Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Timothy Zahn, one of the most influential Star Wars Expanded Universe authors (creator of Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade), and writer of 40 novels and 90+ short stories, will be trying his hand as the Creative Director for a new video game, Timothy Zahn's Parallax. From the Kickstarter page: 'The game concept is heavily inspired by the original Master of Orion but, because Timothy Zahn is the co-creator, a major focus is going to be on making sure that each alien race is as fully-realized as possible, and that the interactions with the other aliens are realistic: talking to one alien race will be different than talking to another, and the choices you make in the game will have side effects and the computer players will remember them — and treat you differently because of them.' Other highlights: 'The game will include at least 5 of his non-Star Wars alien races (Modhri, Kalixiri, Zhirrzh, Qanska and Pom); Backers will be active participants in the game creation process; No Digital Rights Management foolishness.' The Kickstarter starts at 6pm MST today."

Eloquence writes "Three years ago, Musopen raised nearly $70,000 to create public domain recordings of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and others. Now they're running a new campaign with a simple but ambitious objective: 'To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created. To release his music for free, both in 1080p video and 24 bit 192kHz audio. This is roughly 245 pieces.'" Adds project organizer aarondunn: "His music will be made available via an API powered by Musopen so anyone can come up with ways to explore and present Chopin's life."

borgheron writes "A maintainer of GNUstep has launched a Kickstarter campaign to get the resources needed to make GNUstep more complete and bring the implementation to API compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6's Cocoa. This will allow applications for Mac OS X to run on GNU/Linux with a simple recompile using new tools developed by the GNUstep team to directly build from xcodeproj project files. If the Kickstarter project is funded beyond its $50,000 goal, it's possible that WebKit and Darling might also be completed allowing applications built on Mac OS X to run without the need for a recompile... think WINE-like functionality for Mac OS X applications on other platforms... including Windows, Linux, BSD, etc." GNUStep is pretty useful now, but increased coverage of newer Cocoa APIs would be nice, and Darling in particular is interesting by providing a portable Mach-O binary loader.

Kagetsuki writes "While grainy GIF images can have entertaining uses, they aren't the ideal animated image format due to lack of full color support and an alpha channel [for varied transparency]. Animated PNG doesn't have these faults and has been available and incorporated in quite a few browsers since roughly 2004. Lack of tools and recognition has hurt adoption, so to remedy this there is a campaign on Kickstarter to create an Open Source, high quality Animated PNG [APNG] conversion library and GUI Editor based on the APNG Assembler tool 'apngasm.' Even the primary goal includes libraries/modules for C/C++ and Ruby along with a cross platform GUI authoring tool. Aside from supporting the project simply using APNG willl help raise interest and support in the standard and bring us one step closer to a world with cleaner animated images."

First time accepted submitter Jason Waddell writes "According to Kickstarter's historic backing data, crowdfunding follows a very predictable pattern: a strong opening, a mid-campaign 'dead zone', and a small resurgence at the end of the campaign. We combine Kickstarter's trends with the Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo crowdfunding data to forecast whether the innovative Ubuntu phone will reach its $32 million campaign goal."

hypnosec writes "Adapteva has started shipping its $99 Parallella parallel processing single-board supercomputer to initial Kickstarter backers. Parallella is powered by Adapteva's 16-core and 64-core Epiphany multicore processors that are meant for parallel computing unlike other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices like Raspberry Pi that don't support parallel computing natively. The first model to be shipped has the following specifications: a Zynq-7020 dual-core ARM A9 CPU complemented with Epiphany Multicore Accelerator (16 or 64 cores), 1GB RAM, MicroSD Card, two USB 2.0 ports, optional four expansion connectors, Ethernet, and an HDMI port." They are also releasing documentation, examples, and an SDK (brief overview, it's Free Software too). And the device runs GNU/Linux for the non-parallel parts (Ubuntu is the suggested distribution).

DeviceGuru writes "WigWag has developed a home automation kit that combines a Linux-based 6LoWPAN router with sensor units running the open-source Contiki IoT (Internet of Things) OS. Users can add ZigBee, Bluetooth, and other modules to expand the home network, and the WigWam development kit provides shield development boards for use with Arduino and Raspberry Pi SBCs. Users control the devices with a smartphone app (initially Android-based) and associated WigWag cloud service, which lets the devices remotely respond to sensor-based events such as motion detection, rain, noise, etc. Developers can create rules-based scripts for controlling devices using WigWag's open-source Javascript-based DeviceJS development environment. WigWag used a Kickstarter page to fund production and has already tripled its goal."

DeviceGuru writes with an excerpt that may be of interest especially for mobile users with cheap, always available wireless data: "An OpenWRT Linux-based hardware adapter called Plug designed for unifying USB-connected storage met its $69,000 Kickstarter pledge goal in 12 hours. The tiny Plug device eschews cloud storage for a localized approach whereby an app or driver installed on each participating computer or mobile device intercepts filesystem accesses, and redirects data reads and writes to storage drives attached to the user's Plug device. The Plug enjoyed one of the fastest fulfillments in Kickstarter history, meeting its goal in 12 hours, and has already soared to over $223,000 in funding."

symbolset writes "Most of you know about Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, and their Kickstarter campaign in the finest spirit of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon. The campaign has reached its minimum $1M goal to get funded with eight days left to go. In celebration, PR's CEO and Chief Asteroid Miner Chris Lewicki does an interview with Forbes where he discusses the future opportunities, the potential pitfalls, and the unlimited potential of private sector space exploitation. It's well worth the read. Planetary Resources' kickstarter has some worthy stretch goals that are well worth looking at, and the sort of supporter premiums that many Slashdotters will not want to miss. Only $175,000 more and they get a second ground station, at $2M they add exoplanet search capability. Both of these stretch goals are within reach."

TheSHAD0W writes "It's been over a decade since Megatokyo was mentioned in a Slashdot story. Fred Gallagher, author of the long-running webcomic, has launched a Kickstarter for a Megatokyo Visual Novel Game. The KS has fared very well, funding its basic goal in less than four hours and covering most of the posted stretch goals in the first twenty-four. Fred also posted a half-joking stretch goal at a half-million dollars to include'"excessively romantic content,' wink wink nudge nudge. He may have been kidding, but there are some indications it might be reached."

An anonymous reader writes "These folks at Public Lab have published instructions to hack a conventional camera to do photosynthesis photography, just like NASA's LANDSAT satellite. What better way to introduce your kids to space technologies and learn more about the environment? Measure the health of your garden, all with a simple filter switch and some post-processing. It's thoroughly documented at http://publiclab.org/wiki/near-infrared-camera, and you can do it to a variety of cameras." (And here's a link to the related — and fully funded — kickstarter project.)

An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld has an interview with an Australian startup called LIFX, producing WiFi-connected LED light bulbs. Each light bulb is a small computer running the Thingsquare distribution of the open source Contiki operating system that creates a low-power wireless mesh network between the light bulbs and connects them to the WiFi network. The wireless mesh network lets the light bulbs be controlled with a smartphone app. Through a Kickstarter project, the company has already raised a significant amount of money: over one million USD. "

An anonymous reader writes "The Kickstarter campaign for the UDOO board is 7 days out from closing and they currently sit just under $4,000 short of their stretch goal of $500,000. The UDOO is an attempt to produce a single board which would combine the best parts of both Raspberry Pi and Arduino. UDOO will have a 1GHz ARM i.MX6 CPU in either a Dual Core or Quad Core flavor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM, HDMI and LVDS + Touch, and both an RJ45 port and an on board Wifi Module. Along with those specs, it will be compatible with Arduino DUE R3. The UDOO will utilize Micro SD as a boot device and run both Linux and Android. Currently on Kickstarter, the Dual Core starts at a pledge of $109."

kkleiner writes "Planetary Resources, the company that set its sights on mining asteroids, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1M to crowdsource the world's first publicly accessible space telescope. In an interview, co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis stated that the ARKYD 100 telescope is a means of 'extending the optic nerve of humanity.' The company hopes that the campaign, which is supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green, will make an orbiting telescope available to the public to help schools and museums in their educational efforts to inspire great enthusiasm in space."

Last week you had the chance to ask Neil Gaiman, Amber Benson and the crew of Blood Kiss about the upcoming Kickstarter movie, vampires, and their past projects. The film has reached the initial funding goal with the new target being $200K, making it an entirely fan funded film. Below you'll find their answers to your questions. Overdone?
by Anonymous Coward

Given the plethora of vampire-related media in recent years, do you believe there is still a market for this type of film? What will you bring to the table that has not already been done?

Michael Reaves: Well, how about just plain people, instead of overblown Transylvanian counts? Maybe because they're not constantly reminding their victims that "The blood is the life," they have something of a sense of humor about themselves.

David Raiklen: Blood Kiss is as much detective story as vampire tale and that is new. There's a mix of glamour and fear, classic Hollywood and the unexpected. Plus great characters, each one could have their own movie. And there's nothing supernatural about our vampires.



Vampyres of Hollywood?
by Scott Loving

Without spoiling the plot, what separates Blood Kiss from the Vampyres of Hollywood series of novels?

Michael Reaves: The fact that I've never heard of them. Lemme check out the link .... Hey, is that Adrienne Barbeau? We used to have a lotta laughs at the Batman: TAS recordings. Yo, Adrienne! (Oops, sorry; wrong franchise.)



Thoughts on Vampire rules?
by kannibal_klown

What are your thoughts on Vampire rules; such as classic vampires vs sparkling? Over the decades we've seen Vampires (and Zombies) change and evolve from the classic rules and mythology to a whole plethora of variations. Powers, weaknesses, origins, turnings, etc. Such transitions have been slow, but now we have sparkling vampires made of stone. Do you feel that we should stick more with the classic mythos? Or are you in favor with your own spin.

Michael Reaves: I'm in favor of whatever works. I can't really comment on the "Twinkleteeth" style of vamps, because I haven't seen any, but I might remind you that Hollywood has been embellishing myths ever since George Méliès punched the Moon's eye out.

