Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from half stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I love all things tech. And in a couple of episodes recently, as in't the ones just before the one that published yesterday, I talked about vapor ware, and today I'm going to focus on crowdfunding platforms and some of the best and worst examples of tech projects that have received crowdfunding. This is not a definitive list by any stretch of the imagination. I could do a month's worth of episodes about really cool crowdfunded tech projects and ones that just went terribly wrong. And by worst, I don't necessarily mean that the idea for the project was a bad one, but rather something happened between the campaign launching and what of her the delivery time was supposed to be for that product. Sometimes that just means that things didn't go as planned. It doesn't necessarily mean any particular idea was bad. But first I want to go into the background of the two most popular crowdfunding platforms that are out there, and that would be Kickstarter and indie go Go. Kickstarter was an idea that's been around for a pretty long time. As it turns out. In late two thousand one, an artist named Perry Chen wanted to get a musical performance organized during the two thousand two Jazz Fest in New Orleans. So he's looking ahead. He's saying, next year, there's gonna be this big jazz festival. I want to create a show where these these two dep DJs can come down and do a full performance in the course of the jazz festival. Uh, I really want to make this happen. So he tries to get this show together. He takes initiative, but the musical venue he was talking to wanted way more money than he could provide. There was no way he could come up with the the expense it was going to take just to have the show. So even if the show were incredibly successful, it would never be able to happen because he could not come up with that front capital. So that experience inspired him to brainstorm about a way where people who are interested in having something happen could pledge money toward that thing, perhaps using credit cards or some other form, and if enough money were pledged to meet the costs to have that thing happen, then it would happen. They would be charged the money, The money would go towards the cost of production, and the thing would go on, and in return, people could actually go to that thing. They would end up receiving essentially a ticket in return for their pledge. But if not enough money were pledged, let's say that after a certain amount of time there just wasn't enough interest, then the whole thing would be scrapped. No one would be charged, and everything would go on. It's mary little way. Well that would become the germ of the idea for Kickstarter, but the actual launch of Kickstarter was still years away. Flashboard to two thousand five. Perry Chen has relocated. He's living in Brooklyn. That's when he met Yancy Strickler, a writer and editor who had worked for m j I Interactive and Flavor Pill Media. He was mostly working as sort of a rock and roll music critic and writer. Chen was waiting tables at that time in a restaurant in Brooklyn, and Strickler was a regular at this particular restaurant and the two started talking and eventually Chen told Strickler about his idea about this fundraising approach, this idea of pledging money towards something, but only getting charged if enough money were raised to make that something happen. And Strickler thought this was a really cool notion, so they went and bought a white board and they began to actually brainstorm what Kickstarter might look like and how it might work. That kept on going for a couple of years, and in two thousand seven they ended up meeting another person by the name of Charles Adler. He would become the final piece of that triumvirate who founded Kickstarter. Adler and Chen began work on the actual artistic layout of Kickstarter. Uh Strickler was still working on the project as well. He was also working his regular day job, but none of the three co founders were actual developers, so building out a functional website was laborious and filled with errors. So they started hiring people to work on the idea. Some people would stay on the project for a little while, some would stay a little bit longer. They ideated several times. There are pictures online of the various versions of Kickstarter that were proposed before the site went live. Some of them are truly hideous to behold. But they began meeting with other people who had helped them with the design and the launch, and eventually they were able to get something together. They went to an early beta test in two thousand nine, and then on April two thousand nine, nearly a decade after Chen had the original idea, they launched with a public website. The first project to fund successfully on Kickstarter was called Drawing for Dollars, and it hit its goal on May third, two thousand nine. It raised all of thirty five dollars. Two other projects funded that week as well. In two thousand ten, Time magazine named Kickstarter one of the ten best inventions of the year. So that shows you that just within a year Kickstarter was already making a big impact right out of the gate. Nearly another ten years and more than three billion dollars in crowdfunding campaigns later, things have changed a lot. Charles Adler would leave Kickstarter in two thousand thirteen. Perry Chen was serving as CEO until two thousand fourteen, and then stepped down just to to the the chair of the board of directors. Yancey Strickler took over as CEO, and he would remain as CEO until Kickstarter actually became a public benefit corporation. That means that benefiting the public good is actually part of the company charter, in addition to making a profit. In seventeen, when Strickler stepped down as CEO, Chen actually stepped back in, first as interim CEO, and then he said he was the new permanent CEO, although no official announcement about that came out of the company. According to BuzzFeed, Chen's returned to the helm was not greeted with universal approval. About fifty out of a hundred twenty employees left the company, including all but one of the executive team who had worked under Strickler. Kickstarter, by the way, takes a five percent cut of any successfully funded campaign. According to kickstarter itself, the site has seen about three point three three billion dollars worth of successful campaigns, which would put the company take it around a hundred sixty six million dollars, which isn't bad, but Kickstarter also has a reputation. More than three fifths of the total dollars pledged on Kickstarter has gone to campaigns for games, design projects and tech projects rather than creative artistic projects. So a lot of people look at Kickstarter as the place to go to pitch your ideas to the general public. So instead of like going to a company and saying I've got this idea of for our product, I would like to work with you to produce it, or going with potential private investors like Angel investors to get a company together, you take it to Kickstarter and you pitch it to the general public and see if you can get your support that way. Indie go go is similar in many ways to Kickstarter. It actually launched before Kickstarter did. It went live in January two th eight. Indie go Go was the brain child of Denay Ringelman, Eric Shell, and Slava Rubin, who met at the University of California, Berkeley. Like Chen, these three wanted to create a platform that would make it easier for people to get funding for various projects. Ringelman came up with the idea. She was inspired originally by her parents, who were small business owners, and also her experiences both as a student and someone who had worked in the financial district over on Wall Street. Her original idea was for an offline business, but Shell and Ruben would collaborate with her and convince her that an online platform would actually be a better solution. The three struggled for three years to find investors to help fund their company. It was live, it was working, but they didn't have a whole lot of money to work on this. They were actually supporting it largely themselves. In two thousand and eleven, they landed one point five million dollars in venture capital, and then over the next few years they would raise more. Indie goog covers a broader spectrum of projects than Kickstarter does. Kickstarter is really meant for creative projects, although that can include products like tech or games. Indie go go can be used for just about anything, including raising money for causes. So if you wanted to hold a funding campaign for a nonprofit organization, you could conceivably use indie go go, but you could not use Kickstarter because it's not what kickstarters for. Also, Kickstarter limits people in the US, UK, Canada, and a couple of other countries for their campaigns. You cannot launch a campaign if you live outside of that small group of countries. Indie go Go considers itself an international crowdfunding option, although it does not allow campaigners that are that belong to the nations that are on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Controls sanctioned list. That would include countries like North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, that kind of thing. Indie go Go has a slightly different approach to funding