alternative is the amount of storage space you have on your USB drives.

Lima is actually a small Linux-based machine that creates a VPN network between your devices and the adapter. The overall experience feels a lot like browsing and using your Dropbox files, except that you can choose to cache some folders on your device or not — it works like the offline playlist button in Spotify. Finally, you don’t have to pay a subscription fee and you own your files since they are not stored in an Amazon S3 data center. Lima expects to deliver its adapters in December.

For its new Google Chromecast feature, the company takes advantage of the SDK to stream media content to your TV using your phone or tablet. Music, photos and even videos should all work. For a little bit more than $100 ($69 + $35), you can stream everything that is on your computer from your sofa.

“We automatically re-encode all the videos that are stored on Lima,” co-founder and CEO Séverin Marcombes tells me. “An h.264 version of each video will be kept in Lima’s cache.”

That step was already necessary to allow Lima users to watch their videos on their phones and tablets — especially for iOS devices that can really only stream h.264 videos. The team just took it one step further by building Chromecast support into the iOS and Android apps.

Even more impressive than the device itself is the Kickstarter campaign. Back in July I wrote: “the Kickstarter campaign just started but its goal is pretty low. At $69,000, the Paris-based team will certainly attract a thousand backers to reach its goal.” It turns out that this sentence diminishes what the team has accomplished.

In just 12 hours, Lima managed to shatter its $69,000 goal. In fact, with $858,000 and 24 days to go, the campaign is now the 10th most-funded Kickstarter campaign in the technology category. In this list, there are pretty well-known projects, such as Form1 and Oculus Rift. The question on everyone’s mind now is whether the campaign will break the $1 million barrier.

There’s a thriving cottage industry of smartphone extension accessories, seeking to harness all that compute power and battery life, and also often make use of some of the phone’s on-board sensors. Well, here’s another: a neat iPhone extension for macrophotography fans that could also have a variety of medical and/or industrial use-cases.

The Illumoscope — currently seeking $60,000 on Kickstarter to fund manufacturing costs — is a case for the iPhone 4/4S/5 that has built in macro photography optics plus a light conditioning system to allow for optimal illumination of whatever it is you want a closer look at. The extension means you can use the iPhone’s camera to get a lot closer to a subject than you would otherwise be able to, to capture very fine detail. Or go investigating.

Examples of things you might want to peek at in more detail include jewellery stamps, electronic circuitry, insects and detailed art works, say its creators. They also envisage various medical scenarios such as checking out your moles or looking into your inner ears for infection — rather than having to get someone else to do it for you (the Illumoscope was actually devised by a audiologist). Yes there are various macro lens iPhone accessories already on the market but the Illumoscope goes one better by supporting multiple use-cases, not merely the taking of pretty close-ups.

It also makes use of the phone’s built in flash to do the lighting up required to get a clear close-up but moderates the beam to avoid over-saturation. The basic system consists of an iPhone case (which can be reversed if you want to switch back to using the phone’s camera sans macro optics) plus a variety of attachment accessories to support the various use-cases.

Attachments include a borescope for in-ear or other nook-and-cranny investigations; an observation chamber where insects can be contained for closer inspection; and fixed view and measured view scopes for scanning large areas at high magnification. One posited scenario for the latter attachments is checking your hotel bed for bed-bugs. The creators also note the borescope attachments could be used for peeking into port openings on electronic devices — which could be handy for makers and tinkerers.

The campaign launched this week and most of the early bird $25 pledges have been snapped up already. For that pledge price you get an Illumoscope plus two observation chambers, two borescope tips, one measured view scope and the Illumoscope software (the device apparently works with “many” iOS camera apps too, though).

If it hits its funding target — there’s a way to go but the campaign only launched this week and has grabbed 40 backers already with 28 days left to run — the Illumoscope’s creators are aiming to ship to backers this October.

This week we learned that NASA was sending its own 3D printer into space to support the astronauts on the International Space Station. But NASA didn’t build the printer. Instead they farmed it out to a company called Made In Space, a startup focused on making a solid, space-ready 3D printer that can survive the vast darkness of the cosmos.

That company has a great sense of humor and wanted to talk a little bit more about their product and the printer. In fact, they explained that they are currently working on a closed loop system that would allow the astronauts to reuse plastic over and over again in the printer. I spoke with the founders of Made In Space, Aaron Kemmer, Jason Dunn, and Mike Chen, about their new product and what it feels like to be the first additive manufacturing company to send their product into orbit.

TC: Let’s start with this question… How can you be sure the printer won’t become sentient and lock the pod bay doors?

Made In Space: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t answer that.

TC: Tell us about the printer. Why is it special?

MIS: Our printer will be the first device to ever manufacture anything off of the Earth.

This milestone is significant because up until now, everything that is needed in space must be made on Earth and then launched to space, which is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process. This is a tremendous impediment to progress in the space industry, and is also one of the primary factors that makes space missions so risky. You really need to plan for every contingency ahead of time.

In 2014, When our 3D printer starts manufacturing parts on-demand in space, NASA and other space entities will have the capability to repair their space missions on the fly if something goes wrong.

Astronauts will be able to create new parts as-needed on the station in a matter of minutes or hours, instead of waiting months to years for the needed parts to arrive on station. This will speed up development time, accelerate the innovation cycle, and increase the safety of space missions.

TC: Why didn’t you just buy a Makerbot and fly it into space?