David Raiklen: It's time to give old myths a new spin. The classics will still be around, and will get remade. The first cinematic vampires were not undead fiends but 'vamps' or femme fatales. So we're actually true to the origins.

Neil Gaiman: I think the joy of being a writer is you use whatever you need for the story that you're on. The only rules are the ones that make that story work. I wrote a bunch of classical wumpires in the new book, Fortunately, the Milk, and wrote a dozen different kinds of vampire in a short story called Fifteen Painted Cards From a Vampire Tarot, with SF, fantasy and horror backgrounds.



Will Lincoln be in it?
by the_humeister

I'll only watch if the main character is a popular dead president.

Michael Reaves: Yes, Lincoln will be in it. He'll even have his big ol' shotgun axe. Happy now? (And people wonder why I didn't want studio interference ...)



Funding
by DocGerbil100

The Kickstarter page asks for $50K, but considering the apparent costs usually involved in making anything other than the smallest-scale movies, as well as the references in the text of your KS pitch regarding venture capital, I'd like to know how much you *actually* need to get this film made and distributed.

David Raiklen: Please check out our stretch goals on the KS front page. The first goal is to see if there's fan interest, and we are so grateful that you guys want to see this movie! We can make and distribute a good movie for about 200k and hopefully all from fan support.



Abuse of Kickstarter
by Anonymous Coward

Given that you have access to the Hollywood funding machine, why should you be using Kickstarter to fund this project? Shouldn't Kickstarter be used for people who have a good idea but don't have those industry connections? Do you worry that this will dilute the pool for indy film makers who have no other options?

David Raiklen: Actually, KS reports smaller projects get more funding when there's a bigger project active at the same time. The old studios just aren't making many movies and are following formulas more than ever. We've all backed indie films by first time filmmakers and encourage you to try it too. There's room for everyone, and if we protect the open nature of crowdfunding, more freedom for all creators.



Singing
by AmiMoJo

Will Amber Benson be singing? Some of us have been waiting a long time for the debut album but will take what we can get.

Amber Benson: I will be singing for sure! I've been relegated to my shower for most of my singing days post Buffy, so Michael asking me to actually sing in front of human beings/vampires was both titillating and frightening.



Re:My question
by Anonymous Coward

Tara was a very popular character particularly in the geek/nerd community. Do you think that character would have been as accepted if she was a gay man instead of a lesbian?

Amber Benson: I think it would've been accepted, for sure. I know that Tom Lenk has experienced the same love and affection from the geek/nerd community that I have - though his character's homosexuality was more implied than 'out in front' on screen in the show. The Buffy fans are an amazing group: smart, aware and open - less judgmental about our character's sexual preferences.



Acting
by Anonymous Coward

From the webpage it sounds like you don't relish the idea of acting Neil. What made you decide to do it and what is Mr. Reaves holding over you?

Neil Gaiman: What first attracted me to the project was Michael telling me he'd written a part for me. And that it wasn't a writer. (I've played lots of variants on myself now, which is fun, but isn't challenging.)



American Gods HBO series
by wynterwynd

Hi Neal - first off I want to say I'm a huge admirer and I can't wait to see you in Nashville this July! That being said, the tour is billed as the "Last US Signing Tour". Say it ain't so! My question: With the upcoming "American Gods" project for HBO, how much creative control do you have over the direction of series? Is there a firm beginning and an end to the story arc, as with the novel, or do you have to keep things open for possible future seasons? Blood Kiss sounds interesting due to the sheer creativity pool involved, although I think the vampire genre is getting a bit washed thin and fraying at the cuffs lately. Hopefully this approach will be sufficiently unique as to revitalize it (entendré completely intended).

Neil Gaiman: Right now I'm just waiting to find out if they like the pilot script. I'll worry about the rest of the things when the pilot episode gets approved.



Series Vs. Movie
by Anonymous Coward

I think the success of Game of Thrones and the fact that most successful Sci-fi or fantasy films unfold over multiple movies shows that people want to get to know characters on a personal level more now than before. Do you think it's still possible to tell a great story with fleshed out characters in two hours or less?

Michael Reaves: Yes; if I didn't I wouldn't be trying to do it. True, TV lends itself better to the "Novel for TV" format -sometimes. But sometimes the series doesn't have enough story to fulfill its time slot commitment, and it gets bloated and boring (yeah, I'm looking at you, Smallville).

Amber Benson: I do think it's possible to tell a great story in two hours. It's just harder than doing it in a serialized/television fashion because people really want to delve into the interior lives of the characters they watch - which is easier to do in a non-film (2 hour) format. I loved the first Matrix movie - I think it stands on its own - sure, it's part of a trilogy, but for me, that first one says it all.

Last week you had the chance to ask Neil Gaiman, Amber Benson and the crew of Blood Kiss about the upcoming Kickstarter movie, vampires, and their past projects. The film has reached the initial funding goal with the new target being $200K, making it an entirely fan funded film. Below you'll find their answers to your questions. Overdone?
by Anonymous Coward

Given the plethora of vampire-related media in recent years, do you believe there is still a market for this type of film? What will you bring to the table that has not already been done?

Michael Reaves: Well, how about just plain people, instead of overblown Transylvanian counts? Maybe because they're not constantly reminding their victims that "The blood is the life," they have something of a sense of humor about themselves.

David Raiklen: Blood Kiss is as much detective story as vampire tale and that is new. There's a mix of glamour and fear, classic Hollywood and the unexpected. Plus great characters, each one could have their own movie. And there's nothing supernatural about our vampires.



Vampyres of Hollywood?
by Scott Loving

Without spoiling the plot, what separates Blood Kiss from the Vampyres of Hollywood series of novels?

Michael Reaves: The fact that I've never heard of them. Lemme check out the link .... Hey, is that Adrienne Barbeau? We used to have a lotta laughs at the Batman: TAS recordings. Yo, Adrienne! (Oops, sorry; wrong franchise.)



Thoughts on Vampire rules?
by kannibal_klown

What are your thoughts on Vampire rules; such as classic vampires vs sparkling? Over the decades we've seen Vampires (and Zombies) change and evolve from the classic rules and mythology to a whole plethora of variations. Powers, weaknesses, origins, turnings, etc. Such transitions have been slow, but now we have sparkling vampires made of stone. Do you feel that we should stick more with the classic mythos? Or are you in favor with your own spin.

Michael Reaves: I'm in favor of whatever works. I can't really comment on the "Twinkleteeth" style of vamps, because I haven't seen any, but I might remind you that Hollywood has been embellishing myths ever since George Méliès punched the Moon's eye out.

David Raiklen: It's time to give old myths a new spin. The classics will still be around, and will get remade. The first cinematic vampires were not undead fiends but 'vamps' or femme fatales. So we're actually true to the origins.

Neil Gaiman: I think the joy of being a writer is you use whatever you need for the story that you're on. The only rules are the ones that make that story work. I wrote a bunch of classical wumpires in the new book, Fortunately, the Milk, and wrote a dozen different kinds of vampire in a short story called Fifteen Painted Cards From a Vampire Tarot, with SF, fantasy and horror backgrounds.



Will Lincoln be in it?
by the_humeister

I'll only watch if the main character is a popular dead president.

Michael Reaves: Yes, Lincoln will be in it. He'll even have his big ol' shotgun axe. Happy now? (And people wonder why I didn't want studio interference ...)



Funding
by DocGerbil100

The Kickstarter page asks for $50K, but considering the apparent costs usually involved in making anything other than the smallest-scale movies, as well as the references in the text of your KS pitch regarding venture capital, I'd like to know how much you *actually* need to get this film made and distributed.

David Raiklen: Please check out our stretch goals on the KS front page. The first goal is to see if there's fan interest, and we are so grateful that you guys want to see this movie! We can make and distribute a good movie for about 200k and hopefully all from fan support.



Abuse of Kickstarter
by Anonymous Coward

Given that you have access to the Hollywood funding machine, why should you be using Kickstarter to fund this project? Shouldn't Kickstarter be used for people who have a good idea but don't have those industry connections? Do you worry that this will dilute the pool for indy film makers who have no other options?

David Raiklen: Actually, KS reports smaller projects get more funding when there's a bigger project active at the same time. The old studios just aren't making many movies and are following formulas more than ever. We've all backed indie films by first time filmmakers and encourage you to try it too. There's room for everyone, and if we protect the open nature of crowdfunding, more freedom for all creators.



Singing
by AmiMoJo

Will Amber Benson be singing? Some of us have been waiting a long time for the debut album but will take what we can get.

Amber Benson: I will be singing for sure! I've been relegated to my shower for most of my singing days post Buffy, so Michael asking me to actually sing in front of human beings/vampires was both titillating and frightening.



Re:My question
by Anonymous Coward

Tara was a very popular character particularly in the geek/nerd community. Do you think that character would have been as accepted if she was a gay man instead of a lesbian?

Amber Benson: I think it would've been accepted, for sure. I know that Tom Lenk has experienced the same love and affection from the geek/nerd community that I have - though his character's homosexuality was more implied than 'out in front' on screen in the show. The Buffy fans are an amazing group: smart, aware and open - less judgmental about our character's sexual preferences.



Acting
by Anonymous Coward

From the webpage it sounds like you don't relish the idea of acting Neil. What made you decide to do it and what is Mr. Reaves holding over you?

Neil Gaiman: What first attracted me to the project was Michael telling me he'd written a part for me. And that it wasn't a writer. (I've played lots of variants on myself now, which is fun, but isn't challenging.)



American Gods HBO series
by wynterwynd

Hi Neal - first off I want to say I'm a huge admirer and I can't wait to see you in Nashville this July! That being said, the tour is billed as the "Last US Signing Tour". Say it ain't so! My question: With the upcoming "American Gods" project for HBO, how much creative control do you have over the direction of series? Is there a firm beginning and an end to the story arc, as with the novel, or do you have to keep things open for possible future seasons? Blood Kiss sounds interesting due to the sheer creativity pool involved, although I think the vampire genre is getting a bit washed thin and fraying at the cuffs lately. Hopefully this approach will be sufficiently unique as to revitalize it (entendré completely intended).

