Last week we announced our long-awaited shipping partner, Ingram Micro. Until now, shipping has been a major struggle for many campaigners. A product could be fully made and ready to ship and still be sitting in a warehouse, garage, or living room. Shipping is a huge logistical challenge that we’re hoping this partnership will solve. We want to get perks to backers as fast as possible – and this is going to help!
If you didn’t already know it, our team is well-regarded as experts in this industry. Our Senior Director of Social Innovation, Bre DiGiammarino was recently interviewed by Oprah Magazine about how crowdfunding saves people in medical emergencies. I am always impressed by how well-spoken Bre is, and here is the proof for you.
Tech
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about video games or video game systems. What I do know is that people who are really into video games like to see them on the big screen. You no longer have to spend money on both a portable and a big-screen video game system. The Ojo projector was created specifically for the Nintendo Switch and is portable, so you can share your sweetest tricks with all of your friends.
Whether you’re traumatized from a bad snowboarding-caused wrist break, or just plain uncoordinated, you can now get in on adventures in the powder. Sno-Go is like a ski-bike combo easy for anyone to learn to ride. It can also be disassembled, which makes it easy to take on any snowcation.
I’m still on the fence about AirPods, and I still think that people look like robots from the future when they wear them, but they seem to be increasingly popular. They are also expen$ive for a pair of earbuds. As always, one of our campaigners has come up with a lower-cost alternative that still has great sound. Mars has come up with not one, but two different versions, and with way more fun colors than Apple’s classic robot white.
We have a new addition to the ever-growing category of “products to help you pretend you’re single when your partner is annoying”. Bose launched a pair of “noise-masking sleep buds” that play soothing noises to drown out the snores of our partners, constant onslaught of emergency vehicles, and the always horrifying sound of cats fighting.
Skateboards continue to evolve while my ability to ride them does not. The Track1 is an all-terrain off-road skateboard that you can take on all of your mountain trips to stimulate your burned out adrenals once again.
Even though I know you’ll be wearing a helmet on those trips, you might get concussed, and boy would it be a shame to lose all of your precious memories of the trip because of a bad fall. You no longer have to buy a ridiculously expensive 360 camera to capture every angle of your experience. You can instead get a Fishball, which costs a lot less and attaches to your smartphone. Just don’t fall ON your phone.
Where are they now?
To answer “Where are they now?” very literally, Jibo was on the front cover of TIME magazine this week! And what’s more – they were on that cover as one of the top 25 inventions of 2017. Jibo was technically invented a few years go, but we’ll take it.
After Jibo and Travis shipping, you may have thought things couldn’t get better, but you were wrong. Not only is Eve V shipping, it has been declared a major competitor to the Windows Surface Pro, even though the “delete” key says “oops” on it. If you can get through this ridiculously long review, the payoff will be worth it. Something that the reviewer points out is that the people who funded Eve V are responsible for some of its best features, which you just don’t get in traditional retail. Go backers go!
This week, we had not one, not two, but three Indiegogo campaigners included in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Lisa Curtis of Kuli Kuli (campaign 1, campaign 2), was featured in the “Social Entrepreneurs” category for the company she founded that has created a sustainable livelihood for female moringa farmers, in Ghana, Haiti and Nicaragua, while bringing the benefits of the nutrient-dense plant to your local Whole Foods. Jake Stauch of NeuroPlus was celebrated in the “Games category” for his focus on improving attention and self-control, which can be used as complimentary therapy for ADHD. Finally, we have Alex Fine, co-founder of Dame Products. The ‘Eva‘ vibrator was the most successful sex toy crowdfunding campaign in history, and she’s well on her way to closing the “pleasure gap” with products created by women, for women.
Looking for more great stories about our campaigners? Head on over to our Medium publication.
