The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

We’ve seen this happen before. Last year we wrote a post called Blockbuster Effects that detailed the same phenomenon in the Games and Comics categories. Two big projects brought tons of new people to Kickstarter who went on to back more than 1,000 other projects in the following weeks, pledging more than $1 million. Projects bring new backers to other projects. That supports our mission too.

I have something every detractor doesn’t have: the analytics. Most of the backers of my film aren’t people on Kickstarter who had $10 and were deciding where to give it, and then gave it to me instead of someone else. They came to Kickstarter because of me, because of this project. They wouldn’t have been there otherwise. In fact, a lot of people who didn't know about Kickstarter came and wound up giving money to a lot of other projects too. So for people to say, 'That’s ... up; you’re stealing money from documentaries' is just not a sensible argument.

• The new KALQ keyboard layout enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices. In the new layout, all the vowels except for "y" are placed in the area for the right thumb, while more keys are assigned to the left thumb. After a short amount of practice, users were able to type 34% faster with the KALQ keyboard than with a traditional QWERTY layout. [url]
• Minuum is a space-efficient, single-row keyboard layout that uses auto-correction algorithms to intelligently predict the words users are attempting to type. The traditional QWERTY order of letters is mostly in place to make it easier to transition from standard software keyboards, and the powerful predictive typing algorithms ensure accurate text entry.[url]
• IBM envisions a virtual keyboard that can adapt to each user's unique typing style. The keyboard would gather data on the user's typing habits and compile an "anatomical profile" of the user, which it would then use to subtly adapt the keyboard to the user. [url]

• Hopefully you are well aware of Jonathan Coulton, internet sensation and all around nice guy musician. We've written about him many, many times in the past, as an example of a musician who really embraced the internet and his fanbase, connected with them in a really genuine way and has built up a hugely successful career as a professional musician while ignoring all of the traditional routes to music stardom. Now, he's teamed up with famed comic book artist Greg Pak to do do a graphic novel based on characters from various Coulton songs. Plus, Coulton is writing a new song for the book as well. My favorite part about this is how this collaboration came to be. You can trace it back to a single tweet: And people say the internet isn't awesome? The illustrations are also being done by another top comic book artist, Takeshi Miyazawa, so it's basically just a whole bunch of awesome folks coming together, via Twitter, to do something cool that should exist. Given who is involved, it should be no surprise that it quickly shot past its target threshold, and Pak has already said that due to the overwhelming response, the book is going to be even longer than originally planned.
  
• Last summer, we wrote about the band Secret Cities, when one of its members talked about how wonderful he thinks it is when he finds out someone downloaded his music, even if it wasn't an authorized copy -- because he knows that obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy, and you'll never get fans who like you if you can't get them to hear your music first. The band has never lived together in the same city, and has always recorded in the past on their own computers, sending the various bits and pieces between each other wherever they were at the time. However, for their next album, they want to try going into a studio, and recording it the old fashioned way -- so they've booked a great studio in San Francisco, and are using Kickstarter to (hopefully) raise the cash to pay for the studio time. They're about halfway to their goal with 15 days to go, which usually means the project will get funded, but it's no guarantee. So you can kick in and help make their dream a reality. The band's got nearly two dozen songs ready to go, and just watch the video above to see how giddy they are about this project.
  
• Finally, we've got an interesting project from Ondi Timoner, a documentary filmmaker, who is working on a really ambitious project called a Total Disruption telling a variety of stories about innovators of all kind. While most of the stories involve talking to various great entrepreneurs (including some of our favorite entrepreneurs out there: Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Tony Hsieh from Zappos, Reid Hoffman from Linkedin and Bram Cohen from BitTorrent), Timoner recently decided to do a whole series on Amanda Palmer, as she goes around performing the house concerts from her mega-successful Kickstarter campaign. It's important to note that this is not about creating another 1.5 hour "documentary" with all of these folks, but building an information service / portal that contains as many stories as possible of innovators and the innovation they're working on. This is a sorely needed visual and audio history of some of the most interesting innovations of this era. This project is about 60% funded, with 24 days to go, which is a good sign, but the dollar amount is pretty high, so it may still be a challenge. We love really ambitious projects, and this seems like a great one to check out and support if you agree.