Neil Gaiman: Right now I'm just waiting to find out if they like the pilot script. I'll worry about the rest of the things when the pilot episode gets approved.



Series Vs. Movie
by Anonymous Coward

I think the success of Game of Thrones and the fact that most successful Sci-fi or fantasy films unfold over multiple movies shows that people want to get to know characters on a personal level more now than before. Do you think it's still possible to tell a great story with fleshed out characters in two hours or less?

Michael Reaves: Yes; if I didn't I wouldn't be trying to do it. True, TV lends itself better to the "Novel for TV" format -sometimes. But sometimes the series doesn't have enough story to fulfill its time slot commitment, and it gets bloated and boring (yeah, I'm looking at you, Smallville).

Amber Benson: I do think it's possible to tell a great story in two hours. It's just harder than doing it in a serialized/television fashion because people really want to delve into the interior lives of the characters they watch - which is easier to do in a non-film (2 hour) format. I loved the first Matrix movie - I think it stands on its own - sure, it's part of a trilogy, but for me, that first one says it all.

Writer and novelist Neil Gaiman and Amber Benson of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame have teamed up to star in a new vampire movie called, Blood Kiss. Kickstarted by ST:TNG and Emmy-winning writer Michael Reaves, Blood Kiss is a film noir vampire movie set in Golden Age Hollywood. Of his acting debut Gaiman says, "I'm willing to pretend that the prospect of acting doesn't terrify me in order to help Michael Reaves make his film." The trio have agreed to take a break from the blood and answer any questions you have about the new project or their past work. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

woohoodonuts writes "The Professional & Amateur Pinball Association is creating a webchannel that will livestream content from their national circuit of tournaments ranging from Southern California to New York City. The most recent circuit tournament in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sold out of all 400 tournament openings in less than three weeks, months in advance of the event. With several new companies in the process of creating machines and hundreds of new competitive events springing up worldwide at a record pace, is the retro silverball rising to prominence once again?"

"Quirky.com has generated a lot of buzz," writes frequent contributor Bennett Haselton, "but it's hard to see how it could ever be more than a novelty unless they change two key features of their process. Fortunately, they already have all the infrastructure in place for bringing inventions to fruition, so that with these two changes, Quirky really could deliver on their early promise to change the way products get invented." Read on for Bennett's thoughts — which seem more sensible than quirky.

You've probably read about Quirky in one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept. I do think the vision is brilliant — regular people who have smart ideas, but no experience with patents or marketing, partner with an invention company that manufacturers the product and splits the profits with them. But the hype seems oddly out of proportion to what Quirky actually makes — if you received a catalog in the mail with pictures of these products, would you remember the catalog a week later?

OK, I know, the hype is based not on the products, but on the process — regular people getting a shot at inventor stardom. Certainly the fairy tale has come true for some of the community inventors (who, not surprisingly, are spotlighted by Quirky quite a bit). But if you look at the overall numbers, the "About Quirky" page claims a community of "399,000 inventors" and "325 products developed," a pair of statistics that may reveal more than they intended — and indeed the odds are even worse than that, since only 74 of those products are being sold in their store and making the inventors any money, and only about half of those have made the inventor $10,000 or more. (For reasons explained here, some products selected by Quirky never actually get manufactured.) If you're tempted to think that it's a meritocracy and those 74 products really are the best ones anyone has ever submitted -- do you really think the Glide knife cleaner (12 units sold so far) is more useful than the nearly 400,000 other ideas people have sent in?

So if the products themselves are not changing the world, and from the "community inventor's" point of view it's a lottery that most of them have no chance of winning, then what is the big deal about Quirky?

Not surprisingly, there is an undercurrent of frustration that keeps bubbling to the surface on the Quirky message boards — frustration with the high odds against winning, and the lack of transparency about what products do make it. But I think the frustration can be traced back to two key problems with Quirky's process — both of which could be fixed (one of them quite easily), and which could take the arbitrariness and lack of transparency out of the selection process, and result in more inventions getting selected, all while making Quirky more money.

First, in the existing system, a user submitting a new idea probably doesn't realize that less than 1 in 1000 submissions goes on to be selected by Quirky as one of that week's "winners," and only about 1 in 10,000 ideas has ever gone on to make the inventor more than $10,000. On this page you can see a scrolling list of the most recent submissions; I wrote a script to poll that feed and count up the new submissions as they appeared, and the total averages about 1,500 per week. Of these, only two get selected by Quirky at their weekly staff meeting, and, as noted above, most of the selected winners do not end up in their store anyway.

Quirky also charges $10 for each idea submission, which comes to $15,000 per week, or about $150 per employee — hardly enough for each of them to live on, but not trivial. According to the text I copied from an old version of Quirky's FAQ: "We ask for $10 when submitting an idea for three simple reasons: to make sure you are serious about your submission, to be sure that you're an actual human, and most importantly: to assure that the quality of submissions remains high." Notably missing from that list was "To make Quirky some extra money." But from my experience when running a paid service that offered the first month at a reduced rate, asking for $1 and asking for $10 achieved about the same goal of filtering out the people who weren't serious.

Now, however, Quirky's FAQ answers that question by saying:

Well, you've got to ante up to give your idea the fair shot it deserves. Best case scenario? Your $10 investment takes your idea from a tiny sketch to a professionally manufactured product found on shelves worldwide, earning you a heckuva lot more. Worst case? That 10 bucks gets you extensive community feedback on who liked and didn't like your idea, which serves as focused consumer market research. You then have the option to resubmit your idea, or you can use the feedback you received to make it on your own.

That's not a trivial change, because that statement is actually wrong — the $10 doesn't "get you" any "community feedback". Which brings me to the next problem with Quirky's current system.

When I gave Quirky a test drive by submitting an idea for a standalone smartphone-battery recharger (something I wished for in my article about the usefulness of spare batteries), after I submitted the idea and my payment, I was left on a page without any information about what to do next. How, I wondered, was I supposed to get "votes" for my idea without spamming the message boards or other users? The FAQ didn't — and still doesn't — answer this question, odd for something that would be one of the first things on every submitter's mind. But it referred me to the forums, where I found a post by quirky user Matthew Fleming, whose invention was actually picked up by Quirky, summarizing advice from himself and other Quirky experts on how to get votes (and, presumably, how he himself did it):

"(1) Posting your idea is the designated Pimping Zone. [dead link]
(2) Getting your Facebook friends or Twitter followers to check out your idea.
(3) Promoting to all other people off site (including Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit, emailing, texting & calling your friends, finding relevant forums elsewhere online).
(4) Putting links to your idea in your profile, then being active in other areas of the site, such as helping other people's. People may check out your profile and look at your ideas.
(5) When adding a link to your submission in # 1 or 4, make sure your link is clickable typing in the html code (OR you can use this handy link generator to generate the HTML code to then paste directly into your post).
(6) Promote in other Quirky hangouts, like:
Quirky Inventors on Facebook
As Seen On Facebook [dead link]
Quirky Products on Facebook"

My heart sank like a rock when I read those words. Here I had really believed that — despite the considerable odds against any given submission making it into the production stage — Quirky at least had a system in place for identifying the best ones. But it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.

So it is in fact misleading to say that the $10 entry fee "gets you" any community feedback. The only way to get community feedback is to try bringing up your idea in forum threads (which risks pissing people off if you violate some rules that are never clearly explained), to post it in designated areas where idea flooding is encouraged (which are clogged to the point of uselessness from everybody else doing the same thing), or to recruit new people under you in the Quirky pyramid.

I didn't do any of those things, so my idea got a grand total of 8 views and 3 votes, before expiring at the end of the 30-day vote-gathering window. Far from being surprised that I got so few views, on the contrary I don't even have any idea where those 8 views came from, since I didn't rope in any of my friends to sign up and vote for me.

If Quirky wants to essentially limit the winners to people who agree to promote Quirky to their friends, that's their right, but then they shouldn't claim that their system actually identifies the best new ideas, or even what "the community" thinks are the best new ideas.

Meanwhile, the products that do make it into production, seem to bear out the prediction above — they're good, but not great, and many of them look like they made it as a result of a combination of luck and playing the promotion game. The $13 "Pluck" egg yolk separator looks cool, but do you really need it when the grocery store sells an egg separator for $1.59? Well, I don't cook much, so maybe I'm more qualified to evaluate electronics accessories. I actually did just order one of Quirky's "Cordies" for holding cord extensions on your desktop (if it works out, I can let you know in a follow-up to my much-beloved article about low-tech hacks!), but there are gizmos on Amazon that do the same thing. The Pivot Power Strip also looks cool, but it seems simpler to me just to use power strip liberators, which are cheaper per-plug, can be divided across multiple rooms, and light up to show when the power is running.

And the truth is that of all the gadgets I saw in the Quirky store, there's nothing I would choose over having a portable charger for spare cell phone batteries. I may be biased, but what would you rather have — effectively unlimited phone battery life, or an egg yolk separator that happens to look like an egg?

What's frustrating about all of this is that there are two simple changes that Quirky could make to their selection system, which would immediately make the "promotion game" obsolete, and almost by definition would select the inventions that the greatest number of people would actually buy. The first change is the same basic system that I've advocated for reforming the White House "We The People" website, for halting cheating on news aggregator sites, for detecting abusive content on Facebook, and multiple other problems: random-sample voting. In other words, when you submit a new idea to Quirky, the idea would also be presented to, say, 20 other users selected at random. Each user votes on whether they would buy the product if it went into production. (Quirky could simply require that, as a condition of keeping your account active, you have to vote when they ask you to.) The ideas that get the most "yes" votes out of those 20 randomly selected users, are judged to be the most marketable. (Well, 20 is a small enough sample that some would get high ratings just as a statistical fluke, but an invention that cleared the first hurdle could then be sent to a voting panel of 100 users.)

