At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there — alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the fidget spinners and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting new crowdfunding projects out there this week. That said, keep in mind that any crowdfunding project — even the best intentioned — can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams.
January 6th
MyFirst Fone — wrist-borne communicator for kids
In addition to being a solid contender for 2018’s Worst Product Name of the Year Award, MyFirst Fone is the newest addition to the growing category of kid-friendly smartphones. Now before you lose your mind and go into an impassioned rant about how young kids shouldn’t have cellphones, take a deep breath, rub your earlobes, and hear me out. This is actually a pretty decent idea. I too agree that young children shouldn’t have cellphones — especially those of the “smart” variety. Spending so much time staring wide-eyed at an LED screen, texting, and playing games all day removes kids from the real world, robs them of meaningful social interaction with other people, and screws them up developmentally. That being said, having a way to communicate with your kids no matter where they are is a huge plus, and can help keep them safe.
MyFirst Fone is a little wearable device that aims to reconcile these problems. It’s essentially a minimalist wearable smartphone designed to be worn on a child’s wrist, thereby giving kids a direct line to their parents, and giving parents the ability to check up on their kids’ whereabouts via GPS. It does this while keeping games, internet browsers, and other distractions out of the equation — so your kids can focus on being kids, and enjoy the world around them.
Hudly – HUD for your car
It only takes a glance at distracted driving statistics to drive home the fact that smartphones were not designed for the car. The apps that run on these devices tempt drivers to take their eyes off the road, which is dangerous, even if it’s just a glance. So how do you help drivers stay focused on the road, but still give them access to essential navigation and communication apps? Hudly thinks it has the answer. The company’s newest product is arguably one of the most advanced dashboard HUDs to date, and boasts a unique set of features that aim to solve the problems that other HUDs suffer from.
Instead of forcing you to look directly at your smartphone map (and away from the road), the Hudly app beams your smartphone nav info to the Hudly HUD, which projects it onto a reflective (but still transparent) piece of glass. This allows you to see navigation info without taking your eyes off the road ahead of you. Plus, since the HUD itself is a standalone unit that relies on a wireless connection to your smartphone, you don’t have to surrender your device to a dock every time you go for a drive. Just hop in, fire up the app, and hit the road.
Yeti Touch — quick defrosting tray
Defrosting your food is a lot like saving for retirement. If you plan ahead, it’s not a big problem — but if you don’t think about it until the last minute, you’re screwed. Generally, you have two options if you forget to pull the steaks out of the freezer: you can toss them in the microwave and turn them into rubber with a quick defrost cycle, or you can leave them on the cutting board, let them thaw naturally, and have dinner at midnight. Neither of those options are ideal. But what if there was a better way? What if you could thaw food quickly without compromising its flavor or texture?
That’s precisely where the Yeti Touch defrosting tray comes in. Thanks to some brilliant design and smart materials choices, the tray is able to defrost a frozen steak (or whatever you’re trying to cook) in a fraction of the time it would take to thaw on a normal cutting board. For example, while an ice cube typically takes about 20 minutes to melt completely while sitting on a cutting board at room temperature, the same ice cube will be reduced to a puddle in under four minutes on the Yeti. The key is the raised aluminum tray and vented lower chamber, which work together to draw the cold out and away from your food.
Dygma Raise — ergonomically optimized gaming keyboard
Keyboards and mice weren’t originally designed with PC gaming in mind, and despite the fact that gaming-focused keyboards and mice are widely available these days, many of them still suffer from the same drawbacks and shortcomings that their non-gaming counterparts do. So Luis Sevilla created a solution. The Dygma Raise, as it’s called, was designed from the ground up with professional gamers in mind.
First of all, it addresses ergonomics. “A normal keyboard forces the wrists to bend towards the pinky side of our hand,” Sevilla says on his Kickstarter campaign page. “Rotating Raise’s halves lets you keep your wrists at a neutral angle, decreasing pressure and strain over time. You can also adjust the width between the [keyboard’s] two halves, placing them in front of your shoulders to reduce internal shoulder rotation.”
The Raise is also completely customizable, and features additional buttons that normal keyboards don’t have. “The giant space bar is one of the things that we’ve inherited from the typewriter that doesn’t make sense any more,” says Sevilla. “We’ve divided the spacebar into 4 and added 4 extra keys under it. They are comfortable to use because they are in the area where our thumbs naturally rest.”
Vinci 2.0 — smart wireless headphones
We covered this one a few weeks ago, so I’ll let DT’s Nick Hastings give you the scoop.
“Leonardo da Vinci was the original Renaissance man, a brilliant polymath whose expertise in various arts and sciences often outclassed even the leaders of those fields. New York-based Inspero Inc.’s Vinci 2.0 smart earphones hope to offer enough versatility and flexibility to live up to their inspirational namesake. Following up on the company’s crazy Vinci over-ear headphones that impressed us at the 2017 Luxury Tech show and received nearly $1 million in Kickstarter funding last year, the Vinci 2.0 pack an impressive array of features into a unique, angular-neckband design. The band itself is pentagonal, featuring a small OLED touchscreen — we’re not entirely sure why — and the whole package weighs a shade over three ounces (90 grams).”
“The Vinci 2.0 are equipped with onboard flash storage — 8GB for the Lite model, 16GB for the Pro, and 32GB for the Super — so you can leave your phone in your bag while working out. Baked-in support for not one but two virtual assistants, Amazon’s Alexa and Inspero’s proprietary Vinci, means you can rely on voice commands to do just about anything, including controlling your music playback, calling an Uber, or checking the weather forecast. The Vinci 2.0 support both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, allowing you to utilize Alexa and Vinci without an anchor device. If you’re out on a run — and therefore outside of Wi-Fi range — the headphones even support 3G (something we’ve never seen before), so you can access voice assistants or even streaming services from virtually anywhere.”