Producer Garen Barsegian and fledgling writer/director Micael Preysler have launched a Kickstarter campaign for Preysler’s directorial debut feature film, “Lily & Kat.” The film, described as a "hot mess quarter-life crisis," involves two inseparable best friends, “Lily” and “Kat” who celebrate their final days together in New York City savoring the intoxicating nightlife and entertaining the affections of an enigmatic artist. In his first foray as a writer/director of a feature film, the 23-year-old Preysler and his crew wrapped production on “Lily & Kat” last November. The movie was shot in New York at multiple locations and soundstages around Manhattan and Brooklyn. (Read More)

The Pebble smart watch gave everyone what they were looking for last year, but a new contender threatens to challenge that space in 2013. Meet AGENT, a promising new smart watch for the ages. (Read More)

Less than 24 hours after its launch, a Kickstarter campaign by Jeremy Kirby to fund a coffee table book devoted to his legendary grandfather Jack Kirby has already exceeded its $7,500 goal. Titled The Life and Times of Jack Kirby, the hardcover will feature hundreds of personal photographs and artwork, and a never-before-seen play written by Jack Kirby called Frog Prince. (Read More)

The Energy Hook Kickstarter may not be up there with Brian Fargo's stuff but for what's pratically a one-person shop it's doing quite famously. So people are asking me if I had any secret sauce. Strategically, I think the Spider-Man 2 nostalgia has been really helpful, and the $1 thing was unique and a lot of press were interested in that, so those two things combined drove a lot of backers. (Read More)

Ed Bettinelli is passionate about the finger-mounted rattles he invented for musicians, but passion won’t pay his $40,000 manufacturing bill. So he turned to the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.com, unsuccessfully last year and again this month with less than ideal results. (Read More)

The Pebble wasn’t the only smartwatch to launch by way of Kickstarter, however given the financial success of the campaign and the delays that followed — it is the one many seem to remember. Anyway, while shipping delays with the Pebble appear to be coming to an end, there is another smartwatch that has recently appeared on Kickstarter. This latest is called the AGENT and they are coming forward with an expected shipping timeframe of December 2013. (Read More)

Alex Grey was on the Joe Rogan podcast last night to talk about his Kickstarter which has 9 days left and is at $107K of a $125 goal. (Read More)

A new Heavy Gear game is coming, but Heavy Gear Assault will only appear at the mercy of the wallet-wielding crowd. The Unreal Engine powered game is asking for $800,000, and is looking pretty stompy. However, this proposition does not include a campaign, but instead is a multiplayer combat game: “Compete in tournaments and organized matches for fame and fortune. Spectate and sponsor other players. Vote on performances. Put bounties on poor sports and pay their enemies to take them out.” The final thing will be free to play, and backing now buys in-game items and other additional awards both virtual and physical. (Read More)

Recently, the act of donating to or promoting a Kickstarter campaign has become a highly politicized and moralized one for movie fans, an act brimming with questions, crises, and conundrums about systemic economic disadvantages normalized by dominant industries of filmmaking. Suspicion has been directed in droves toward legitimate-seeming yet vastly-supported projects like the studio-release Veronica Mars movie or Zach Braff’s directorial follow-up to Garden State, whose constellation of multiple funding sources perhaps says more than we’d like to admit about the complex process of realizing even the most distinctly above-the-line indie projects. (Read More)

Aqueti, a startup company looking to commercialize gigapixel photographic technology developed at Duke University, said Monday it will look to gain funding from the Kickstarter site to help evangelize its Aware gigapixel digital cameras. (Read More)

I think we can all agree that camping sucks for a long list of reasons, many of which stem from the tendency for camping to occur outdoors. Here’s a brief list of the most common camping annoyances: Getting eaten by bears (duh!), Pooping in those nasty smelling mystery holes (Those things are scary, man…admit it. If you were a monster that wanted to eat people’s butts, that’s where you would hide)... (Read More)

Kickstarter seems to be the number one choice for upstarts with a smartwatch in mind to seek funding these days. Agent “the world’s smartest watch” is the latest in a long line that includes tech darlings like the Pebble. And actually, this new Agent watch seems like nothing more than a thicker (and potentially uglier depending on your taste in watch designs) version of the Pebble, but with one difference – it has Qi wireless charging built in. The promo video shows a watch with a “Memory” display that’s a combination of an e-paper and LCD displays, that can be paired with your phone and used to tell the time, show weather, control music players, act as a pedometer, and show you incoming calls or messages. (Read More)

In an impressively short time, Kickstarter has quickly become the go-to high-impact mashup of crowdsourcing sensibility and entrepreneurial endeavor. If you've got a genuinely creative idea — or even a "me, too with a twist" — Kickstarter's "crowd funding" platform offers a genuinely innovative way to finance creativity and innovation. Since its 2009 launch, Kickstarter claims that more than 4.1 million people have pledged over $619 million to fund over 41,000 projects. It's exciting. (Read More)

Some weeks ago I read an article on the New York Times talking about Kickstarter. The author was exploring the logic of the platform and especially in which way backers shouldn’t really be considered like investors. They aren’t because their main aim is not looking for the project that will give them the greatest return on their money. Here we are then, highlighting two Arduino-based projects because we are intrigued by them and hope you like them too. (Read More)

Known for its collectible card and board game business, Cryptozoic Entertainment put its latest creation, a free-to-play digital collectible card game named HEX, up on Kickstarter with an initial goal of $300,000. (Read More)

How many of you grew up on a steady diet of comics, and came upon instances where there was this huge are that is engulfed in flames, only to have a superhero like Superman fly by and blowing his lungs out, or to have the Incredible Hulk do the same (although chances are he might just clap his hands). I am quite sure that Clark Kent would brush his teeth daily, but gamma-radiated Hulk? He might not be so pleasant to smell breath-wise. Well, either Hulk or Superman, they both have mean lungs that possess plenty of power, and sometimes, you wish you had that, too. (Read More)

WAY back in 1977, Mel Croucher's Automata entertained early computer enthusiasts with surreal games that gained a cult following. After a string of best sellers, Croucher released his magnum opus in 1984, the first true interactive movie, Deus Ex Machina. Then, inexplicably, he turned his back on the industry he helped create, and quit. Now, after what must be the longest gap in the history of video game sequels, he's reformed Automata and is back with Deus Ex Machina 2. (Read More)

This week proves to be no disappointment on the crowdfunding front. Here are a few of the gems we came across that are currently seeking funding. (Read More)

Heavy Gear Assault is a first-person multiplayer mech simulator that’s slated for release on PC, Mac and Linux next year. It’s set in the Heavy Gear universe that has been established through a series of tabletop, role-playing and card games, created by a hobby-games publisher called Dream Pod in 1994. (Read More)