than Kickstarter. So if you launch an indie go go campaign, you can choose to keep whatever money you raise even if you don't make your goal. So let's say that your goal is twenty dollars but you only raise seven thousand dollars. Well, you could actually select an option that allows you to keep whatever money you raised. Now, in that event, indie go go gets to keep a nine percent take of whatever you raised. Now if you hit your goal, if you hit that twenty dollars, you get back some of that cut that indiego go takes, so indigoga would only take uh four percent of the total, not nine. Or you could choose the all or nothing approach similar to what Kickstarter does, that also locks in that four percent indie go go fee. So if you do that, you're actually owing a little less to indie go go than you would if you were running the exact same campaign on Kickstarter. There are also a lot of other crowdfunding platforms out there, by the way, some of them are like go fund me, and that's more about fundraising for causes, personal or general. Some of them are more like Patreon. Actually, Patreon really is kind of its own thing. Patreon sets up a recurring pledge, like a monthly pledge, to fund ongoing projects and work. So it's not a startup thing. It's an ongoing thing. So if I were saying making a web series, I could have a Patreon and in return for monthly uh pledges, you might get extra material related to the web series. So not only would you be supporting my work, but you would get a little extra something on the side. And there are others that are geared specifically for stuff like musicians, or for startup companies or for charities. But when it comes to tech products, the two big crowdfunding platforms out there really are Kickstarter and indiego Go, and both of them have played host to some good and some questionable tech products. I'll talk more about those in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's get this underway. Let's go to the tech category. Over to Kickstarter. One of the most successful campaigns on Kickstarter in the tech category was the Pano Music campaign. This was championed by musician Neil Young, and the idea was pretty interesting. Pano Music would take the master recordings of various songs, so the masters are the recordings from which all copies are made. If you get your hands on a master, you are listening to the most accurate representation of how the music was originally sounding when it was recorded. That is copy number one, or really recording number one. It's not a copy, is the recording. Pano Music was going to create digital versions from those masters, and it was going to use a lossless digital format that you could play on a special digital music player. Lossless means that no data gets thrown out, whereas a compression format like MP three is known as a lossy format, and it's called lossy because during the compression algorithm, some data gets pushed out in order to make the file size more manageable. And typically a lossy sound file will eliminate any sounds that fall outside the normal range of human hearing, because the the idea is that you would not be able to perceive them anyway. There are audio files who argue know that actually has an effect on the overall quality of the sound. You may not be able to hear those individual sounds, but they'll produce other elements like harmonics that you can actually perceive. So there's this argument that goes back and forth between audio files and people who work in compression technology, and that has raised the the issue of lossy versus lossless. So this Pondom Music player was supposed to play lossless music files, although it could handle other ones as well. The campaign had an early bird special for one hundred backers. If they pledged at least two hundred dollars, they would get a Pinto Player device as soon as they became available. After that, you would have to make a pledge of at least three hundred dollars to get a Poto Player, So the first one hundred could get that two hundred dollar price, and then if you showed up at the campaign after that, you'd have to The lowest you could pledge to get a pot a Player would be three hundred dollars, but even at that price, backers were assured they would be spending tollars less than what the eventual retail price for the Pinto Player would be. That retail price ended up being three cents, so you would save about a hundred bucks off the final price. By being a supporter during the Kickstarter campaign. The campaign more than met it's eight hundred thousand dollar goal. By the end it had raised more than six million dollars ers and the Poto Player did actually come out in two thousand fifteen, So this is not one of those vaporware stories. It was a device that really came out, It really worked, it really got shipped to the backers. But the story still doesn't have a very happy ending, or or quasi ending, I guess I should say, because what the heck ever ends these days. The Pinto Player supported many different formats for music. It could support MP three's as well as tons of other file formats, but the goal was to guide users to the Panto music World digital music store to buy this lossless form factor to get hold of these high definition, high resolution audio recordings. However, according to Neil Young, music labels demanded very high prices for those high resolution, lossless format audio files. They're demanding two to three times as much for normal MP three files, which again is a lossy format. They said, if you're gonna spend let's say five dollars on this sound file, then for this other format, you're gonna have to spend fifteen dollars for it in the music store went offline when Ponto Music's partner company, omni Phone, was sold off. Panto announced it would partner with another company called seven Digital, but the store never came back. Neil Young moved on to launch a free music streaming service called Xtreme. The letter X followed by the word stream. But the Ponto Music Player only plays downloaded songs. It doesn't have any WiFi or cellular capability. You cannot streaming to the Pinto Player. So wamp wamp, there's a four dollar MP three player you've got now, essentially. Also, I should add that, according to several reviews I read, the Pinto Player was a good digital music device, but it was really hard to tell the difference between lossless and lossy file formats, assuming that someone wasn't going crazy with the compression rate when they were making the lossy file. So while the device performed well, it was based on a somewhat faulty premise, because if you could not reliably tell the difference between a lossy file and a lossless one, why are you spending four hundred dollars on this thing? Anyway, Let's move on to a different one. Another big winner in the text space on Kickstarter was the z Time smart watch from Micronos Switzerland. The watch is a kind of hybrid watch, so it actually has physical hands, like in that analog style, actual clock hands on your watch. So if you don't know how to read a clock, an analog clock, I guess you're out of luck here. But in addition to these physical hands that would point to the time, there was also a touch screen digital interface incorporated into this watch. The goal for the campaign was to raise fifty dollars, but it raised more than five point three million dollars. The campaign had three early bird specials for the first one thousand to contribute at each of those levels. Uh there was a hundred and nineteen dollar level, a D seven dollar level, and a one level for the original, Premium and Elite models respectively. And the company designed the hands so that they would actually move out the way when you received messages on the smart watch screen. So let's say that you're looking at your watch and it's normally would say six PM, which means the the hands would be in a vertical line, but it needs to display a message to you, then the hands would actually shift so that one is pointing at three and one's pointing at nine, So it's making a horizontal line. That's just the clearer the face so that you can read the messages. Probably it would then go back to the regular time once you had dismissed the message, which I thought was kind of a cool idea. Also, the hands would automatically adjust to reflect whatever time zone you were in at that time, and it had some other features. Uh, I guess I should say it has other features The watch does exist, including a pedometer has a heart rate motor. According to Digital Trend, those features worked really, really well, although their overall review for the watch was less than stellar. The campaign listed a ship date of September, and that's when the first Z time watches actually began to ship, So that's good. This is one of those stories where there was something that was promised, that thing was delivered. It appears to be the thing that everyone was promised. It wasn't a bait and switch. But the reviews I've seen for the watch say the features tend to be good, but the interface is a little tricky, maybe a little frustrating. So your mileage may vary, but I would at least say this campaign should fall into the good category, not the bad story category, because it actually produced what was promised and they shipped it. Another one of kickstarters most funded tech projects came to a pretty dismal end down the line, and that would be the Zano