Of course, users who have expertise in particular fields, could weigh in at any time to point out that an invention would be impractical, illegal, in violation of someone else's patent, or redundant given another product already on the market. But to answer the basic question of how many people would buy a product if it cleared all those other hurdles, asking a random sample of users is a rather more valid research method than "texting & calling your friends".

Unusually for one of my "random-sample-voting" lobbying efforts, someone has already made essentially the same point on the Quirky message boards — community inventor Clinton Fleenor wrote a post making essentially the same argument. I would quibble with him in a couple of points (there's no reason to bring in "a million+ impartial, non-submitting voters" per day, since a smaller sample size is good enough), but he got the key point exactly right:

"What happens if the system is distributing the submissions to voters one at a time instead of allowing voters to self-select?
Answer: No submissions are buried."

(Clinton's posts since that date have expressed an increasing disgust with the process, most recently calling Quirky "glaze-eyed lazy asses" — and this was from someone who actually won at their game. You can imagine how the people feel who don't win.)

In fact, you could even use the random sampling method to ask people not just whether they would buy a product, but to give them the option to pre-order it, Kickstarter-style, with the money to be returned if the product doesn't get enough pre-orders to justify production. Which leads to the second change that could revolutionize how Quirky works: Rather than picking two "winning" products every week, put every product into production that receives enough votes and/or pre-orders to indicate that it would be profitable.

For example, suppose you have an idea that can be made and sold for $10 per unit, but only if the product sells 10,000 units or more. Assume there are 100,000 Quirky users who can be polled to ask if they are potential buyers. Quirky takes your idea and presents it to 100 randomly selected users, and asks them to pre-order it for $10 if they're interested. If 20 of those 100 users do in fact pre-order, then Quirky presents the idea to all of their 100,000 product-buying user base. Assuming that the original sample of 100 was representative of the population of 100,000, then they would expect that 20,000 users would also pre-order. Now you've exceeded the minimum required order of 10,000 and the product can go into production. On the other hand, suppose only 5 people pre-order out of that sample of 100. Then Quirky could expect that out of their total population of 100,000, only about 5,000 would pre-order the product — not enough to justify production, so they never push the pre-order to the rest of their customers, and the original 5 who placed their pre-order would get their money back.

More realistically, suppose Quirky makes most of their sales through retail and not to their own users, but they also know that sales to their own users are a good predictor of retail sales — for example, that they sell 3 times as many of a product through retailers as they do to their own built-in user base. Then if a product has to sell 10,000 units to be profitable, they put it into production if they determine, via random sampling, that they would sell at least 2,500 units to their own users, and count on roughly 7,500 more orders from retail shoppers.

This system has several desirable features:

• If an idea doesn't appeal to a high enough percentage of the user base (as determined by asking the random sample that are asked to pre-order), then the vast majority of users never get bothered with the pre-order request, since it dies after not making it past the hurdle of the initial 100.
• On the other hand, if there are enough potential buyers among the user population, then barring any statistical flukes, the initial sample of 100 randomly selected users will reveal that. Thus almost all of the time, any idea that does get pushed to the entire user population, will get enough pre-orders at that point to go into production.
• The system can't be "gamed" by promotional shenanigans like "texting & calling your friends".
• It's scalable — any product that receives enough pre-orders to guarantee the desired profit, can go into production, no matter how many such products clear that threshold in any given week.

(If Quirky's patent lawyers are in danger of getting overwhelmed from all the ideas that clear the pre-order hurdle every week, the idea is still scalable for any invention where there's enough profit to pay for the lawyers. Suppose it takes $2,000 worth of lawyer-time to clear all the patents and other paperwork to market an invention. Then any invention that gets enough pre-orders to pay for the production cost, plus $2,000 for the lawyer, can still go to manufacturing. That process can be repeated as many times per week if you want, as long as there are lawyers who want the work.)

Kickstarter doesn't use random-sample-voting to identify the best ideas on their site, but they do use pre-orders to solve the scalability problem -- if enough people make a pre-order pledge on Kickstarter to meet the project's minimum funding requirements, the project goes ahead (and if the fundraising goal is not met, everyone who pledged gets their money back). Kickstarter doesn't pick "winners"; if you meet your funding requirement, you "win," and there's no limit on how many projects can be successfully funded in a given week. So I wasn't surprised to see that Kickstarter has funded over 39,000 projects successfully compared to Quirky's 326. (Yes, that's apples and oranges, since many Kickstarter projects are easier to complete than putting a Quirky invention into production — but still, given the buzz that both companies are receiving these days, would you have guessed that one of them has funded over 100 times more projects successfully than the other one?)

So those are my suggestions to Quirky: Use random-sample voting to get an initial reading for the merits of an idea (very easy), and then use Kickstarter-style pre-orders to secure funding for any marketable invention, not just a limited number of weekly "winners" (a much bigger overhaul, but a good long-term goal). If they appropriate my suggestions, I promise not to organize any protest demonstrations outside their headquarters demanding credit. In fact, given how unfair their current system is to the inventors ponying up $10 each to play their lottery, we should probably stage a protest outside their office if they don't take these ideas.

"Quirky.com has generated a lot of buzz," writes frequent contributor Bennett Haselton, "but it's hard to see how it could ever be more than a novelty unless they change two key features of their process. Fortunately, they already have all the infrastructure in place for bringing inventions to fruition, so that with these two changes, Quirky really could deliver on their early promise to change the way products get invented." Read on for Bennett's thoughts — which seem more sensible than quirky.

You've probably read about Quirky in one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept. I do think the vision is brilliant — regular people who have smart ideas, but no experience with patents or marketing, partner with an invention company that manufacturers the product and splits the profits with them. But the hype seems oddly out of proportion to what Quirky actually makes — if you received a catalog in the mail with pictures of these products, would you remember the catalog a week later?

OK, I know, the hype is based not on the products, but on the process — regular people getting a shot at inventor stardom. Certainly the fairy tale has come true for some of the community inventors (who, not surprisingly, are spotlighted by Quirky quite a bit). But if you look at the overall numbers, the "About Quirky" page claims a community of "399,000 inventors" and "325 products developed," a pair of statistics that may reveal more than they intended — and indeed the odds are even worse than that, since only 74 of those products are being sold in their store and making the inventors any money, and only about half of those have made the inventor $10,000 or more. (For reasons explained here, some products selected by Quirky never actually get manufactured.) If you're tempted to think that it's a meritocracy and those 74 products really are the best ones anyone has ever submitted -- do you really think the Glide knife cleaner (12 units sold so far) is more useful than the nearly 400,000 other ideas people have sent in?

So if the products themselves are not changing the world, and from the "community inventor's" point of view it's a lottery that most of them have no chance of winning, then what is the big deal about Quirky?

Not surprisingly, there is an undercurrent of frustration that keeps bubbling to the surface on the Quirky message boards — frustration with the high odds against winning, and the lack of transparency about what products do make it. But I think the frustration can be traced back to two key problems with Quirky's process — both of which could be fixed (one of them quite easily), and which could take the arbitrariness and lack of transparency out of the selection process, and result in more inventions getting selected, all while making Quirky more money.

First, in the existing system, a user submitting a new idea probably doesn't realize that less than 1 in 1000 submissions goes on to be selected by Quirky as one of that week's "winners," and only about 1 in 10,000 ideas has ever gone on to make the inventor more than $10,000. On this page you can see a scrolling list of the most recent submissions; I wrote a script to poll that feed and count up the new submissions as they appeared, and the total averages about 1,500 per week. Of these, only two get selected by Quirky at their weekly staff meeting, and, as noted above, most of the selected winners do not end up in their store anyway.

Quirky also charges $10 for each idea submission, which comes to $15,000 per week, or about $150 per employee — hardly enough for each of them to live on, but not trivial. According to the text I copied from an old version of Quirky's FAQ: "We ask for $10 when submitting an idea for three simple reasons: to make sure you are serious about your submission, to be sure that you're an actual human, and most importantly: to assure that the quality of submissions remains high." Notably missing from that list was "To make Quirky some extra money." But from my experience when running a paid service that offered the first month at a reduced rate, asking for $1 and asking for $10 achieved about the same goal of filtering out the people who weren't serious.

Now, however, Quirky's FAQ answers that question by saying:

Well, you've got to ante up to give your idea the fair shot it deserves. Best case scenario? Your $10 investment takes your idea from a tiny sketch to a professionally manufactured product found on shelves worldwide, earning you a heckuva lot more. Worst case? That 10 bucks gets you extensive community feedback on who liked and didn't like your idea, which serves as focused consumer market research. You then have the option to resubmit your idea, or you can use the feedback you received to make it on your own.

That's not a trivial change, because that statement is actually wrong — the $10 doesn't "get you" any "community feedback". Which brings me to the next problem with Quirky's current system.

When I gave Quirky a test drive by submitting an idea for a standalone smartphone-battery recharger (something I wished for in my article about the usefulness of spare batteries), after I submitted the idea and my payment, I was left on a page without any information about what to do next. How, I wondered, was I supposed to get "votes" for my idea without spamming the message boards or other users? The FAQ didn't — and still doesn't — answer this question, odd for something that would be one of the first things on every submitter's mind. But it referred me to the forums, where I found a post by quirky user Matthew Fleming, whose invention was actually picked up by Quirky, summarizing advice from himself and other Quirky experts on how to get votes (and, presumably, how he himself did it):

"(1) Posting your idea is the designated Pimping Zone. [dead link]
(2) Getting your Facebook friends or Twitter followers to check out your idea.
(3) Promoting to all other people off site (including Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit, emailing, texting & calling your friends, finding relevant forums elsewhere online).
(4) Putting links to your idea in your profile, then being active in other areas of the site, such as helping other people's. People may check out your profile and look at your ideas.
(5) When adding a link to your submission in # 1 or 4, make sure your link is clickable typing in the html code (OR you can use this handy link generator to generate the HTML code to then paste directly into your post).
(6) Promote in other Quirky hangouts, like:
Quirky Inventors on Facebook
As Seen On Facebook [dead link]
Quirky Products on Facebook"

My heart sank like a rock when I read those words. Here I had really believed that — despite the considerable odds against any given submission making it into the production stage — Quirky at least had a system in place for identifying the best ones. But it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.