After five years, we're finally close to releasing the documentary. Our final step is to pay the network for photos from the set of the show. These photos are extremely relevant to the story, and we can't move forward with the release of the documentary until our fees are paid to the network. This is where you come in. Help us pay the network fees so every Arrested fan can see this documentary!

This was not a "failure!"

Platforms like Kickstarter have changed the way the market is functioning, and our ways of thinking about it (even here on Techdirt) have to catch up.

Bjork's campaign did not fail, even though the results were not what she was hoping for. She successfully learned that the market was not interested in this product.

Spending £375,000 of her own money? Now THAT would have been a failure.

Using Kickstarter is more like running a science experiment than it is like selling a product. It increases the efficiency of the market by orders of magnitude, and apparently beyond our ability to think about it clearly.

Of course, Warner Bros. still owns Veronica Mars and we would need their blessing and cooperation to pull this off. Kristen and I met with the Warner Bros. brass, and they agreed to allow us to take this shot. They were extremely cool about it, as a matter of fact. Their reaction was, if you can show there’s enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we’re on board. So this is it. This is our shot. I believe it's the only one we've got. It's nerve-wracking. I suppose we could fail in spectacular fashion, but there's also the chance that we completely revolutionize how projects like ours can get made. No Kickstarter project ever has set a goal this high. It's up to you, the fans, now. If the project is successful, our plan is to go into production this summer and the movie will be released in early 2014.

crowdfunding should, by its very nature, be available to EVERYBODY....

here's what i think: THE MARKET IS EFFICIENT.

if ANYBODY wants to give a go at having the community help them with a project, that’s the ARTISTS prerogative. if it fails, then the interest wasn't there.

it should't matter if it's justin bieber, obama, the new kids of the block reunion project, lance armstrong, oprah, or the friendless 18-year old down the street who's been hiding in his bedroom making EDM music.
ANYBODY CAN ASK. that's democracy.

and since crowdfunding is – by definition – in the hands of the community: THE COMMUNITY WILL DETERMINE WHETHER A PROJECT IS SUCCESSFUL.

Boasting a backing from well-known Atlanta Falcons running back Jamal Anderson, the project claimed that it was hoping to create a competitor to EA's NCAA Football game and only needed the relatively paltry sum of $500,000 to develop a PS3 and Xbox 360 title.

However, many of the 3D models and assets compiled by the group, calling itself "Dirty Bird Sports", were found to have been lifted from sites selling other artists work, a roundup of which can be seen at Kotaku.

This is a message from Kickstarter Support. We’re writing to inform you that a project you backed, GameStick: The Most Portable TV Games Console Ever Created, is the subject of an intellectual property dispute.

The law requires that we remove the project from public view until the process is complete or the dispute is resolved. If we are not able to re-post it within 30 days, we will cancel the project, all pledge authorizations will expire, and the project will be permanently unavailable.

If you’d like to manage your pledge, you can do so through the project page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…ever?ref=email

If you have any questions, we encourage you to message the creator directly. You can also do this from the project page.