Nano drone. Now as a quad copter drone, it can actually fit in the palm of your hand, and the campaign included an incredible video showing off what the drone could supposedly do, which was really impressive. The late fourteen campaign aimed to raise a hundred five thousand pounds British pounds that's equivalent to about a hundred nine thousand dollars back at that time. Ultimately, though, it would end up raising two point three million pounds or nearly three and a half million dollars. The drones were supposed to include a high definition camera. They were supposed to have some object avoidance technology so that they could um detect and easily avoid things like trees or walls. They were supposed to have tracking technology. You would end up controlling them using gesture controls on a smartphone, like you could actually hold your phone up and move it across your field of view and control your your drone that way, and they had an early bird rate for this as well. If you want to buy a white or black Xano or pledge at that level, it was a hundred thirty nine pounds if you were one of the first five hundred backers to pledge for those perks. Once the campaign was over, the company behind it, Torking Group, ended up taking pre orders for more Zano drones. They accepted around three thousand pre orders after the conclusion of the campaign. The company send out regular updates about production, which is good transparent communications very important. At the launch of the campaign, the company had claimed that it pretty much had all the elements in place to go into production immediately upon funding, though they did start to introduce stretch goals once they began to hit those campaign goals really early on, and those stretch goals, you could argue that's an example of feature creep, where they started to throw more and more features into these drones, and it would even include technologies that a lot of people are finding kind of questionable, like do you think you could actually work this into this design, including stuff like facial recognition technology, three sixty degree panorama capability, the ability to fly upside down and also wireless charging. Torking Group estimated that it was going to have a delivery date for June two thousand fifteen. That was when I was going to start shipping out these drones. It wasn't until September two thousand fifteen that any drones were actually shipped, and even then it was only about six hundred of them. They went mostly to the preorder customers rather than the crowdfunding backers, and that raised a lot of eyebrows and more than a few tempers. Out of the thousands of backers who put money towards this, only four of them ever received a drone. And to make matters worse, the people who received the drones complained that the product they got was not what they were promised. They got a quad copter, but they could barely fly. They'd hop around, they slammed into walls. They apparently had no object avoidance technology. They were missing tons of promised features. On November eighteen, two thousand fifteen, to Working announced it would undergo liquidation. All of the company's assets would be sold off and the money would be sent to creditors. To Working had spent a million pounds over the two and a half million it had earned from crowdfunding in that time, and to Working's servers shut down, which was a real shame because the drones actually would call into the server in order to operate. So once the servers shut down, the drones that were out there were left inoperable. Even if they couldn't work very well, now they couldn't work at all. Mark Harris, by the way, has an incredible piece on medium all about the Zano story. I encourage you to look it up if you want to know more about what happened. It is an exhaustive account. It's far too long for me to go into on this episode, but I had to call special attention to it because it is an amazing investigative peace so if you really want to learn all about how things can go wrong, and I should stress that Harris concludes that this was not a scam. It wasn't a hoax. It wasn't that people were trying to get money from folks and then run away with it. They really were trying to build a product. It just got away from them. It's a good warning story to read, both from someone who might want to launch a product and someone who's looking at potential products that they might support on a crowdfunding platform. Well, I have more to say about crowdfunding misses and hits, but before I get into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, I don't want it to sound like I believe Kickstarter has an exclusive hold on bad crowdfunding projects, because this next one ends up being the realm of indie go go. And as the Dragonfly future Phone future phone is spelled, all is one word fu tu r e f O with a new lout in future food. That was an indiego go project that funded on December two, thou fourteen. The campaign raised more than seven hundred twenty five thousand dollars, which meant the campaign funded by six thousand, four hundred. Now, originally the campaign goal was to hit one dollars, but Jeff Batio, who was the head of this company that was bringing this project up to crowdfunding, apparently lowered that to ten thousand dollars in an effort to get the fully funded designation on indiego go. Because that gives it a sense of prestige. People are more willing to put money into it when they see other people are already supporting it. There's also this whole fear of missing out the fomo approach, where you might think, oh, if I don't put money into this, I'm not going to be a part of this, or I'll have to pay three times as much when it comes out for retail. So it was a pretty clever move. So what was the future phone. Well, it was supposed to be part laptop, part tablet, and part phone. Imagine a laptop computer. Now imagine that this laptop computer is actually kind of four pieces. Both the screen and the keyboard are divided right down the middle, and it's to vide in such a way where when you fold it down like you would fold down a regular laptop, you could then fold it again, so you're essentially folding it twice right, once with the screen down and once when you fold it back together against itself. Um, all the parts were hinged. It was supposed to work seamlessly, and you could even detach one of those two screens and have it act as a phone with the Android operating system. You could use a stylists or a keyboard for input. It was supposed to have a slide out touch pad that would come out of the keyboard as well, so you could use that as like a mouse pad tracker. And it was also supposed to be able to run Windows, so you could run Android and Windows parallel to each other. And you were supposed to have uninterrupted experiences. So if you were watching a movie, say on your Android fablet, which is what we used to call these things that were larger than phones and smaller than tablets. And I hate the phrase, but there you go. If you plug that into your overall device, you could turn it into back into laptop mode and keep watching right at that same moment. From that point forward. It was also supposed to have an eight hour battery life, was supposed to have really powerful process. There's a whole lot of ram for both the phone version and the laptop version. Essentially it was to have all the bells and whistles, and yet you would be able to secure one for just under eight hundred dollars. Remember the phrase if it sounds too good to be true. Well, Jeff Battio has a history of legal issues in business. He received a ban from selling securities in the state of Illinois at one point. The Danzing report goes so far as to call the future Phone and outright scam, saying Battio was essentially fleecing the public, that there was no intent to ever release a piece of technology at all, and in fact, there was a history of similar projects, even with similar signs to this future phone, that never seemed to exist beyond a computer generated model. The piece also pointed out that Battio's company, Ideal Future Incorporated, had actually let its business license expire, which seems to be an indication that it's not really a thing anymore. There's some speculation online that he's actually scheduled to go up for trial for possibly unrelated charges later this year. And now I don't know if Jeff Badio set out to create a scam and fleece people out of money, that is what a lot of people have accused him of doing. But I can certainly say that there's been no evidence of a future phone actually coming out since the announcement back then, and like there was, there were several updates that would come out over the next two years, but since it's been silent. Not all questionable campaigns, by the way, go the distance. Sometimes they get caught before they can go to completion, at least not on every platform. Back in twenty of team, there was a company called Scarp Technologies that launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Scarp Laser razor. And yeah, this was the device that was supposed to use laser light to give you a smooth close shave. The razor was supposed to reduce waste and eliminate skin irritation. Didn't use a blade to cut. It was going to use a fiber that has laser light running through it too destroy hair. It was supposed to actually be the evolution of technology that came out of the