So it is in fact misleading to say that the $10 entry fee "gets you" any community feedback. The only way to get community feedback is to try bringing up your idea in forum threads (which risks pissing people off if you violate some rules that are never clearly explained), to post it in designated areas where idea flooding is encouraged (which are clogged to the point of uselessness from everybody else doing the same thing), or to recruit new people under you in the Quirky pyramid.

I didn't do any of those things, so my idea got a grand total of 8 views and 3 votes, before expiring at the end of the 30-day vote-gathering window. Far from being surprised that I got so few views, on the contrary I don't even have any idea where those 8 views came from, since I didn't rope in any of my friends to sign up and vote for me.

If Quirky wants to essentially limit the winners to people who agree to promote Quirky to their friends, that's their right, but then they shouldn't claim that their system actually identifies the best new ideas, or even what "the community" thinks are the best new ideas.

Meanwhile, the products that do make it into production, seem to bear out the prediction above — they're good, but not great, and many of them look like they made it as a result of a combination of luck and playing the promotion game. The $13 "Pluck" egg yolk separator looks cool, but do you really need it when the grocery store sells an egg separator for $1.59? Well, I don't cook much, so maybe I'm more qualified to evaluate electronics accessories. I actually did just order one of Quirky's "Cordies" for holding cord extensions on your desktop (if it works out, I can let you know in a follow-up to my much-beloved article about low-tech hacks!), but there are gizmos on Amazon that do the same thing. The Pivot Power Strip also looks cool, but it seems simpler to me just to use power strip liberators, which are cheaper per-plug, can be divided across multiple rooms, and light up to show when the power is running.

And the truth is that of all the gadgets I saw in the Quirky store, there's nothing I would choose over having a portable charger for spare cell phone batteries. I may be biased, but what would you rather have — effectively unlimited phone battery life, or an egg yolk separator that happens to look like an egg?

What's frustrating about all of this is that there are two simple changes that Quirky could make to their selection system, which would immediately make the "promotion game" obsolete, and almost by definition would select the inventions that the greatest number of people would actually buy. The first change is the same basic system that I've advocated for reforming the White House "We The People" website, for halting cheating on news aggregator sites, for detecting abusive content on Facebook, and multiple other problems: random-sample voting. In other words, when you submit a new idea to Quirky, the idea would also be presented to, say, 20 other users selected at random. Each user votes on whether they would buy the product if it went into production. (Quirky could simply require that, as a condition of keeping your account active, you have to vote when they ask you to.) The ideas that get the most "yes" votes out of those 20 randomly selected users, are judged to be the most marketable. (Well, 20 is a small enough sample that some would get high ratings just as a statistical fluke, but an invention that cleared the first hurdle could then be sent to a voting panel of 100 users.)

Of course, users who have expertise in particular fields, could weigh in at any time to point out that an invention would be impractical, illegal, in violation of someone else's patent, or redundant given another product already on the market. But to answer the basic question of how many people would buy a product if it cleared all those other hurdles, asking a random sample of users is a rather more valid research method than "texting & calling your friends".

Unusually for one of my "random-sample-voting" lobbying efforts, someone has already made essentially the same point on the Quirky message boards — community inventor Clinton Fleenor wrote a post making essentially the same argument. I would quibble with him in a couple of points (there's no reason to bring in "a million+ impartial, non-submitting voters" per day, since a smaller sample size is good enough), but he got the key point exactly right:

"What happens if the system is distributing the submissions to voters one at a time instead of allowing voters to self-select?
Answer: No submissions are buried."

(Clinton's posts since that date have expressed an increasing disgust with the process, most recently calling Quirky "glaze-eyed lazy asses" — and this was from someone who actually won at their game. You can imagine how the people feel who don't win.)

In fact, you could even use the random sampling method to ask people not just whether they would buy a product, but to give them the option to pre-order it, Kickstarter-style, with the money to be returned if the product doesn't get enough pre-orders to justify production. Which leads to the second change that could revolutionize how Quirky works: Rather than picking two "winning" products every week, put every product into production that receives enough votes and/or pre-orders to indicate that it would be profitable.

For example, suppose you have an idea that can be made and sold for $10 per unit, but only if the product sells 10,000 units or more. Assume there are 100,000 Quirky users who can be polled to ask if they are potential buyers. Quirky takes your idea and presents it to 100 randomly selected users, and asks them to pre-order it for $10 if they're interested. If 20 of those 100 users do in fact pre-order, then Quirky presents the idea to all of their 100,000 product-buying user base. Assuming that the original sample of 100 was representative of the population of 100,000, then they would expect that 20,000 users would also pre-order. Now you've exceeded the minimum required order of 10,000 and the product can go into production. On the other hand, suppose only 5 people pre-order out of that sample of 100. Then Quirky could expect that out of their total population of 100,000, only about 5,000 would pre-order the product — not enough to justify production, so they never push the pre-order to the rest of their customers, and the original 5 who placed their pre-order would get their money back.

More realistically, suppose Quirky makes most of their sales through retail and not to their own users, but they also know that sales to their own users are a good predictor of retail sales — for example, that they sell 3 times as many of a product through retailers as they do to their own built-in user base. Then if a product has to sell 10,000 units to be profitable, they put it into production if they determine, via random sampling, that they would sell at least 2,500 units to their own users, and count on roughly 7,500 more orders from retail shoppers.

This system has several desirable features:

• If an idea doesn't appeal to a high enough percentage of the user base (as determined by asking the random sample that are asked to pre-order), then the vast majority of users never get bothered with the pre-order request, since it dies after not making it past the hurdle of the initial 100.
• On the other hand, if there are enough potential buyers among the user population, then barring any statistical flukes, the initial sample of 100 randomly selected users will reveal that. Thus almost all of the time, any idea that does get pushed to the entire user population, will get enough pre-orders at that point to go into production.
• The system can't be "gamed" by promotional shenanigans like "texting & calling your friends".
• It's scalable — any product that receives enough pre-orders to guarantee the desired profit, can go into production, no matter how many such products clear that threshold in any given week.

(If Quirky's patent lawyers are in danger of getting overwhelmed from all the ideas that clear the pre-order hurdle every week, the idea is still scalable for any invention where there's enough profit to pay for the lawyers. Suppose it takes $2,000 worth of lawyer-time to clear all the patents and other paperwork to market an invention. Then any invention that gets enough pre-orders to pay for the production cost, plus $2,000 for the lawyer, can still go to manufacturing. That process can be repeated as many times per week if you want, as long as there are lawyers who want the work.)

Kickstarter doesn't use random-sample-voting to identify the best ideas on their site, but they do use pre-orders to solve the scalability problem -- if enough people make a pre-order pledge on Kickstarter to meet the project's minimum funding requirements, the project goes ahead (and if the fundraising goal is not met, everyone who pledged gets their money back). Kickstarter doesn't pick "winners"; if you meet your funding requirement, you "win," and there's no limit on how many projects can be successfully funded in a given week. So I wasn't surprised to see that Kickstarter has funded over 39,000 projects successfully compared to Quirky's 326. (Yes, that's apples and oranges, since many Kickstarter projects are easier to complete than putting a Quirky invention into production — but still, given the buzz that both companies are receiving these days, would you have guessed that one of them has funded over 100 times more projects successfully than the other one?)

So those are my suggestions to Quirky: Use random-sample voting to get an initial reading for the merits of an idea (very easy), and then use Kickstarter-style pre-orders to secure funding for any marketable invention, not just a limited number of weekly "winners" (a much bigger overhaul, but a good long-term goal). If they appropriate my suggestions, I promise not to organize any protest demonstrations outside their headquarters demanding credit. In fact, given how unfair their current system is to the inventors ponying up $10 each to play their lottery, we should probably stage a protest outside their office if they don't take these ideas.

The Kickstarter project we mentioned late last month to bring open source video editor OpenShot to Mac and Windows as well as its native base of Linux has surpassed its initial funding goal, and now is just shy (just under a thousand dollars shy, at this writing) of reaching all of the items on a revamped list of stretch goals. The only goal on that list not yet funded is a tantalizing one. JonOomph writes "The lead developer has proposed a revolutionary new feature, which would allow users to offload CPU, memory, and disk cache to a local server (or multiple local servers), dramatically increasing the speed of previewing and rendering. The more servers added to the pool, the faster the video editing engine becomes (with the primary limitation being network bandwidth). If the final goal of $40k is reached in the remaining hours, this feature will be added to the next version of OpenShot." Like all Kickstarter projects, though, there's no actual guarantee that things will come to pass as hoped; ya pays yer money, and ya takes yer chances. Update: 04/16 16:53 GMT by T : Some hours remain, but they've crossed the $40,000 line. I hope the funding is adequate to support the outlined plans.

Feast Huggston writes "Indie Dev Darkseas Games has released an early gameplay trailer (video) of Road Redemption, a modern reimagining of the Sega Genesis (and later 3DO/N64/PSX/PC) motorcycle combat-racing classic Road Rash. The project has been in development since early 2012 and utilizes the Unity 4 engine. It is currently slated for release on PC, Mac, and Linux in 2014, with a stretch goal of eventually reaching the major game consoles. So far, it has raised over $24,000 of its $160,000 pledge goal on Kickstarter. While Road Rash creator Dan Geisler recently stated that he was interested in making another Road Rash, he is apparently not directly involved in this project, although he has given it his blessing. I grew up playing the heck out of this on Genesis and PC and it already appears that for many, a rebirth of this franchise was long overdue."