Thanks so much for your patience and cooperation,
Kickstarter

• At least 86 Kickstarter-funded films have been released theatrically, screening in more than 1,500 North American theaters according to Rentrak. Another 14 films have theatrical premieres slated for 2013.
• According to Rotten Tomatoes, three of the 20 best-reviewed films of 2012 are Kickstarter-funded (The Waiting Room, Brooklyn Castle, and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry). Another Kickstarter-funded film, Pariah, was among the best-reviewed of 2011.
• Two films have been nominated for Oscars in the past two years: Sun Come Up and Incident in New Baghdad. A third, Barber of Birmingham, launched a project after being Oscar-nominated. Three documentary features and two documentary shorts are currently shortlisted for Oscar nominations in 2013: The Waiting Room, Detropia, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Inocente, and Kings Point.
• Kickstarter-funded films comprised 10% of Sundance’s slate in 2012 and 2013. In total, 49 Kickstarter-funded films have been official selections at the prestigious festival.
• Kickstarter-funded films comprised 10% of the 2012 slates at the SXSW Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival. In total, 57 Kickstarter-funded films have premiered at SXSW and 21 at Tribeca.
• At least 16 Kickstarter-funded films have been picked up for national broadcast through HBO, PBS, Showtime, and other networks.
• Kickstarter-funded films have won at least 21 awards at the Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Cannes, and Berlinale festivals.
• Eight Kickstarter-funded films are nominated for Independent Spirit Awards this year.

The music industry may have screwed Lester Chambers for decades, but we the internet public can right their wrong.

Thanks to the open internet (things we fought for against SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, etc.), sites like Kickstarter and other innovations that are being worked on by entrepreneurs right now, we have the opportunity to do right by artists and cut out those who'd mistreat them. We have the opportunity to create solutions that will support artists in the digital world.

Firstly, there's the "Kickstarter is not a store" aspect (which was the name of their initial blog post about the rules). The core change here was prohibiting projects in the Product Design and Technology sections from offering multiple-item reward tiers (e.g. get three widgets, get five widgets, etc.) which had previously been a pretty popular strategy for launching new consumer products on Kickstarter. They felt that offering multiple items would lead to a lot of disappointment when some projects inevitably go wrong, since it gives the impression that the product is "shrink-wrapped and ready to ship" — and if it is, then it shouldn't be on Kickstarter, a platform geared at helping products to completion, not selling finished ones. That makes sense, but it comes with a few problems:

• Kickstarter acknowledges that in some cases it makes sense to sell products as a set — but that in such cases, you won't be allowed to sell them individually. This ignores the wide variety of versatile products that might make sense individually or in sets. For example, take the Ubi computer (a sort of stationary Siri) which finished its funding just two days before the rule change. It's a device designed to be useful as a standalone unit or a network of units throughout a large home — so it offered one, two, three, five and ten packs (and got backers at all those tiers). Now, for comparison, look at the still-funding Light by Moore'sCloud, which is similarly designed to be useful as a single unit or a house-wide solution, but is unable to offer multi-unit package tiers. It's not a perfect comparison because the Light also has an extremely ambitious funding goal and its entry-level price is a bit lower, but it's interesting to note that despite having 1,398 backers to the Ubi's 1,190, it has raised only $157k to the Ubi's $229k. Though both projects are precisely what the Kickstarter rules are supposed to favor — new devices in the advanced prototype stage that needed resources to finalize the development — the Light seems to be held back by the new restrictions.


• Of course, it's not quite that simple, because there's a weird loophole in the rules. Though projects aren't allowed to offer multiple items at specific reward tiers, they are allowed to offer them as add-ons. For those unfamiliar with the Kickstarter add-on process, well, it's not really a process at all: creators tell backers how much money to add to their pledge for various things, then it's up to them to survey the backers after the project ends to find out which add-ons they want, and square that up with the pledge amount. If anyone made a mistake like failing to cover shipping, they have to deal with it themselves using something like Paypal, absorb the loss, or piss off the backer. Thus, many products actually are available in bigger quantities, but many Kickstarter users are unaware of this process, or confused by it, and project comment pages are filled with repeated back-and-forths about how to order. Rather than preventing Kickstarter from being a store, the change has just made it a store with a worse customer experience.