medical and cosmetics fields. The video on Kickstarter showed a device that was supposed to use lasers that relied on wavelengths of light that hairs could absorb but skin would not, So hair would effectively melt off at the base of the shaft, but your skin would remain untouched. The video also showed that the razor was in pretty much the same form factor as your general plastic disposable razor. It's just didn't have a blade, had this little laser light thing. But that's incredible they could fit all of that into a form factor that small, The power source, the laser, everything that you would need would be in this little handheld razor, just like it was disposable. That's amazing. The goal of the project was one sixty thousand dollars and the campaign had hit four million dollars, but then Kickstarter stepped in and suspended the campaign on October twelve, two thousand fifteen. So why did Kickstarter do that? While according to Kickstarter, it was because they said the team had no working prototype to show off, and Kickstarters said that any campaign that offers a physical product as a reward must have a working prototype of that product in order to be considered a valid campaign. Undeterred, the creators hopped on over to indiego Go and they launched a campaign there. They did not raise another four million dollars like they did on Kickstarter, but they still got five d seven thousand, hundred ten dollars funding. On October twenty, two thousand fifteen, two weeks after the kickstarted campaign had been suspended. Backers were supposed to get their laser razors in I have not seen any reports that anyone ever got one. Though a c Net reporter did visit their facility and god demonstration of the technology, it was not in the same form factor, it was not capable of doing all the things that the laser razor is supposed to be able to do. That the basic principles behind the technology were demonstrated, so the technology kind of sort of worked. The last update I saw from the company was in mayen and here is what it said, verbatim so quote. Dear Indiego Go supporters, it's hard to believe it's over two and a half years since we enlisted your support to help us bring the world's first laser powered razor to the market. It's been a time of many ups and downs, more downs than ups, to be honest, but the team continued to progress the project. It took nearly two years to produce the fiber to the necessary specifications, and halfway through we are pleased to announce we have also managed to apply the first coding in a manner that will allow the device to perform as required. We are also very pleased to announce that some strategic manufacturing partners are assisting us with continuing developments. Next steps include a second coding and then the challenge of mounting the physical size of the fiber. Finally, continued funding is vital, and meanwhile, fundraising we continue to keep funding progress from personal means as well as backing afforded by you, which I interpret to mean they actually are continuing to get money from their backers. A variety of industry professionals and executives remain involved in both these and our technical developments efforts. We knew it might not be easy to bring SCARP to the market, but we thank you for your continued support and optimism. Sincerely, Morgan and the SCARP team. So from this from May two thousand eighteen, we can presume that they're still working on this technology and maybe one day they'll actually be able to come out with the the full product. Whether or not it will be worth the weight is a question that other people will have to answer. I am not a backer on this one, and there are a lot of people who list this as an outright sort of scam approach. I'm not so readily eager to jump on that bandwagon. For one thing, the c NET report about actually seeing the technology working, although again in a totally different form factor and in a very limited use case, at least tells me that they are sincere in their efforts and raising half a million dollars. While that's a lot of money is not a lot to work on for two and a half years. So I suspect that this is a passion project that the team really hopes is going to work out, and here's hoping that they are able to turn out something that satisfies the people who have been backing their project. Now, no discussion about crowdfunding stories is complete without a rundown of the coolest cooler. This is probably really one of the most infamous tech related crowdfunding campaigns, and this one was a huge headache. Ryan Grepper first tried to get funding for his idea in but that campaign failed to fund. His second try, however, was a success, a massive success. He set a fifty thou dollar goal and he hit more than thirteen million dollars with more than sixty two thousand backers. And the idea sounded kind of neat but also kind of you know, bonkers. It's a cooler, the kind you put ice and drinks into, but it was also meant to have a USB charging station in it. There's a blender for a crushing ice, a waterproof Bluetooth speaker, and led light for the lid for those nighttime beach parties and a whole lot more right, You can actually see these things online. You can find one on various shopping sites. Well, Grepper ran into huge problems in production and in shipping. He discovered that it was really really complicated and there were a lot of points of failure and he kept running into them. And worse, he found it was more expensive than he anticipated. So while he had raised thirteen million dollars, that actually was not going to be enough to cover his costs to manufacture and ship these coolers out to backers and two pre orders. The company also put the cooler up for sale on Amazon before they had actually shipped out all the coolers to backers. In fact, as of this month, at the end of June two eighteen, approximately twenty thousand backers still have not received their cooler. That is crazy. I mean it's years later and twenty thousand people are still waiting on this. The company asked backers to cough up another nineties seven dollars at one point for expedited shipping. That was really in an effort to get a little more money to help cover the costs, almost you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul sort of situation. Uh, Grapper said, well, this is think of it this way. You're still getting the cooler for less than what retail price is going to be. That didn't necessarily mollify backers who had already spent the money thinking they were going to get a cooler in the first place. Grepper eventually would have to settle a case with the Oregon Department of Justice, and Coolest would ship coolers to eight seventy three backers in Oregon as part of that settlement. Coolest Coolers remains an example of how a project can get away from someone, particularly a project that involves manufacturing. So when you rely on production that's going on in another country, like in China, you give up a lot of your control and you might find that things do not go your way, and when things go wrong, it's really hard to rectify them. Actually feel pretty badly for Grepper. His campaign was incredibly successful, his costs were way higher than he anticipated, and his obligations were such that that really put him in a tough position. His backers were understandably upset by numerous delays, and he has to scramble to deliver upon promises because he takes these obligueations seriously. It's not again, it's not going to take the money and run kind of situation. This is a case where success kind of stinks, where because he was essentially promising stuff for less than what was going to cost him to make it, and because it got so incredibly successful, ultimately he was digging a deep hole for himself. I feel for the guy, especially since he just had an idea to make a kind of ridiculous cooler. Anyway, that RUPs up this discussion, this overview of some of the hits and misses of crowdfunding. Really to give you guys a sense of it, it's important to maintain skepticism and and you know, some some realistic expectations when you look at crowdfunding campaigns, and also to ask yourself really really really hard questions before you launch your own crowdfunding campaign, because sometimes it might mean the difference between setting a goal that is a chief movable but it's going to put you in a very difficult position, or setting a goal that is extremely ambitious. Maybe you don't achieve it, but if you if you don't, you're not beholden to those guarantees you've been making. It's a delicate thing both as a crowdfunding campaign manager and as someone who's actually looking out at the crowdfunding landscape and saying, this sounds like a really interesting project and I want to support it. It also depends upon how you view the whole concept. Is it supporting a project or are you pre ordering a product? If you're thinking of it as pre ordering a product, maybe it's better to just wait pay full price when it comes out, after you have been assured that the product works as advertised. I don't know, maybe that's just my own opinion. Anyway, If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why not write me and let me know what those are. Otherwise I ain't gonna know. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The hand over both of those is text stuff hs W. 