MIS: When we started to bring additive manufacturing to space, we originally looked at adapting commercial off-the-shelf 3D printers. In 2011, we conducted in-depth testing of off-the-shelf 3D printers in microgravity. The results of our testing clearly indicated that no 3D printers designed for terrestrial use were fit for the space environment.

There are quite a number of significant differences between a 3D printer designed for use on Earth and one that is fit for use in space. We have had the good fortune of working with and employing quite a few highly experienced aerospace engineers with extensive experience creating space-ready hardware.

Not only does the printer need to work in extended microgravity, but it needs to be capable of surviving the extreme forces imposed on it during launch, and meet a very long list of NASA imposed requirements to fly hardware to the International Space Station. These are just some of the developments we’ve needed to make. It’s taken us thousands of pages of internal documentation just to describe the engineering work we’ve done to get our printer ready for space.

TC: How are you associated with NASA? NASA spins of companies now? Like Tang?

MIS: NASA is one of our customers. It is common for NASA to contract private companies to provide products and services for space exploration. A good example is Boeing. One of the most featured in the media these days is SpaceX, who is now delivering goods for NASA to the Space Station on their rockets.

The “new space” industry is getting more exciting with every passing year, where startups in Silicon Valley like Made in Space are working with NASA and other groups to push the envelope of what is possible with space missions.

TC: How did you test this for space travel?

MIS: The process starts with an extensive suite of modeling and simulation tools that we use to run analyses on every detail of our design.

The primary way that we test our hardware for space travel, though, is by repeatedly testing our systems in an actual microgravity environment, on parabolic aircraft flights through the NASA Flight Opportunities Program. To date we’ve accumulated over 500 parabolas of zero-gravity manufacturing time.

We also put our printer through rigorous environmental testing with NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center, where we test everything from electromagnetic interference and radiated emissions, the ability to survive launch vibrations, crew safety, and just about everything in-between.

We now have over a dozen full-time employees and a team of 20+ people.

TC: So this is very important: will they ever print a Yoda in space?

MIS: We asked our team, and they told us that they would try. We told them “do or do not, there is no try.”

As BlackBerry will now readily admit, gesture-based touchscreens have taken over from physical keyboards in the mobile space. But there’s still plenty of plastic keys on and around PCs. Not that people aren’t trying to change that. The Leap Motion controller is one well-funded device that’s attempting to move things along by letting you swipe in mid-air to interact with a terminal, rather than clicking on a boring old mouse.

Well, here’s another: Haptix uses twin cameras to peek at what your hands are doing and turn their actions into input signals. It supports both in-air gestures — a la Leap Motion — but also interprets 2D gestures (such as pinch to zoom) made on any flat surface. In other words, it can turn a tabletop into a touchscreen. Haptix’s creators, who have just kicked off a Kickstarter campaign seeking $100,000 to help fund manufacturing costs, are Darren Lim and Lai Xue. Lim is a 2013 Thiel Fellow and Xue has ‘used to be the youngest engineer at Intel‘ on his CV.

Supporting both 2D and 3D gestures means Haptix users can rest their hands while using it — thereby heading off any complains about tired wrists, which have been levelled at Leap Motion in (the mostly lukewarm — okay, damning) reviews. It also means the surface of a laptop keyboard can be used as a touchscreen instead of having to reach over for a trackpad or mouse. However just offering 2D gesture sensing wasn’t enough either, says Lim, arguing that the 3D sensing element is essential to making the device feel “intuitive”. “It’s crucial to see your fingers on the screen,” he adds.

Thus Haptix also supports mid-air swipes/typing too, so it’s not tethered to a flat surface if you don’t want to be. It’s a cake-and-eat it approach — with the only limitation being that gestures need to be performed within its field of vision. Currently the Kickstarter prototype Haptix has a 120 degree field of view but Lim and Xue are hoping to expand that to 150 degrees when/if they get to ship product.

And before you ask, Haptix does have an algorithm to detect when a user is actually typing on a physical keyboard to avoid confusing real typing with some other input gesture. It also includes an infrared camera so it can still function in dingy environments, a la Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral for XBox.

As well as adding a gesture interface layer to laptops and computers, Haptix’s creators reckon it could be used by people wanting to control an Internet-connected TV. Albeit, that requires rigging up the device so that it covers the appropriate patch of your coffee table. Which looks pretty inelegant, judging by their product shots. The design of Haptix certainly seems better suited to closer use-cases — such as being clipped onto a laptop screen where it can point down at the keyboard.

One laptop/PC use-case its creators envisage for Haptix is being able to optimise the work flow of people who have to manipulate a lot of data in spreadsheets — such as accountants. Once it’s affixed to their computers these Excel ninjas would no longer need to shuttle their hand back and forth to a mouse/trackpad but could perform all those essential micro-mousing movements just by sliding their number-loving fingers over the keyboard. (If ‘Kinect for accountants’ can’t rock the accounts department, nothing can.)

Haptix currently works with Windows and Ubuntu, but Android (for smart TV integration) and OS X support are also in the works. Lim and Xue are also planning on releasing an API — assuming their invention flies — so that developers can start playing around and crafting dedicated apps for Haptix. In the meanwhile it integrates with Windows via the system’s support for multitouch inputs —  and Ubuntu via a driver that enables multitouch function. Lim claims Haptix’s performance is not at all laggy, and feels “as responsive as using a mouse”.

The Kickstarter campaign is offering the Haptix device itself for an early bird price of $59. There’s also a $25 pledge for people wanting to try turning their own webcam into a gesture-sensing input device using software based on the algorithms driving Haptix.