• Then there's a second weird loophole. The rules only apply to the Product Design and Technology categories — projects under Publishing, Graphic Design and Tabletop Games, for example, can still offer multiple copies at various tiers in a very store-like way. In a way this makes sense, since books, posters, board games and decks of cards all have much clearer, simpler supply chains and paths to completion than a new tech gadget or a unique manufactured product. But that's not universally true: some of the best product innovations are the simplest — easy to create, and destined to become ubiquitous. If they fall under the product design category, though, they are forced to pre-sell them one at a time. And then you get some real anomalies, like the still-funding (and highly successful) Dice Rings. They are a manufactured product design in every sense, but because they were accepted to the Tabletop Games category, they can offer reward tiers with rings in several different quantities — and a huge portion of their backers have pledged for those higher tiers. And, once again, they are exactly what Kickstarter is looking for: a neat idea in a late-prototyping stage that needed a final push to enter production. But they would have faced massive restrictions were it not for some lucky category overlap.

As these loopholes and anomalies show, there are plenty of products that have a perfectly good reason to offer multiple-item tiers without going against Kickstarter principles, and such projects seem to benefit highly from doing so. When you look at this, you realize that the rule change has a built-in negative effect: it optimizes against the best-planned and most reliable projects. It's basically saying "if you don't have a significant risk of failure, you shouldn't be here." But while it's important for entrepreneurs to be aware of risks and challenges, they also pretty universally have a lot of faith in their idea — so telling them they aren't allowed to promise people five widgets, when that may have been a key part of their widget sales strategy, just drives the most confident creators elsewhere.

The other controversial rule change is the ban on product renderings and simulations. This was an attempt to avoid situations like when Felix Salmon pointed out that the prototype of the hugely popular Lifx Lightbulb was a long, long way away from the snazzy mockup plastered all over the Kickstarter page, and made a pretty compelling argument that the whole thing was vaporware. Again, this makes partial sense — but it seems like there are a lot of situations in which product renderings, responsibly used and properly labelled, would be vital to educating potential backers about a project. In a recent submission to Techdirt, Tom McWilliams, creator of the Tiger Cam 3D video microscope, provides an example from his own experience in attempting to launch the project on Kickstarter:

3D imagery is hard to demonstrate when you aren't physically immersed in the actual experience. Most of the time we see 3D advertised using pictures of objects flying out of the screen at us or funny block letters emerging from a picture. We did some (not all) of the same type of effects in our Kickstarter project video to try to emphasize that the really cool part of our product was the 3D experience it offered.

The week we were set to launch our project on Kickstarter, the press release was issued about Kickstarter's new guidelines for technology projects. After a bit of concern, and a lot of review, we presumed that we had complied with these new guidelines, including those prohibiting product simulations. After all, we weren't simulating what our project might do in the future, we were illustrating what our 3D microscope does right now, using the medium we had available to us. After submitting our project, it was declined by Kickstarter because it was deemed that simulations of any kind in our project video were prohibited. We then went back to re-think the video. After removing our 3D-like graphics in the video our project was accepted, but it seems that the message might have been lost in translation.

It's easy to understand the rationale behind the new technology guidelines from Kickstarter. Kickstarter projects are about concrete projects looking to fund their next steps, not about what someone thinks they might be able to create if given the backing. But when simulated images convey the essence of a project in a way that a thousand words cannot, even if disclaimer were to be boldly displayed, there is room, one hopes, for conversation.

McWilliams also raises an excellent question about what exactly a "simulation" is:

Some technology projects are easy to demonstrate by showing a user's interaction with them. But often isn't this simulated? Did that alarm clock really wake up the actor in the video, or was it a simulation? Other projects might be more difficult to demonstrate and ask for a stretch of the imagination in order for the viewer to understand the true user experience. Our 3D microscope product certainly garners this challenge, and we feel that in the end maybe we weren't able to convey this experience to potential project backers.