New submitter JonOomph writes "Director Alex Cox, the creator of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, is making plans via Kickstarter for his next film, Bill, the Galactic Hero, a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy. He is challenging the norm by shooting the film on 35mm monochrome (black and white) film, possibly the last film to ever attempt this, and possibly the first feature film to be edited with popular open source video editor OpenShot." If you don't like spoilers, I suggest reading this short but fascinating piece on Repo Man (one of my all-time favorite movies) only after watching it.

New submitter JonOomph writes "Director Alex Cox, the creator of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, is making plans via Kickstarter for his next film, Bill, the Galactic Hero, a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy. He is challenging the norm by shooting the film on 35mm monochrome (black and white) film, possibly the last film to ever attempt this, and possibly the first feature film to be edited with popular open source video editor OpenShot." If you don't like spoilers, I suggest reading this short but fascinating piece on Repo Man (one of my all-time favorite movies) only after watching it.

hypnosec writes "Developer units of Android based gaming console on-a-stick GameStick have already been shipped but, the units meant for early Kickstarter backers have been delayed by two months and will now ship by late June, PlayJam has revealed. The reason, according to PlayJam, is that the consoles would require stronger tooling as compared to silicon based moulds of the dev consoles, which would be finished sometime by June 10. Further, because of the sheer increase in the number of units, PlayJam has said that it won't be able to afford the air freight and will be going for sea freight instead, which will delay the shipments to June."

Once upon a time, people shot a kind of video called "film." And one of the most popular film camera makers was Bolex. Their 16 mm and Super 16 mm cameras were the favored tools for indie film makers, low budget TV news operations, and film schools. Sure, there were 8mm and Super 8, but they didn't give you the stunning clarity you could get with 16 mm. Besides that, carrying a Bolex was kind of like telling everyone, "Look at me! I'm a professional moviemaker!" And with the cost of processing 16 mm film back in the late 1960s and early 1970s you pretty much had to be a pro -- or at least have access to a TV station or college film lab if you wanted to do any serious movie experimentation. Obviously, times have changed. You can now buy a fairly serious camcorder at a consumer-level price. Or a DSLR that can do video -- and do depth of field tricks hardly any camcorder can match. Even so, if you are a film junkie, you just might want a Digital Bolex. Thanks to a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, it looks like you might be able to buy one before long. Too bad you can't still get Kodachrome film, which was the perfect film for your Bolex. Ah, well. RAW format digital is more or less the 21st Century equivalent of Kodachrome, so it will have to do.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Kickstarter has taken off in the past year, raising big money for a wide variety of projects. Look at some of their stats: in June 2012, only seven projects raised more than a million dollars apiece; in the past nine months, another 16 projects have passed that threshold. Since the site began operations in 2009, several of the 38,000 funded projects have broken out as superstars, including the Pebble Watch and a new gaming console. With all this competition, has crowdfunding gotten, well, too crowded? Is Kickstarter peaking? As the dollar amounts have grown, so has the potential for abuse. Hidden amidst all these success stories and multi-million dollar payouts are some sadder tales. The majority of the nearly 50,000 unfunded Kickstarter projects received less than 20 precent of their funding goals, with 11 percent never even getting a single pledge."

There have been video editing apps available for Linux for years, from ones meant to be friendly enough to compete on the UI front with iMovie (like the moribund Kino, last released in 2009, and the actively developed PiTiVi and Kdenlive) to editors that can apparently do nearly anything, provided the user is a thick-skinned genius — I'm thinking of Broadcast 2000/Cinelerra. Then there's VJ-tool-cum-non-linear editor LiVES, which balances a dense interface with real-time effects for using video as a performance tool, and can run on various flavors of UNIX, including Mac OS X. Dallas-based developer Jonathan Thomas has been working for the last few years on a Free (GPL3 or later), open-source editor called OpenShot, which aims for a happy medium of both usability and power. OpenShot is Linux-only, though, and Thomas is now trying to kickstart (as in, using a Kickstarter project) a cross-platform release for OS X and Windows, too. I've been tempted by dozens of KickStarter projects before, but this is the first one that I've actually pledged to support, and for what may sound like a backwards reason: I like the interface, and am impressed by the feature set, but OpenShot crashes on me a lot. (To be fair, this is mostly to blame on my hardware, none of which is really high-end enough by video-editing standards, or even middle-of-the-road. One day!) So while I like the idea of having a cross-platform, open-source video editor, I have no plans to migrate to Windows; I'm mostly interested in the promised features and stability improvements.

Cynic writes "Inspired by an earlier Slashdot story about Finnish teachers and students writing a math textbook, I pitched the idea of writing our own much cheaper/free C++ textbook to my programming students. They were incredibly positive, so I decided to move forward and started a Kickstarter project. We hope to release the textbook we produce under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and sell cheap hard copies to sustain the hosting and other production costs."

Slashdot editor Tim Lord was wandering around SXSW and ran into a small display for Lynx Laboratories, a startup that makes this claim about its Lynx A camera: "If you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx even easier to use. Instead of outputing 2D images, it produces 3D models of whatever you point it at. It's faster and cheaper than existing solutions today." There's a two-minute demo at the end of the video in which Lynx Founder and CEO Chris Slaughter shows how it works, and (at least in his hands) it looks extremely easy. The company is a University of Texas spinoff that "has received prestigious awards including the 1st Place Idea2Product (I2P) Texas, 1st Place I2P Global, Top 10 Dell Innovators and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Funding." Naturally, they're hoping to raise money through Kickstarter as well. They're looking for $50,000 and as of 13 March 2013 it looks like they've raised $88,548 of it. There are obviously other ways to make 3-D images and models. But Lynx seems to have made a novel device, and the images it makes can be picked up directly by a number of 3D printer software packages. The Lynx-A also does motion capture, which could really speed up rotoscoping and other techniques that make video games and other animations look more lifelike than pure animation. That's totally different from static 3D modeling but might be more interesting to more people, at least in a commercial sense.

New submitter abuelos84 writes "Just a few hours after the Kickstarter project was opened to the public, Torment: Tides of Numenera, successor of the legendary Planescape:Torment, had been funded. In the dev's own words: 'Our heads are still spinning at the incredible response we have had from today's support of our Kickstarter campaign. We had plans to roll out our stretch goals and to write our Kickstarter updates but never in our wildest dreams did we think we would fund this quickly!!! We are joyfully scrambling right now to get a longer update and some stretch goals in front of you as soon as we can. We should have more to say later today.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Indie Kickstarter-funded short HENRi stars a sci-fi legend in a role very much like HAL-9000 — with a twist. Wired writes: 'If it sounds a little bit like 2001: The Later Years, then here's the real twist: HENRi, the ship/body, is voiced [by] Dr. Dave Bowman himself, Keir Dullea.' In a making-of video for the film, Dullea says, 'I guess you could say the character of HENRi was a sane version of HAL.' The film itself utilizes a mixture of the old and the new — combining live-action sequences with puppetry, quarter-scale miniatures, and modern CGI. The official trailer has just been released."

Kagetsuki writes "There's a project on KickStarter for a Free and Open set of emoji [the graphical emoticon glyph set which has a block reserved in Unicode]. Currently there are no full sets of Emoji that are completely free (as in beer and and freedom), so if this project gets funded it will be the first and only set of emoji that can, say, be distributed with FLOSS Linux/BSD/GNU systems. Not to mention anyone will be able to incorporate them into any project without any restrictive conditions." And lest you think emoji devoid of literary value, reader coondoggie points out that the Library of Congress has just welcomed (or at least allowed) onto its vaunted shelves an all-emoji version of Melville's Moby Dick, created with the help of translators working through Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Several readers sent word of a new addition to the 3-D printing industry. Most 3-D printers are roughly the size of regular printers, and require design files on the computer to guide the extruder. Now there's a much smaller and much simpler alternative: the 3Doodler pen, which lets you draw 3-D objects by hand. The people making the pen set up a Kickstarter project yesterday with a $30,000 goal. They reached that within hours, and now have pledges exceeding $800,000. "The 3Doodler pen is 180mm by 24mm. The pen weighs less than 200 grams or 7 ounces (the weight of a typical apple), although the exact weight will depend on the final shell specifications once in production. And we are using a universal power supply, so provided you have the correct adapter for your country, 3Doodler will work just fine on 110v or 240v. ... While the plastic extruded from 3Doodler is safe to touch once it has left the pen, the pen itself has a metal tip that can get as hot as 270C." The pen uses the same ABS/PLA plastic as most 3-D printers, and they're planning to host stencil designs on their website so that users have patterns to sketch from.

New submitter terbeaux writes "The documentary TPB AFK follows the creators of The Pirate Bay — Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm — through their technical and logistical trials of keeping TPB online as well as their court appearances in Sweden. After its premiere at Berlin International Film Festival, TechCrunch is reporting that TPB AFK is now available under a Creative Commons license for purchase, download on TPB, or viewing on YouTube. The budget for the film was raised on Kickstarter, where the makers achieved twice the funding goal in the allotted month-long funding campaign. The film already has 40,000 YouTube views, 19,000 torrent seeders, and over 2,000 paid downloads. There are public screenings happening world-wide."

JerkyBoy writes "RunRev maintains the proprietary LiveCode programming environment. Those familiar with HyperCard on the Mac would feel quite at home using the environment to produce simple applications, and possibly more, although the programming language it incorporates has a few significant shortcomings (e.g., true object orientation). But it is a very versatile environment, currently claiming support for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and server-side scripting. For us NOOBs who could never find the time to learn C++ and something like the wxWidgets or QT toolkits, it seems like a pretty good deal. Recently RunRev has done something interesting, however, and that is to create a Kickstarter campaign to move the environment to open source (~500K lines of code, ~700 files). The way that they describe it, it sounds like there will be a commercial version and an open-source version of the environment (hopefully not cripple-ware), and they are asking for money to do this. But I want to know: what are their chances of success with this model? How in the world can they make enough money to maintain their programmers and overhead while giving the environment away? In other words, if a company like RunRev announces that they are moving to an open-source model, should you become more interested or less interested in their product?"