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Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from half stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I love all things tech. And in a couple of episodes recently, as in't the ones just before the one that published yesterday, I talked about vapor ware, and today I'm going to focus on crowdfunding platforms and some of the best and worst examples of tech projects that have received crowdfunding. This is not a definitive list by any stretch of the imagination. I could do a month's worth of episodes about really cool crowdfunded tech projects and ones that just went terribly wrong. And by worst, I don't necessarily mean that the idea for the project was a bad one, but rather something happened between the campaign launching and what of her the delivery time was supposed to be for that product. Sometimes that just means that things didn't go as planned. It doesn't necessarily mean any particular idea was bad. But first I want to go into the background of the two most popular crowdfunding platforms that are out there, and that would be Kickstarter and indie go Go. Kickstarter was an idea that's been around for a pretty long time. As it turns out. In late two thousand one, an artist named Perry Chen wanted to get a musical performance organized during the two thousand two Jazz Fest in New Orleans. So he's looking ahead. He's saying, next year, there's gonna be this big jazz festival. I want to create a show where these these two dep DJs can come down and do a full performance in the course of the jazz festival. Uh, I really want to make this happen. So he tries to get this show together. He takes initiative, but the musical venue he was talking to wanted way more money than he could provide. There was no way he could come up with the the expense it was going to take just to have the show. So even if the show were incredibly successful, it would never be able to happen because he could not come up with that front capital. So that experience inspired him to brainstorm about a way where people who are interested in having something happen could pledge money toward that thing, perhaps using credit cards or some other form, and if enough money were pledged to meet the costs to have that thing happen, then it would happen. They would be charged the money, The money would go towards the cost of production, and the thing would go on, and in return, people could actually go to that thing. They would end up receiving essentially a ticket in return for their pledge. But if not enough money were pledged, let's say that after a certain amount of time there just wasn't enough interest, then the whole thing would be scrapped. No one would be charged, and everything would go on. It's mary little way. Well that would become the germ of the idea for Kickstarter, but the actual launch of Kickstarter was still years away. Flashboard to two thousand five. Perry Chen has relocated. He's living in Brooklyn. That's when he met Yancy Strickler, a writer and editor who had worked for m j I Interactive and Flavor Pill Media. He was mostly working as sort of a rock and roll music critic and writer. Chen was waiting tables at that time in a restaurant in Brooklyn, and Strickler was a regular at this particular restaurant and the two started talking and eventually Chen told Strickler about his idea about this fundraising approach, this idea of pledging money towards something, but only getting charged if enough money were raised to make that something happen. And Strickler thought this was a really cool notion, so they went and bought a white board and they began to actually brainstorm what Kickstarter might look like and how it might work. That kept on going for a couple of years, and in two thousand seven they ended up meeting another person by the name of Charles Adler. He would become the final piece of that triumvirate who founded Kickstarter. Adler and Chen began work on the actual artistic layout of Kickstarter. Uh Strickler was still working on the project as well. He was also working his regular day job, but none of the three co founders were actual developers, so building out a functional website was laborious and filled with errors. So they started hiring people to work on the idea. Some people would stay on the project for a little while, some would stay a little bit longer. They ideated several times. There are pictures online of the various versions of Kickstarter that were proposed before the site went live. Some of them are truly hideous to behold. But they began meeting with other people who had helped them with the design and the launch, and eventually they were able to get something together. They went to an early beta test in two thousand nine, and then on April two thousand nine, nearly a decade after Chen had the original idea, they launched with a public website. The first project to fund successfully on Kickstarter was called Drawing for Dollars, and it hit its goal on May third, two thousand nine. It raised all of thirty five dollars. Two other projects funded that week as well. In two thousand ten, Time magazine named Kickstarter one of the ten best inventions of the year. So that shows you that just within a year Kickstarter was already making a big impact right out of the gate. Nearly another ten years and more than three billion dollars in crowdfunding campaigns later, things have changed a lot. Charles Adler would leave Kickstarter in two thousand thirteen. Perry Chen was serving as CEO until two thousand fourteen, and then stepped down just to to the the chair of the board of directors. Yancey Strickler took over as CEO, and he would remain as CEO until Kickstarter actually became a public benefit corporation. That means that benefiting the public good is actually part of the company charter, in addition to making a profit. In seventeen, when Strickler stepped down as CEO, Chen actually stepped back in, first as interim CEO, and then he said he was the new permanent CEO, although no official announcement about that came out of the company. According to BuzzFeed, Chen's returned to the helm was not greeted with universal approval. About fifty out of a hundred twenty employees left the company, including all but one of the executive team who had worked under Strickler. Kickstarter, by the way, takes a five percent cut of any successfully funded campaign. According to kickstarter itself, the site has seen about three point three three billion dollars worth of successful campaigns, which would put the company take it around a hundred sixty six million dollars, which isn't bad, but Kickstarter also has a reputation. More than three fifths of the total dollars pledged on Kickstarter has gone to campaigns for games, design projects and tech projects rather than creative artistic projects. So a lot of people look at Kickstarter as the place to go to pitch your ideas to the general public. So instead of like going to a company and saying I've got this idea of for our product, I would like to work with you to produce it, or going with potential private investors like Angel investors to get a company together, you take it to Kickstarter and you pitch it to the general public and see if you can get your support that way. Indie go go is similar in many ways to Kickstarter. It actually launched before Kickstarter did. It went live in January two th eight. Indie go Go was the brain child of Denay Ringelman, Eric Shell, and Slava Rubin, who met at the University of California, Berkeley. Like Chen, these three wanted to create a platform that would make it easier for people to get funding for various projects. Ringelman came up with the idea. She was inspired originally by her parents, who were small business owners, and also her experiences both as a student and someone who had worked in the financial district over on Wall Street. Her original idea was for an offline business, but Shell and Ruben would collaborate with her and convince her that an online platform would actually be a better solution. The three struggled for three years to find investors to help fund their company. It was live, it was working, but they didn't have a whole lot of money to work on this. They were actually supporting it largely themselves. In two thousand and eleven, they landed one point five million dollars in venture capital, and then over the next few years they would raise more. Indie goog covers a broader spectrum of projects than Kickstarter does. Kickstarter is really meant for creative projects, although that can include products like tech or games. Indie go go can be used for just about anything, including raising money for causes. So if you wanted to hold a funding campaign for a nonprofit organization, you could conceivably use indie go go, but you could not use Kickstarter because it's not what kickstarters for. Also, Kickstarter limits people in the US, UK, Canada, and a couple of other countries for their campaigns. You cannot launch a campaign if you live outside of that small group of countries. Indie go Go considers itself an international crowdfunding option, although it does not allow campaigners that are that belong to the nations that are on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Controls sanctioned list. That would include countries like North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, that kind of thing. Indie go Go has a slightly different approach to funding