Why are we so fascinated with the ocean? – Be a part of the documentary: What the Sea Gives Me

I’m a big fan of the crew at Misfit Pictures and the last movie they made – Manufacturing Stoke. It opened my eyes to the DIY community in surfing and inspired me to get out in the ocean, and I bet it will do the same for you. There next project is just getting started …

The first of its kind – open robot building system

  A great idea from a teacher, two engineers, and a robotics specialist. Developed to use in the classroom but developing a following outside of it. The Multiplo robotics system. It’s easy to assemble, difficult to break and simple to customize: The concept is that you get a box that has a kit inside. We took …

Crowdsource the launch of a nano-satellite into space – Kickstarter

We are developing a nano-satellite, and mobile apps to go with it, as the focus for a global education and public outreach campaign. The satellite, called SkyCube, is a 10x10x10 cm “1U” CubeSat intended for launch as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2013. Orbiting more than 300 miles up, on a …

Kickstarter project: build an environmentally friendly-er surfboard

My project is all about environmental and community responsibility.  I’m a custom surfboard builder that wants to help make a change in our toxic industry while also taking action to help protect a rare California coastal habitat. The technologies required to make a better surfboard are no longer experimental, they’re high quality and available for …

DIY: build your own Battlestar Galactica space flight simulator

Six families of makers from the Bay Area are working on building a fully-operational motion controlled flight simulator based on the fighter ship from Battlestar Galactica. Using the fuselage of a small plane, the team has already built a motion platform that rotates a full dizzying 360 degrees in both the pitch and roll axes. …

The untold story of American superheroines

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for women writers and artists in comic books, highlighting a very successful Kickstarter project, Womanthology. The project was so successful that they have an offshoot. A documentary about female super heroes that premiered at South by Southwest 2012: Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines traces the fascinating evolution and …

Kickstarter project: Womanthology – massive all-female comic anthology

I read a lot of comics and it is always upsetting that there are no women creating them. There are female characters everywhere in the stories, many super heroines, and yet, nearly all the top female characters have all-male teams working on them. It is pretty sad, and unfair. The good news is that a …

Kickstarter project: build a NYC park in an abandoned, underground trolley terminal

We want to transform an abandoned trolley terminal on the Lower East Side of Manhattan into the world’s first underground park, called Lowline. This space is quite large, by New York standards: 60,000 square feet, or 1.5 acres. It was built in 1903 as a trolley terminal, for streetcars traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge, and …

A documentary on the next big thing in gaming – Independent developers of 2-3 people

Great things are continuing to come out of Kickstarter, especially their huge jump in funding and million dollar projects. Here is another one: Indie Game: The Movie A behind the scenes look at the tiny, passionate teams of imaginative programmers and level designers who spend years and thousands of dollars slaving away towards realizing lifelong …

Profiles on the million dollar projects of Kickstarter

Idea Lab: On Monday, Kickstarter saw the third project in its short history, a Web comic book, raise over $1 million. Before that, the first two projects to cross the million dollar mark — a computer adventure game and a fetching American-made iPhone dock — did so just days prior, on February 10, and both …