TwineLogic writes "Many Slashdot readers have been enjoying the availability of $20 USB radios which can tune in the range of 50MHz-2GHz. These devices, while cheap, have limited bandwidth (about 2MHz) and minimal resolution (8-bit). Nuand, a new start-up from Santa Clara, wants to improve on that. Their Kickstarter proposal for bladeRF, a Software Defined Radio transceiver, will support 20MHz bandwidth and 12-bit samples. The frequency range to be covered is planned as 300MHz-3.6Ghz. In addition to the extended spectrum coverage, higher bandwidth, and increased resolution, the bladeRF will have an on-board FPGA capable of performing signal processing and an Altera processor as well. SDR hobbyists have been using the inexpensive receivers to decode airplane data transmission giving locations and mechanical condition, GPS signals, and many other digital signals traveling through the air around us. This new device would extend the range of inexpensive SDRs beyond the spectrum of 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. In addition, the peripheral includes a low-power transmitter which the experimenter can use without needing a 'Ham' license."

Incarnate-VO writes "Long running space-MMO Vendetta Online, which debuted with Linux support back in 2002, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to support a major gameplay expansion, including player-owned stations, capships, and territorial conquest. If the Kickstarter succeeds, an upcoming iPad version could also gain some added polish, joining the existing mobile support for Android. (The Kickstarter video is also available on YouTube in HD)."

Many reporters go to the CES, AKA Consumer Electronic Show (warning - link landing page plays annoying sound) in Las Vegas to see the newest 42.001" LCD TVs, which are 0.001" bigger than last year's 42" models. And there are many boring Windows 8 devices, many of which both run Windows and can display the number 8. These items, along with keynotes from tech gurus like Bill Clinton (We're not making this up!) may be amazing to some news outlets, but not to Slashdot or to Our Man Timothy, who seeks out the new, the bizarre, and the unusual and -- without taking a dime from them -- lets their instigators talk to him about their wares. But it's got to be good stuff, not run of the mill incremental advances. Like the Good Night Lamp(tm), which was invented by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, whose "work has been exhibited," says the goodnightlamp.com/team page, "at the Milan Furniture Fair, London Design Festival, The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York." Now the Good Night Lamp people are showing off their product and trying to raise money through Kickstarter. But that's enough from us. We will now hand the microphone to Ms. Deschamps-Sonsino and let her tell you the rest.

adeelarshad82 writes "Oculus VR Rift is a one of the seventeen kickstarter projects to raise more than a million dollars in 2012 and a recently published hands-on shows exactly why it was so successful. Using Oculus VR Rift with the upcoming Infinity Blade and a modified version of Unreal Tournament 3, the analyst found that the 3D effect and head tracking provided a great sense of immersion. At one point while playing Infinity Blade, the analyst describes walking around the guards and watching their swords shift as he stepped, seeming like they were inches from cutting him. While he felt that the demo was impressive, he found that the software limitations made the whole experience a bit unrealistic. Needless to say that Oculus Rift is a long way from hitting stores but Oculus VR is getting ready to ship developer kits."

eldavojohn writes "I kickstarted a project undertaken by Daniel Shiffman to write a book on what (at the time) seemed to be a very large knowledge space. What resulted is a good book (amazing by CC-BY-NC standards) available in both PDF and HTML versions. In addition to the book he maintains the source code for creating the book and of course the book examples. The Nature of Code starts off swimmingly but remains front heavy with a mere thirty five pages devoted to the final chapter on neural networks. This is an excellent book for Java and Processing developers that want to break into simulation and modeling of well, anything. It probably isn't a must-have title for very seasoned developers (unless you've never done simulation and modeling) but at zero cost why not?" Read below for the rest of eldavojohn's review. The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing author Daniel Shiffman pages 520 publisher The Nature of Code rating 9/10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0985930806 summary A book concentrating on the simulation of natural elements through both basic and advanced programming concepts in Processing. First off, I feel like defining the audience of this book is very important to avoid disappointment. This book is not for someone who's already developed games or modeled highway traffic or knows how to build their own physics engine. No, this book is geared at the people who are familiar with one language (preferably Java or Processing) and want to get a taste of all of the above. This book is possibly suitable for a someone new to the world of programming who is willing to put in the extra effort of coming up to speed on Processing in tandem with the text. After all, Processing is a comparatively forgiving language with a dead simple API to interact with the mouse and draw/animate objects.

I'd also like to address the "exercises" that are found throughout chapters and at the end of chapters in this book. They are excellent. I picked a couple and invested actual time in fleshing them out and I feel like Shiffman succeeded in inserting a wide range of difficulty. Leading along through each chapter, it is easy to successively complete each new exercise while the end of the chapters present stretch exercises. In addition to that, applicable chapters urge and provoke the reader to utilize newly learned concepts into what Shiffman calls "The Ecosystem Project." Where the user is basically defining an ecosystem and continually adding new animals, new movement patterns, new behaviors like predation and finally artificial intelligence.

Lastly this book can be found in many formats and I read the first half as HTML with animated diagrams. While the animated diagrams were awesome and added greatly to the text, I still found myself enjoying the dead tree book much more. I know I will soon be a dinosaur with shelves of needless weight that people will mock but I cannot make the jump to reading on a screen. The book's binding and paper quality is average as it appears to be from Amazon's CreateSpace. Diagrams that would animate are shown in the book as having progressively darkening shadows of the paths of objects and is fairly easy to envision movement. I did love the HTML version's moving examples though!

The introduction of this book brings up a few fundamental concepts on randomness like random walks and Perlin noise as well as a bit of statistics. For being labeled "Introduction" this chapter is fundamentally important and the aforementioned concepts are referred back to throughout the rest of the book. The book immediately dives into code snippets of a very simple nature that are easy to run and understand. Great detail and careful explanation are found throughout these opening chapters. The user is given informational boxes going further in depth to certain concepts. This was done really well in the first five or so chapters and was rare if even present in the final chapters.

The first chapter is devoted to vectors. It does an excellent job of explaining why they are so important as well as define and code mathematical concepts that affect vectors. A great aspect of this chapter is that the author fleshes out PVector functionality before your eyes to better understand Processing and object oriented programming. New (to beginners) ways of representing and implementing velocity and acceleration using vectors are explored at their most basic levels.

The second chapter moves naturally enough to forces on objects and begins to delve in basic physics formulas. Newton's Laws are modeled as well as friction, aerodynamics, fluid dynamics and gravity. Shiffman does a great job of keeping these unruly topics in easy to understand language while at the same time offering the scary looking formulas. He even goes so far as to insert an informational box imploring the reader to not be afraid of scary looking formulas by breaking down friction. I feel like one of the strengths of this book is showing how a complex looking formula can be deconstructed to easy English and then further implemented roughly in a model in Processing. While this modeling is by no means completely accurate or state of the art, it is a good introduction and would likely suffice for simple games and web design.

The third chapter brings angles into the mix by concentrating on oscillations. While it does a great job of talking about the important aspects of trigonometry, the text does really follow through with recalling these concepts. For instance, the mnemonic device SOHCAHTOA from geometry class is briefly explained and subsequently dropped. We use it in later chapters but it is used implicitly and may be difficult for people who are not intimately familiar with it to see the trigonometric reductions employed for simplified coding of the visualizations. Shiffman does an excellent job at starting with something that looks like a complex system, breaking it down to its component vectors and showing incremental changes to the code that iteratively improve on the visualization at hand. In doing so he gives an example of how a modeling programmer should think and work through known physical behavior to derive something that works visually in Processing.

Next up is particle systems. The reader is introduced to simpler ways of maintaining a set of particles as we start to focus on multiple particles with complex interactions. Shiffman opts to keep it simple and shies away from coding aspects like ArrayList versus LinkedList versus HashMap. Instead minimal space is spent on side ventures and the particle systems are surprisingly easy to get off the ground. The user is introduced to polymorphism, inheritance and more advanced class constructs so that the user can reduce the amount of code required to activate, handle and delete heterogenous groups of particles. For a beginning developer this chapter is great at walking them through these more advanced concepts and helping them see a direct benefit to the code.

So far, Introduction through Chapter Four of the book, everything has been great. Shiffman points out that there are a plethora of physics libraries out there in any imaginable language of any imaginable quality. And, consequently, it's unlikely you're going to forge forward with the aforementioned concepts and find yourself making the next engine for latest blockbuster space shooter game. As a result, Chapter Five is an overview of how to interact with physics libraries and use your Processing sketch as a facade that just queries said library for position. Box2D is the first library he tackles and with good cause — it's the same engine used by Angry Birds. And that's great because it is certainly empowering to know that if you can skin a simple game that adds a few game rules to physics, you can make a billion dollars. I learned a lot from this. I have never interacted with a physics library like this before and it was easy to produce fluid and impressive results. But it felt like glue code and it also felt like this text could be deprecated with a large update to Box2D (or it's Java and Processing equivalents). This really is a necessary and helpful chapter for this book but I felt sad that we had so quickly given up on rolling our own physics library. After Box2D, Shiffman presents VerletPhysics and provides a helpful resource for when you should use one over the other. Also, the terms for interacting with the libraries are slightly different but represent the same concept (side note: I wasn't a big fan of the convoluted names these two libraries used to designate objects and object types).