It seems like Kickstarter realized that managing backer expectations, and controlling the quality and the honesty of projects, was a complicated challenge, so they decided to make a bold move that they hoped would initiate wide-scale change for the better, even if it did a little collateral damage. Unfortunately, such strict broad strokes seem to be creating more problems than they are solving, and unfairly disadvantaging projects with perfectly legitimate interests that run counter to the rules.

Luckily, Kickstarter is still an evolving platform, and none of this is set in stone. It's only been a couple of months since the change, and the company can likely be convinced to revisit the rules once it has a little bit more data to see what effect they had. But, ultimately, they have to listen to their users, both creators and backers. They may not want to be a mere store, but they can't be a haven for creators who hedge every bet while scaring away those with ambitious goals. In striving to manage expectations, Kickstarter can't forget that the best entrepreneurs have high expectations of themselves.

Upon information and belief, Formlabs and it sales agent Kickstarter knew or should have known about, or were willfully blind to, 3D Systems' extensive patent rights in the area of three-dimensional printing and stereolithography, including but not limited to 3D Systems' U.S. Patent No. 5,597,520 covering improved methods of stereolithographically forming a three-dimensional object by forming cross-sectional layers of an object from a material capable of physical transformation upon exposure to synergistic stimulation, by virtue of their sales of machines touted by Formlabs as using "stereolithography (SL) technology," which is a technology invented and extensively patented by 3D Systems and its founder Charles Hull.

Upon information and belief, Kickstarter contributes to the infringement of the '520 Patent by offering to sell and selling within the United States the Form 1 3D printer which is an apparatus for use in practicing patented processes of the '520 Patent, constituting a material part of the invention, knowing the same to be especially made or especially adapted for use in an infringement of the '520 Patent, and the Form 1 3D Printer is not a staple article or commodity of commerce suitable for substantial noninfringing use.

Upon information and belief, Kickstarter knowingly or with willful blindness induced and continues to induce infringement and possessed specific intent to encourage another's infringement by, or was willfully blind as to the '520 Patent and with respect to, its activities and Formlabs' activities described above.

Upon information and belief, Kickstarter had specific intent to infringe the '520 Patent by virtue of its agency, business and sales arrangement with Formlabs, which had actual knowledge of the '520 Patent and/or was willfully blind to the existence of the '520 Patent as set forth in the allegations above.

Indeed, in Kickstarter's own Guidelines as to "Project must fit Kickstarter's categories" at http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines?ref=footer, under section 02, under "View Design and Technology requirements," Kickstarter is actively encouraging "hacker and maker" companies to make 3D printers for Kickstarter to sell, stating: "Not everything that involves design or technology is permitted on Kickstarter. While there is some subjectivity in these rules, we’ve adopted them to maintain our focus on creative projects: D.I.Y. We love projects from the hacker and maker communities (weekend experiments, 3D printers, CNC machines) and projects that are open source. Software projects should be run by the developers themselves."

...this revolution has a few mitigating circumstances. First, Kickstarter might produce many new documentaries, but the odds are that those documentaries will be of a very particular kind (this critique also applies to other sites in this field like indiegogo.com, sponsume.com, crowdfunder.co.uk, pledgie.com). They are likely to be campaign and issue-driven films in the tradition of Super Size Me or An Inconvenient Truth. Their directors seek social change and tap into an online public that shares the documentary's activist agenda. A documentary exploring the causes of World War I probably stands to receive less—if any—online funding than a documentary exploring the causes of climate change.

Second, some films require significant startup costs (think drama-documentaries or history movies) or involve considerable legal risks that may be hard to price and account for. Say you are making a film that includes an undercover investigation of the oil industry. When you have the BBC's lawyers backing you up, you'll probably take many more risks than when you are relying on crowdfunding. But if Kickstarter is your platform of choice, you'll probably forgo venturing into the thorny legal issues altogether.

Projects are not closed or taken down, they remain on site for reference and transparency.

For the same reasons, projects cannot be deleted, even if they were canceled or unsuccessful.