than Kickstarter. So if you launch an indie go go campaign, you can choose to keep whatever money you raise even if you don't make your goal. So let's say that your goal is twenty dollars but you only raise seven thousand dollars. Well, you could actually select an option that allows you to keep whatever money you raised. Now, in that event, indie go go gets to keep a nine percent take of whatever you raised. Now if you hit your goal, if you hit that twenty dollars, you get back some of that cut that indiego go takes, so indigoga would only take uh four percent of the total, not nine. Or you could choose the all or nothing approach similar to what Kickstarter does, that also locks in that four percent indie go go fee. So if you do that, you're actually owing a little less to indie go go than you would if you were running the exact same campaign on Kickstarter. There are also a lot of other crowdfunding platforms out there, by the way, some of them are like go fund me, and that's more about fundraising for causes, personal or general. Some of them are more like Patreon. Actually, Patreon really is kind of its own thing. Patreon sets up a recurring pledge, like a monthly pledge, to fund ongoing projects and work. So it's not a startup thing. It's an ongoing thing. So if I were saying making a web series, I could have a Patreon and in return for monthly uh pledges, you might get extra material related to the web series. So not only would you be supporting my work, but you would get a little extra something on the side. And there are others that are geared specifically for stuff like musicians, or for startup companies or for charities. But when it comes to tech products, the two big crowdfunding platforms out there really are Kickstarter and indiego Go, and both of them have played host to some good and some questionable tech products. I'll talk more about those in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's get this underway. Let's go to the tech category. Over to Kickstarter. One of the most successful campaigns on Kickstarter in the tech category was the Pano Music campaign. This was championed by musician Neil Young, and the idea was pretty interesting. Pano Music would take the master recordings of various songs, so the masters are the recordings from which all copies are made. If you get your hands on a master, you are listening to the most accurate representation of how the music was originally sounding when it was recorded. That is copy number one, or really recording number one. It's not a copy, is the recording. Pano Music was going to create digital versions from those masters, and it was going to use a lossless digital format that you could play on a special digital music player. Lossless means that no data gets thrown out, whereas a compression format like MP three is known as a lossy format, and it's called lossy because during the compression algorithm, some data gets pushed out in order to make the file size more manageable. And typically a lossy sound file will eliminate any sounds that fall outside the normal range of human hearing, because the the idea is that you would not be able to perceive them anyway. There are audio files who argue know that actually has an effect on the overall quality of the sound. You may not be able to hear those individual sounds, but they'll produce other elements like harmonics that you can actually perceive. So there's this argument that goes back and forth between audio files and people who work in compression technology, and that has raised the the issue of lossy versus lossless. So this Pondom Music player was supposed to play lossless music files, although it could handle other ones as well. The campaign had an early bird special for one hundred backers. If they pledged at least two hundred dollars, they would get a Pinto Player device as soon as they became available. After that, you would have to make a pledge of at least three hundred dollars to get a Poto Player, So the first one hundred could get that two hundred dollar price, and then if you showed up at the campaign after that, you'd have to The lowest you could pledge to get a pot a Player would be three hundred dollars, but even at that price, backers were assured they would be spending tollars less than what the eventual retail price for the Pinto Player would be. That retail price ended up being three cents, so you would save about a hundred bucks off the final price. By being a supporter during the Kickstarter campaign. The campaign more than met it's eight hundred thousand dollar goal. By the end it had raised more than six million dollars ers and the Poto Player did actually come out in two thousand fifteen, So this is not one of those vaporware stories. It was a device that really came out, It really worked, it really got shipped to the backers. But the story still doesn't have a very happy ending, or or quasi ending, I guess I should say, because what the heck ever ends these days. The Pinto Player supported many different formats for music. It could support MP three's as well as tons of other file formats, but the goal was to guide users to the Panto music World digital music store to buy this lossless form factor to get hold of these high definition, high resolution audio recordings. However, according to Neil Young, music labels demanded very high prices for those high resolution, lossless format audio files. They're demanding two to three times as much for normal MP three files, which again is a lossy format. They said, if you're gonna spend let's say five dollars on this sound file, then for this other format, you're gonna have to spend fifteen dollars for it in the music store went offline when Ponto Music's partner company, omni Phone, was sold off. Panto announced it would partner with another company called seven Digital, but the store never came back. Neil Young moved on to launch a free music streaming service called Xtreme. The letter X followed by the word stream. But the Ponto Music Player only plays downloaded songs. It doesn't have any WiFi or cellular capability. You cannot streaming to the Pinto Player. So wamp wamp, there's a four dollar MP three player you've got now, essentially. Also, I should add that, according to several reviews I read, the Pinto Player was a good digital music device, but it was really hard to tell the difference between lossless and lossy file formats, assuming that someone wasn't going crazy with the compression rate when they were making the lossy file. So while the device performed well, it was based on a somewhat faulty premise, because if you could not reliably tell the difference between a lossy file and a lossless one, why are you spending four hundred dollars on this thing? Anyway, Let's move on to a different one. Another big winner in the text space on Kickstarter was the z Time smart watch from Micronos Switzerland. The watch is a kind of hybrid watch, so it actually has physical hands, like in that analog style, actual clock hands on your watch. So if you don't know how to read a clock, an analog clock, I guess you're out of luck here. But in addition to these physical hands that would point to the time, there was also a touch screen digital interface incorporated into this watch. The goal for the campaign was to raise fifty dollars, but it raised more than five point three million dollars. The campaign had three early bird specials for the first one thousand to contribute at each of those levels. Uh there was a hundred and nineteen dollar level, a D seven dollar level, and a one level for the original, Premium and Elite models respectively. And the company designed the hands so that they would actually move out the way when you received messages on the smart watch screen. So let's say that you're looking at your watch and it's normally would say six PM, which means the the hands would be in a vertical line, but it needs to display a message to you, then the hands would actually shift so that one is pointing at three and one's pointing at nine, So it's making a horizontal line. That's just the clearer the face so that you can read the messages. Probably it would then go back to the regular time once you had dismissed the message, which I thought was kind of a cool idea. Also, the hands would automatically adjust to reflect whatever time zone you were in at that time, and it had some other features. Uh, I guess I should say it has other features The watch does exist, including a pedometer has a heart rate motor. According to Digital Trend, those features worked really, really well, although their overall review for the watch was less than stellar. The campaign listed a ship date of September, and that's when the first Z time watches actually began to ship, So that's good. This is one of those stories where there was something that was promised, that thing was delivered. It appears to be the thing that everyone was promised. It wasn't a bait and switch. But the reviews I've seen for the watch say the features tend to be good, but the interface is a little tricky, maybe a little frustrating. So your mileage may vary, but I would at least say this campaign should fall into the good category, not the bad story category, because it actually produced what was promised and they shipped it. Another one of kickstarters most funded tech projects came to a pretty dismal end down the line, and that would be the Zano