10 of the best Kickstarter technology projects

Power Laces

Goal: $25k. Current: $25,024. Finished Oct 10. kickstarter.com/powerlaces

Just like Marty McFly in Back to the Future 2 you can have real, working power laces. They’ve actually been made, look ace, and now have full funding – all we have to do is wait a little bit longer. You’ve waited nearly twenty years, what’s a few more months?

Recoil Winders

Goal: $10k. Current: $72,181. 14 days to go. kickstarter.com/recoilwinders

So simple yet effective you’ll be kicking yourself you didn’t kickstart the idea yourself. Doing away with messy cables is the dream we thought couldn’t be reached, but Recoil has done it. Simply clip in your folded cable, give the spring a tug to activate and it’s sucked away into safe, tidy storage. Utterly brilliant – we’ll be ordering plenty of these wonderful Recoil Winders.

Mail Pilot

Goal: $35k. Current: $30,386. 17 days to go. kickstarter.com/mailpilot

Email does need a rethink. Google has done a reasonable job, pat yourself on the back – now step aside. With Mail Pilot (which is an app and software for all platforms) all your email services are collated in one place using a single login, but it gets better. When you read a message it stays until you check it as complete when it is then archived out of sight, tidy.

You can also mark for review so it goes out of sight until you are either in the review section, or when it’s come back on a date and time you set it to reappear, while Another ingenious idea lets you set things like, all messages you were CC’d into, to automatically go to the review section.

Other features like Intelligent Compose/Reply, Drill Down Bar and Calendar View all sound lovely, though there’s not a lot about what they do. We’re impressed and reckon email has plenty of room for improvement, why not help make life easier?

Ninja Blocks

Goal: $24k. Current: $49,394. 28 days to go. kickstarter.com/ninjablock

This clever little fellow won’t slit your throat like his name suggests, but rather will bring your virtual and real world into one. By attaching sensors to the Ninja Block and using the beautifully design Ninja Cloud software, you can set real actions to occur. Sounds odd, an example will help. Place the motion sensor and micro cam at your front door, set a rule to tweet you when motion is detect and to include a picture, and it’s done. Or set your light to come on whenever you and your mates are playing Xbox Live, or a hall light to come on when your baby cries.

With movement, temperature, humidity, motion, distance, sound, and light all detected and more sensors in production, your imagination is the only limit.

It works with Facebook, Twitter, DropBox, Google Docs, SMS, Xbox Live and soon Siri. So your whole world could soon be automated without you having to lift a finger, well worth a dollar.

jaja

Goal: $25k. Current: $65,414. Finished 3 days ago. kickstarter.com/jaja

This ingenious stylus turns any tablet into a sketchpad using high frequency sound which is detected by the device’s mic. That means the jaja will work in airplane mode so you can doodle for hours without worrying about battery life, and with 1,024 points of sensitivity those doodles could be more like works of art. Like a Wacom tablet, but for a tenth of the price.

Oculus Surveillance and Telepresence Robot

Goal: $15k. Current: $25,161. Finished Jan 31. kickstarter.com/oculus

Got an old netbook kicking around you’ve been meaning to trade in? Wait, it still has a use as your guard bot. Drop it into the Oculus and from anywhere in the world you can drive it around and see what’s going on back at the homestead using the laptop’s camera and net connection, along with the Oclusus driving system. At the moment it’s only for 10in screens and smaller; but the sky’s the limit now Oculus is ten grand over-funded.

Biofuel for everyone

Goal: $2,000. Current: $7,294. Finished Jan 28. kickstarter.com/biofuel

Make 5 gallons of biofuel everyday without doing a thing. This 26ft by 14ft robot uses a wind turbine and solar panels to generate the 12kW of energy a day required for the thermal depolymerisation that leads to biomass production and cultivation. It’s even collected and processed mechanically, 365 days a year, and the waste is used as fertiliser back in the growth tanks – there is nothing wasted. You can sell on the biofuel if you don’t use it yourself, so it’s win-win.

Printrbot homemade 3D printer

Goal: $25k. Current: $830,827. Finished Dec 17. kickstarter.com/printrbot

Sure 3D printing is going to be big, but who knows where to buy one? We’d love to print off a spare back for the remote, a shower curtain ring, or our own Lego, but can’t be bothered to hunt down a printer. Now you will be able to build your own Printrbot, the kit can even be assembled in just a few hours.

CloudFTP

Goal: $100k. Current: $262,351. Finished Jan 6. kickstarter.com/cloudftp

Wirelessly connect any USB drive to your iOS device be it iPhone, iPod or iPad. Genius. One of those things you can’t believe nobody did before. We’d love to quickly connect a flash drive of films to our iPad, or even connect a digital camera directly – this is brilliant.

isostick

Goal: $25k. Current: $66,607. Finished Aug 22. kickstarter.com/isostick

Imagine plugging in a flash drive loaded with your DVD ISOs to play them instantly. That’s what isostick does on any Linux or Windows computer. A brilliantly simple idea that makes watching your films so much easier. It even comes with a handy lock switch and activity light, which you can turn off if it annoys you – take note flashy bright annoying Virgin Media Superhub.

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