Then we received a letter from a law firm; a cease and desist letter from the mentor with threats to sue. We were very surprised. It consisted accusations of infringement from the mentor. He laid claims to a number of our designs such as our website utilizing a top navigation bar, our photo of the designer operating a sewing machine, etc.

Product simulations are prohibited. Projects cannot simulate events to demonstrate what a product might do in the future. Products can only be shown performing actions that they’re able to perform in their current state of development.

Product renderings are prohibited. Product images must be photos of the prototype as it currently exists.

The development of new products can be especially complex for creators and offering multiple quantities feels premature, and can imply that products are shrink-wrapped and ready to ship.

We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter.

I said to them ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don't get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits’ They said, ‘Yes’.

I was driving across Seattle's 520 bridge on a beautiful, sunny afternoon on the third day of our Kickstarter campaign, dazed and confused, and momentarily considered hitting the red "abort mission" button on our whole Kickstarter. Fifty-five hours into our campaign and we had only gathered 11 percent of our funding goal.

A week into our campaign, we were surprised to see dozens of comments online from people saying: "Look at that game, look at how expensive their video looks... They don't need our money." Meanwhile, our company bank account was getting dangerously low.

As I sought out reasons as to why our campaign wasn't resonating, I realized that people were put off by how polished everything looked. This was disappointing because, yes, in fact, we worked extremely hard to make everything as professional as possible.

Initially, I was frustrated at the "too polished" complaints, especially when I remembered the late nights and weekends Craig Cerhit put into our video content. I often thought about the rich guys on Kickstarter intentionally making rough-looking webcam videos to appeal to peoples' charitable instincts and subsequently pull in six or seven figures in pledges.

Instead of focusing the team on Kickstarter success or failure, we decided to host a Livestream party for the final three hours of the campaign and just have fun regardless if we hit our funding goal. Too distracted to work on the game, the team started prepping food and activities for a big online thank you party for the community. At the time, over 7,000 people had pledged a total of $355,000 towards our game. We wanted to thank them, even if we failed and didn't receive the money.

What transpired what something I was dreading the entire month: dozens of articles with headlines like "République May Miss Kickstarter Goal." While I was anxious about that negative press, it was calling renewed attention to our campaign, which we smartly prepared for: we uploaded an entirely new debut pitch video that reviewed all of the news from the past 30 days (PC & Mac announce, David Hayter & Jennifer Hale), showed new gameplay footage, and addressed all the feedback we got from the community. We slapped a "New Video!" sticker on the top of our page, welcomed all the new and returning visitors, and crossed our fingers that this time they would pledge.

The final three-hour Livestream was the best idea we ever had. We don't know if the 4,500 views sparked increased pledges, and we didn't care -- it was all about connecting and celebrating with the thousands of dedicated backers and enjoying the victory together. By the time the clock struck zero, we were at $555,512 and hugging each other.

Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns. According to a Senior Account Manager at Amazon, Amazon has decided against “boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts at this time”. Amazon has been providing payment services for Unglue.it, as it does for the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

We support a wide variety of businesses, but we have regulatory obligations as a licensed money services business for how we operate. Unfortunately, Unglue.it’s model is not the same as some other crowdfunding services and at this time does not allow us to meet those obligations.

• SkyCube is a satellite project on Kickstarter with $1 sponsoring 10 seconds of the mission. For just $6, you can broadcast six 120-character messages from space! [url]
• Whatever you can fit inside a ping pong ball can be sent up to the edge of space (100,000 feet) -- and anyone can make a PongSat. Presumably, though, they won't let you fill your ping pong ball with a combustible propellant and an altimeter trigger.... [url]
• The ArduSat Mission has completed its Kickstarter campaign and put up a list of experiment ideas that could be run on its Arduino-based satellite. Some of the suggestions for experiments/apps aren't too exciting, but there's also a prize of $1,500 for the most innovative experiment or app for the ArduSat -- so someone is bound to come up with a few more ideas. [url]