Nano drone. Now as a quad copter drone, it can actually fit in the palm of your hand, and the campaign included an incredible video showing off what the drone could supposedly do, which was really impressive. The late fourteen campaign aimed to raise a hundred five thousand pounds British pounds that's equivalent to about a hundred nine thousand dollars back at that time. Ultimately, though, it would end up raising two point three million pounds or nearly three and a half million dollars. The drones were supposed to include a high definition camera. They were supposed to have some object avoidance technology so that they could um detect and easily avoid things like trees or walls. They were supposed to have tracking technology. You would end up controlling them using gesture controls on a smartphone, like you could actually hold your phone up and move it across your field of view and control your your drone that way, and they had an early bird rate for this as well. If you want to buy a white or black Xano or pledge at that level, it was a hundred thirty nine pounds if you were one of the first five hundred backers to pledge for those perks. Once the campaign was over, the company behind it, Torking Group, ended up taking pre orders for more Zano drones. They accepted around three thousand pre orders after the conclusion of the campaign. The company send out regular updates about production, which is good transparent communications very important. At the launch of the campaign, the company had claimed that it pretty much had all the elements in place to go into production immediately upon funding, though they did start to introduce stretch goals once they began to hit those campaign goals really early on, and those stretch goals, you could argue that's an example of feature creep, where they started to throw more and more features into these drones, and it would even include technologies that a lot of people are finding kind of questionable, like do you think you could actually work this into this design, including stuff like facial recognition technology, three sixty degree panorama capability, the ability to fly upside down and also wireless charging. Torking Group estimated that it was going to have a delivery date for June two thousand fifteen. That was when I was going to start shipping out these drones. It wasn't until September two thousand fifteen that any drones were actually shipped, and even then it was only about six hundred of them. They went mostly to the preorder customers rather than the crowdfunding backers, and that raised a lot of eyebrows and more than a few tempers. Out of the thousands of backers who put money towards this, only four of them ever received a drone. And to make matters worse, the people who received the drones complained that the product they got was not what they were promised. They got a quad copter, but they could barely fly. They'd hop around, they slammed into walls. They apparently had no object avoidance technology. They were missing tons of promised features. On November eighteen, two thousand fifteen, to Working announced it would undergo liquidation. All of the company's assets would be sold off and the money would be sent to creditors. To Working had spent a million pounds over the two and a half million it had earned from crowdfunding in that time, and to Working's servers shut down, which was a real shame because the drones actually would call into the server in order to operate. So once the servers shut down, the drones that were out there were left inoperable. Even if they couldn't work very well, now they couldn't work at all. Mark Harris, by the way, has an incredible piece on medium all about the Zano story. I encourage you to look it up if you want to know more about what happened. It is an exhaustive account. It's far too long for me to go into on this episode, but I had to call special attention to it because it is an amazing investigative peace so if you really want to learn all about how things can go wrong, and I should stress that Harris concludes that this was not a scam. It wasn't a hoax. It wasn't that people were trying to get money from folks and then run away with it. They really were trying to build a product. It just got away from them. It's a good warning story to read, both from someone who might want to launch a product and someone who's looking at potential products that they might support on a crowdfunding platform. Well, I have more to say about crowdfunding misses and hits, but before I get into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, I don't want it to sound like I believe Kickstarter has an exclusive hold on bad crowdfunding projects, because this next one ends up being the realm of indie go go. And as the Dragonfly future Phone future phone is spelled, all is one word fu tu r e f O with a new lout in future food. That was an indiego go project that funded on December two, thou fourteen. The campaign raised more than seven hundred twenty five thousand dollars, which meant the campaign funded by six thousand, four hundred. Now, originally the campaign goal was to hit one dollars, but Jeff Batio, who was the head of this company that was bringing this project up to crowdfunding, apparently lowered that to ten thousand dollars in an effort to get the fully funded designation on indiego go. Because that gives it a sense of prestige. People are more willing to put money into it when they see other people are already supporting it. There's also this whole fear of missing out the fomo approach, where you might think, oh, if I don't put money into this, I'm not going to be a part of this, or I'll have to pay three times as much when it comes out for retail. So it was a pretty clever move. So what was the future phone. Well, it was supposed to be part laptop, part tablet, and part phone. Imagine a laptop computer. Now imagine that this laptop computer is actually kind of four pieces. Both the screen and the keyboard are divided right down the middle, and it's to vide in such a way where when you fold it down like you would fold down a regular laptop, you could then fold it again, so you're essentially folding it twice right, once with the screen down and once when you fold it back together against itself. Um, all the parts were hinged. It was supposed to work seamlessly, and you could even detach one of those two screens and have it act as a phone with the Android operating system. You could use a stylists or a keyboard for input. It was supposed to have a slide out touch pad that would come out of the keyboard as well, so you could use that as like a mouse pad tracker. And it was also supposed to be able to run Windows, so you could run Android and Windows parallel to each other. And you were supposed to have uninterrupted experiences. So if you were watching a movie, say on your Android fablet, which is what we used to call these things that were larger than phones and smaller than tablets. And I hate the phrase, but there you go. If you plug that into your overall device, you could turn it into back into laptop mode and keep watching right at that same moment. From that point forward. It was also supposed to have an eight hour battery life, was supposed to have really powerful process. There's a whole lot of ram for both the phone version and the laptop version. Essentially it was to have all the bells and whistles, and yet you would be able to secure one for just under eight hundred dollars. Remember the phrase if it sounds too good to be true. Well, Jeff Battio has a history of legal issues in business. He received a ban from selling securities in the state of Illinois at one point. The Danzing report goes so far as to call the future Phone and outright scam, saying Battio was essentially fleecing the public, that there was no intent to ever release a piece of technology at all, and in fact, there was a history of similar projects, even with similar signs to this future phone, that never seemed to exist beyond a computer generated model. The piece also pointed out that Battio's company, Ideal Future Incorporated, had actually let its business license expire, which seems to be an indication that it's not really a thing anymore. There's some speculation online that he's actually scheduled to go up for trial for possibly unrelated charges later this year. And now I don't know if Jeff Badio set out to create a scam and fleece people out of money, that is what a lot of people have accused him of doing. But I can certainly say that there's been no evidence of a future phone actually coming out since the announcement back then, and like there was, there were several updates that would come out over the next two years, but since it's been silent. Not all questionable campaigns, by the way, go the distance. Sometimes they get caught before they can go to completion, at least not on every platform. Back in twenty of team, there was a company called Scarp Technologies that launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Scarp Laser razor. And yeah, this was the device that was supposed to use laser light to give you a smooth close shave. The razor was supposed to reduce waste and eliminate skin irritation. Didn't use a blade to cut. It was going to use a fiber that has laser light running through it too destroy hair. It was supposed to actually be the evolution of technology that came out of the