Punchline have launched a Kickstarter to help fund a documentary about the band:
Our band, Punchline, will be celebrating our 20 year anniversary this July. It’s been a remarkable journey to get where we are today, and we would like to commemorate it with an ambitious goal: to make a Netflix Music Special.
Ted Leo has announced a Kickstarter for a new solo album:
I probably had enough songs to complete an album a good five years ago, but a number of things – personal and financial – prevented me from doing it. And though it’s always been a constant source of low-level anxiety that so much time continues to pass by, I’ve also come to see that time as a boon. When I missed that first hurdle, that first deadline to PRODUCE SOMETHING, the world didn’t end. Time kept moving, and all of the expectations that I had for MYSELF morphed into a more compassionate and contemplative group of feelings that were more about incubating, honing, experimenting, learning, and rebuilding a certain amount of confidence that I think I’d lost in my stymied relationship with the cycles of releases and promotion and needing support (not just financial) from the label I was working for; and so I started to actually just allow myself that time.
Manton Reece has started a new Kickstarter for a book and service dedicated to a new platform for microblogs:
Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?
In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.
Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.
Amen. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, and it’s one of the reasons I continue to run Chorus (and our forums) on domains I own powered mostly by software I can easy move to other servers if I need to.
The Fidget Cube that started on Kickstarter is now up for order on their website.
An unusually addicting, high-quality desk toy designed to help you focus. Fidget at work, in class, and at home in style. Fidget Cube has six sides. Each side features something to fidget with: Click. Glide. Flip. Breathe. Roll. Spin.
This is devilishly clever.
The Oatmeal has launched a Kickstarter for a new card game called “Bears vs Babies.”
A Kickstarter has launched to press a reproduction of the Golden Record that was included on the Voyager space probes:
The Voyager Golden Record contains the story of Earth expressed in sounds, images, and science: Earth’s greatest music from myriad cultures and eras, from Bach and Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, Senegalese percussion to Solomon Island panpipes. Dozens of natural sounds of our planet — birds, a train, a baby’s cry — are collaged into a lovely sound poem. There are spoken greetings in 55 human languages, and one whale language, and more than one hundred images encoded in analog that depict who, and what, we are.
Amazon has launched a section of their store dedicated to products that were launched on Kickstarter:
Getting a creative idea off the ground is often just the first step. Amazon Launchpad is a chance for creators to be discovered by new audiences, and to serve those audiences well by using Amazon’s retail expertise and infrastructure. The program offers custom product pages, comprehensive marketing support, and access to Amazon’s global fulfillment network.
A new study by the University of Pennsylvania looks at how Kickstarter impacts the economy. The Kickstarter blog has a run down of the findings:
- Employed 283,000 part-time collaborators in bringing creative projects to life.
- Created 8,800 new companies and nonprofits, and 29,600 full-time jobs.
- Generated more than $5.3 billion in direct economic impact for those creators and their communities.
Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica and Objectified, is Kickstarting a movie on legendary product designer Dieter Rams:
This Kickstarter campaign will fund the film and also help to preserve Dieter’s incredible design archive for the future. There’s a trove of drawings, photographs, and other material spanning Dieter’s fifty plus years of work, and it needs to be properly conserved.
Turntable Kitchen have launched a Kickstarter for a new vinyl subscription service called Sounds Delicious. The idea is that you’ll get exclusive full-length cover albums by a variety of different artists:
We’ve asked some of indie music’s most exciting and well-respected artists to choose any full length album they love and cover it from front to back. We’ll produce their recordings on limited edition vinyl packaged in beautifully designed jackets. The records will be released exclusively through the Sounds Delicious subscription service and delivered to you every month.
Steven Levy, writing for Blackchannel, on the new device from Pebble called the “Pebble Core.” It’s basically a little keychain sized device that can stream music from Spotify.
Today, Pebble is launching Kickstarter campaigns for three products. Only two of them are smart watches. It’s the third product that will garner the most attention. It’s a Pebble that’s not a watch. It is optimized for a single task: taking a run. It’s a white plastic and black rubber block, a little thicker than a mahjong tile, with an orange clasp that grasps a keyring. It plays music, has GPS and other sensors that can track activity, and a 3G cellular modem that allows it to work even if your phone isn’t on you.