Chapter Six shows the reader how to emulate an autonomous agent by introducing "desired" vectors to each object. In this case it is a race car trying to reach a target. As the object moves, the desired vector is a updated. Examples of code are provided that show the object overshooting its target and Shiffman progresses on his path of slightly improving it by algorithmically adjusting the desired vector by introducing a slowing magnitude upon approach of the target. The actions of the object become more complicated as a flow field is suggested instead for behavior. The author explores path following and how to introduce a bit of wandering around straight line like an ant following a pheromone trail or a person walking along a wall. Simple examples of group behavior like even spacing in a crowded group or flocking in a sparse population within a large space. Lastly this chapter covers a very important aspect of code: performance. By now the reader has seen many examples where code can run slowly and this chapter's continual pairwise updating of all objects on the screen brings up Big O Notation. I wish Shiffman would spend more time on this or at least provide a separate box with more technical information on it like he did with other concepts.

The seventh chapter takes an interesting turn into cellular automata. While an interesting chapter and an interesting concept, it feels a bit disjoint from the rest of the text. While there is a way to tie it back into the long running ecosystem project. The most important aspect of cellular automata is that they are fun visualizations where as other concepts in programming that revolve around mutating state might not be as readily visible (like finite state machines or Markov models). This is the first chapter that feels a little rushed and more like a brief foray into a potentially deep field. The Game of Life is covered but only in its simplest aspects and I feel like this chapter could be better.

Chapter Eight dives into fractals. Again, like the last chapter, it is a bit short but I enjoyed this chapter. They are a great visual way to introduce newcomers to recursion and get them excited about it. On top of that, Shiffman shows how fractals appear in nature. Koch curves and Sierpinski triangles as fractal visualizations. Shiffman has a great informational box discussing the "monster" curve and tantalizes the reader with the paradox that an infinite recursion of the Koch curve results in an infinitely long line in a finite area of paper. This sort of stuff is what makes reading a book like this enjoyable and drives people to delve deeper into this concepts. I only wish the book had more of this. Also crucial to recursion in this chapter is a processing feature new to me: pushMatrix() and popMatrix(). As these are built out into trees, the author moves on to L-systems as devised by Aristid Lindenmayer. It's amazing how this simple grammar could result in a simulation of an algal growth.

The ninth chapter helps the user through a high level overview of genetic algorithms. I think one thing this book lacks is caution or warning about jumping into concepts or using concepts just because they sound cool. While genetic algorithms sound cool and futuristic, I have rarely found them to be at all useful on a professional level. Shiffman does a great job of explaining precisely how selection is determined by defining the constraints of the environment as well as the evaluation function. Unfortunately I find that these things are often hard to define and it's warnings like these that the text lacks. Nevertheless, there are a few good examples picked out for coding — unsurprisingly they use the laws of physics we just discussed and a number of computable variables for valuation. The best example is the rocket ship which is introduced after the standard monkeys trying to type the works of Shakespeare at a typewriter. Shiffman does a great job of explaining genetic algorithms and it's certainly a neat topic that's fun to think about but I'm not sure it's a good practical fundamental aspect of coding. It definitely works for the simulation side of coding so it should stay in the book but again it feels rushed with a lot of the simulation application left to the reader in the ecosystem project. I think that a much longer chapter that models predation — like wolves and rabbits — might work a lot better. You could even tie in a little bit of math and show situations where not enough mutations cause the hunter or prey to settle in on local maximums.

The tenth and final chapter briefly covers neural networks. Again, this chapter felt rushed and was missing a lot of the great explanations that were present in the first half of the book. The scant thirty five pages covers peceptrons, neural networks, training vehicles with them and even backpropagation of multilayered neural networks to hand more complex classification demands. In an effort to give this chapter some fun visualizations, the last thing Shiffman covers is the animation of the operation of a neural network. I'm intimately familiar with all these topics but the pace at which this chapter moves might be too much for a starting developer. I feel like there's a huge opportunity in this chapter to more thoroughly explain neural networks and to get readers more excited about classification systems in code.

All in all, the book was thoroughly enjoyable and I really enjoy that it is a creative commons work with both a github for the source code and the raw book. Although the latter chapters could use a lot of additional work this book is a great beginning tool for people who wish to start modeling nature in visualizations quickly and easily.

You can purchase a physical copy of The Nature of Code from amazon.com or you can name your price on a PDF directly. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."

An anonymous reader writes "As the next generation of consoles looms, we've seen a growing trend towards low price, compact alternatives such as the Ouya and GameStick, many of which run on the Android mobile platform. But this article on the trend raises a very good point: through the use of cloud computing and game streaming technology, it's entirely possible these machines will be able to keep pace with the powerhouse technology inside the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox 720, and perhaps even overtake them. After all, if these little boxes can simply stream from powerful servers, how can the stalwarts of gaming keep up?"

realxmp writes "After many years in the wilderness, the BBC is reporting that the next sequel to Elite is in the works. After a long Kickstarter campaign, which squeaked through to its target in the last two days, the project was funded and soon many old gamers will be able to relive the joys of exploring the galaxy in what was one of the earliest space trading games."

Nerdfest writes "Venturebeat is reporting that a successfully funded Kickstarter project for a portable phone charger that works with both Apple and Android devices has been canceled because Apple wouldn't let the creators license its Lightning connector. Quoting: 'Edison Junior, the technology and design lab behind the POP portable power station, is returning the full $139,170 in funding it received from Kickstarter backers to develop the device. Unfortunately, Apple has refused to give the project permission to license the Lightning charger in a device that includes multiple charging options. ... "We didn’t get a yes or a no up front," Siminoff said. "But as we kept going back and forth it was clear that it was getting harder. Then, when we saw that they weren’t even going to allow a Lightning connector and a 30-pin connector together, we knew it was over." He also said that, while Apple is a private company and can do whatever it wishes, it should watch out. "When you do things that are bad for the customer I think it will be bad for them.”''" Update: 12/21 22:16 GMT by S : Apple has relented. A spokesman for the company told Ars, "Our technical specifications provide clear guidelines for developing accessories and they are available to MFi licensees for free. We support accessories that integrate USB and Lightning connectors, but there were technical issues that prevented accessories from integrating 30-pin and Lightning connectors so our guidelines did not allow this. We have been working to resolve this and have updated our guidelines to allow accessories to integrate both 30-pin and Lightning connectors to support charging."

New submitter aaron44126 writes "Some VLC developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a native port of VLC as a Windows 8 app. The goal is to create an app with a UI that fits into the rest of the Windows 8 ecosystem that supports the playback of all of the types of files that VLC already supports. Playback of optical media (DVD/VCD/BD) is also on the list. They hope to use as much existing code as possible while doing whatever necessary to get VLC running in the 'Metro' environment and meet Microsoft's requirements for distribution through the Windows Store. Porting to ARM so that it can run on Windows RT devices will happen after the Windows 8 app is complete. The campaign has actually been going on for almost two weeks but they published their first update yesterday, in which they announced their intent to produce a Windows Phone 8 port as well."

New submitter aaron44126 writes "Some VLC developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a native port of VLC as a Windows 8 app. The goal is to create an app with a UI that fits into the rest of the Windows 8 ecosystem that supports the playback of all of the types of files that VLC already supports. Playback of optical media (DVD/VCD/BD) is also on the list. They hope to use as much existing code as possible while doing whatever necessary to get VLC running in the 'Metro' environment and meet Microsoft's requirements for distribution through the Windows Store. Porting to ARM so that it can run on Windows RT devices will happen after the Windows 8 app is complete. The campaign has actually been going on for almost two weeks but they published their first update yesterday, in which they announced their intent to produce a Windows Phone 8 port as well."

Pecisk writes "While PC game development veterans are using Kickstarter more and more for their projects (see the already successful Star Citizen Kickstarter project, which already went home with $2 million, or Elite: Dangerous, a sequel of classic space sim series, which has yet to reach its set target), questions arise: why are devs trying this rather risky way of financing, anyway? For a long time there's also been discussion on Slashdot and elsewhere of game publishers like EA have a preference for unlimited sequels (e.g. the EA Sports series). David Braben, one of creators of first classic 3D space sim, Elite, and its sequels, and also the popular Raspberry PI board/computer, has commentary on that: 'Publishers had and still have now, established processes and a key part of that is the forecast ROI or return on investment. For that to work there has to have been a sufficiently similar game in the near past to base the forecast upon Anything else will be "too risky."'"

Pecisk writes "While PC game development veterans are using Kickstarter more and more for their projects (see the already successful Star Citizen Kickstarter project, which already went home with $2 million, or Elite: Dangerous, a sequel of classic space sim series, which has yet to reach its set target), questions arise: why are devs trying this rather risky way of financing, anyway? For a long time there's also been discussion on Slashdot and elsewhere of game publishers like EA have a preference for unlimited sequels (e.g. the EA Sports series). David Braben, one of creators of first classic 3D space sim, Elite, and its sequels, and also the popular Raspberry PI board/computer, has commentary on that: 'Publishers had and still have now, established processes and a key part of that is the forecast ROI or return on investment. For that to work there has to have been a sufficiently similar game in the near past to base the forecast upon Anything else will be "too risky."'"

Zocalo writes "Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' attempt to reboot the Space Sim genre, hit a major funding milestone earlier today, exceeding the previous record of $4,163,208 secured by the game Project Eternity and more than doubling the initial funding target set by the producer of the Wing Commander series. With Stretch Goals now being passed every few hours bringing new features to the planned game, and David Braben announcing a new installment of the classic Elite using a similar funding model at Kickstarter could this be a wake-up call for the big game publishers to take another look at the genre? There are still two days left for Star Citizen funding as well, so if you feel like taking part, you can chip in either at the main RSI site or on Kickstarter."

Zocalo writes "Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' attempt to reboot the Space Sim genre, hit a major funding milestone earlier today, exceeding the previous record of $4,163,208 secured by the game Project Eternity and more than doubling the initial funding target set by the producer of the Wing Commander series. With Stretch Goals now being passed every few hours bringing new features to the planned game, and David Braben announcing a new installment of the classic Elite using a similar funding model at Kickstarter could this be a wake-up call for the big game publishers to take another look at the genre? There are still two days left for Star Citizen funding as well, so if you feel like taking part, you can chip in either at the main RSI site or on Kickstarter."