{"id":9852,"date":"2012-05-23T15:43:09","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T15:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/kickstarter_a_solution_for_the_patient.html"},"modified":"2022-10-14T18:44:13","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T22:44:13","slug":"kickstarter-a-solution-for-the-patient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/kickstarter-a-solution-for-the-patient.html","title":{"rendered":"Kickstarter, A Solution for the Patient"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you want to be involved – intimately involved with the manufacturing process behind a product you purchase then I suggest you immediately jump onto Kickstarter<\/a> and start backing projects. The high-flying site has made lots of news in a short amount of time. In March of last year they received<\/a> $10 million in funding. In its third year the site raised<\/a> almost $120 million in funding – almost three times as much as total revenue from the prior years combined.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the company’s highest-profile project was Arianna Huffington looking to use the site to raise<\/a> $1 billion to buy back the Huffington Post from AOL.<\/p>\n

In December of last year I came to the conclusion that the TouchFire Keyboard<\/a> – a silicone keyboard project on the site may be  the perfect companion for those of us using the iPad 2 as a data entry device.<\/p>\n

So with my readers in mind I ordered it and waited. And waited. And waited. There have been updates but the detailed emails seemed more like excuses than actual information I could use to determine when this thing was going to ship. And then finally today I received an email from “Steve & Brad” telling me – you know what – let me share how they gave me the news:<\/p>\n

The Good News:<\/strong> We signed off on Touchfire going into volume production; hooray! Our factory will start making Touchfires next week.<\/p>\n

The Bad News:<\/strong> We had to order 80,000 new magnets, and it will be about 4 weeks before they get here.<\/p>\n

More Good News:<\/strong> By the time the magnets arrive, the factory will have made a lot of Touchfires! <\/p>\n

Even More Good News:<\/strong> We were able to come up with a single version of Touchfire that works for all generations of iPads. In fact, we were forced to….<\/p>\n

So the keyboard should now ship by the end of June – about a six month process or so from the time of ordering.<\/p>\n

There are a few things I really like about these emails however. They are enthusiastic. You feel like it is your own in-house R&D team communicating with you – you can sense their excitement which naturally makes you excited as well. And these guys, Steve & Brad (pictured) are really likeable based on their emails – you just get the feeling you could spend hours with them discussing the relative merits of Picard Vs. Kirk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"kickstarter-touchfire-steve-and-brad.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But getting back to the story at hand – it appears the seemingly random magnet polarization of the “iPad 3” speaker which caused some iPad 2 cases not to work with the New iPad has also presented a challenge for this group. Their solution was to change the size and polarity of the magnets – 80,000 have been ordered and will be delivered in four weeks.<\/p>\n

So in short, my first Kickstarter experience has been smooth but slow – very slow. If you are patient and interested in learning how products are made and want to learn about real-world manufacturing challenges, you likely want to order something from them soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you want to be involved – intimately involved with the manufacturing process behind a product you purchase then I suggest you immediately jump onto Kickstarter and start backing projects. The high-flying site has made lots of news in a short amount of time. In March of last year they received $10 million in funding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158,1,162,118,175],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9852"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19307,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9852\/revisions\/19307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}