medical and cosmetics fields. The video on Kickstarter showed a device that was supposed to use lasers that relied on wavelengths of light that hairs could absorb but skin would not, So hair would effectively melt off at the base of the shaft, but your skin would remain untouched. The video also showed that the razor was in pretty much the same form factor as your general plastic disposable razor. It's just didn't have a blade, had this little laser light thing. But that's incredible they could fit all of that into a form factor that small, The power source, the laser, everything that you would need would be in this little handheld razor, just like it was disposable. That's amazing. The goal of the project was one sixty thousand dollars and the campaign had hit four million dollars, but then Kickstarter stepped in and suspended the campaign on October twelve, two thousand fifteen. So why did Kickstarter do that? While according to Kickstarter, it was because they said the team had no working prototype to show off, and Kickstarters said that any campaign that offers a physical product as a reward must have a working prototype of that product in order to be considered a valid campaign. Undeterred, the creators hopped on over to indiego Go and they launched a campaign there. They did not raise another four million dollars like they did on Kickstarter, but they still got five d seven thousand, hundred ten dollars funding. On October twenty, two thousand fifteen, two weeks after the kickstarted campaign had been suspended. Backers were supposed to get their laser razors in I have not seen any reports that anyone ever got one. Though a c Net reporter did visit their facility and god demonstration of the technology, it was not in the same form factor, it was not capable of doing all the things that the laser razor is supposed to be able to do. That the basic principles behind the technology were demonstrated, so the technology kind of sort of worked. The last update I saw from the company was in mayen and here is what it said, verbatim so quote. Dear Indiego Go supporters, it's hard to believe it's over two and a half years since we enlisted your support to help us bring the world's first laser powered razor to the market. It's been a time of many ups and downs, more downs than ups, to be honest, but the team continued to progress the project. It took nearly two years to produce the fiber to the necessary specifications, and halfway through we are pleased to announce we have also managed to apply the first coding in a manner that will allow the device to perform as required. We are also very pleased to announce that some strategic manufacturing partners are assisting us with continuing developments. Next steps include a second coding and then the challenge of mounting the physical size of the fiber. Finally, continued funding is vital, and meanwhile, fundraising we continue to keep funding progress from personal means as well as backing afforded by you, which I interpret to mean they actually are continuing to get money from their backers. A variety of industry professionals and executives remain involved in both these and our technical developments efforts. We knew it might not be easy to bring SCARP to the market, but we thank you for your continued support and optimism. Sincerely, Morgan and the SCARP team. So from this from May two thousand eighteen, we can presume that they're still working on this technology and maybe one day they'll actually be able to come out with the the full product. Whether or not it will be worth the weight is a question that other people will have to answer. I am not a backer on this one, and there are a lot of people who list this as an outright sort of scam approach. I'm not so readily eager to jump on that bandwagon. For one thing, the c NET report about actually seeing the technology working, although again in a totally different form factor and in a very limited use case, at least tells me that they are sincere in their efforts and raising half a million dollars. While that's a lot of money is not a lot to work on for two and a half years. So I suspect that this is a passion project that the team really hopes is going to work out, and here's hoping that they are able to turn out something that satisfies the people who have been backing their project. Now, no discussion about crowdfunding stories is complete without a rundown of the coolest cooler. This is probably really one of the most infamous tech related crowdfunding campaigns, and this one was a huge headache. Ryan Grepper first tried to get funding for his idea in but that campaign failed to fund. His second try, however, was a success, a massive success. He set a fifty thou dollar goal and he hit more than thirteen million dollars with more than sixty two thousand backers. And the idea sounded kind of neat but also kind of you know, bonkers. It's a cooler, the kind you put ice and drinks into, but it was also meant to have a USB charging station in it. There's a blender for a crushing ice, a waterproof Bluetooth speaker, and led light for the lid for those nighttime beach parties and a whole lot more right, You can actually see these things online. You can find one on various shopping sites. Well, Grepper ran into huge problems in production and in shipping. He discovered that it was really really complicated and there were a lot of points of failure and he kept running into them. And worse, he found it was more expensive than he anticipated. So while he had raised thirteen million dollars, that actually was not going to be enough to cover his costs to manufacture and ship these coolers out to backers and two pre orders. The company also put the cooler up for sale on Amazon before they had actually shipped out all the coolers to backers. In fact, as of this month, at the end of June two eighteen, approximately twenty thousand backers still have not received their cooler. That is crazy. I mean it's years later and twenty thousand people are still waiting on this. The company asked backers to cough up another nineties seven dollars at one point for expedited shipping. That was really in an effort to get a little more money to help cover the costs, almost you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul sort of situation. Uh, Grapper said, well, this is think of it this way. You're still getting the cooler for less than what retail price is going to be. That didn't necessarily mollify backers who had already spent the money thinking they were going to get a cooler in the first place. Grepper eventually would have to settle a case with the Oregon Department of Justice, and Coolest would ship coolers to eight seventy three backers in Oregon as part of that settlement. Coolest Coolers remains an example of how a project can get away from someone, particularly a project that involves manufacturing. So when you rely on production that's going on in another country, like in China, you give up a lot of your control and you might find that things do not go your way, and when things go wrong, it's really hard to rectify them. Actually feel pretty badly for Grepper. His campaign was incredibly successful, his costs were way higher than he anticipated, and his obligations were such that that really put him in a tough position. His backers were understandably upset by numerous delays, and he has to scramble to deliver upon promises because he takes these obligueations seriously. It's not again, it's not going to take the money and run kind of situation. This is a case where success kind of stinks, where because he was essentially promising stuff for less than what was going to cost him to make it, and because it got so incredibly successful, ultimately he was digging a deep hole for himself. I feel for the guy, especially since he just had an idea to make a kind of ridiculous cooler. Anyway, that RUPs up this discussion, this overview of some of the hits and misses of crowdfunding. Really to give you guys a sense of it, it's important to maintain skepticism and and you know, some some realistic expectations when you look at crowdfunding campaigns, and also to ask yourself really really really hard questions before you launch your own crowdfunding campaign, because sometimes it might mean the difference between setting a goal that is a chief movable but it's going to put you in a very difficult position, or setting a goal that is extremely ambitious. Maybe you don't achieve it, but if you if you don't, you're not beholden to those guarantees you've been making. It's a delicate thing both as a crowdfunding campaign manager and as someone who's actually looking out at the crowdfunding landscape and saying, this sounds like a really interesting project and I want to support it. It also depends upon how you view the whole concept. Is it supporting a project or are you pre ordering a product? If you're thinking of it as pre ordering a product, maybe it's better to just wait pay full price when it comes out, after you have been assured that the product works as advertised. I don't know, maybe that's just my own opinion. Anyway, If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why not write me and let me know what those are. Otherwise I ain't gonna know. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The hand over both of those is text stuff hs W. 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