The world seems to to be abuzz by crowd-funding.  Hell, I even contributed to an internal business pitch competition where 3-out-of-5 pitches were crowd-funding concepts;  including my own, which won.  Crowd-funding is the new Crowd-sourcing.

So I thought I would share a couple of crowd-funding projects that I’ve contributed a little dough to in the past few months.

Armikrog.

Which is currently in funding over at Kickstarter. Armikrog is a clay-mation point-and-click adventure game made by the team that created one of my all-time favorite video games Earthworm Jim. I’m super-pumped for this project and I hope the project can gain as much momentum as the Double Fine Adventure game did last year.

Thermodo

A small key-ring thermometer that will work with smartphones.  I’ll probably lose it in a day, but I saw it shortly after there was a thermostat war at the office and thought it might be cool to check out the temps in different rooms.  We’ll see if a community of weather enthusiasts can build apps that make it better than nerd jewelry.

By the way, this Kickstarter project had 22 updates during funding, which was about 15 too many emails about how pumped the founders were getting about the “exclusive lime green version”.  But I’m still excited to check it out.

Jesse Huddleston

No, I didn’t back an evil plot to build a humanoid robot.  Jesse is a former student of mine  who is going to grad school and he created a GoFundMe page to pay some expenses.  Although he hasn’t hit his goal of $6,000 he’s blazing the way for other students to start creating their own scholarships online.  I’ve already recommended this approach to 4-5 students who are entering college.

So I’m backing a video game, a gadget, and an education and I hope all three pay off. We’ll see where this phenomenon takes us, but I hope to see more advancement in the human-centered approach demonstrated by Jesse; it would be a shame to relegate something so powerful to celebrity vanity and corporate risk mitigation.