"I think it sets a bad precedent," he says. And the money has reportedly gone in fees to prospective manufacturers and lawyers.īarnett - whose day job is being a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder - decided to pay back 40 of his 500 backers. And with all that dancing."īut a year later, there are still no PopSockets. "Did you see that?" he asks in the video. One of his backers demanded a refund, to no avail.Īnother entrepreneur, David Barnett, released a Kickstarter campaign video where he bounces and steps to raise money for PopSockets, a snazzy iPhone case with a headphone cord wrap. One entrepreneur who raised $10 million to build a "smartwatch" that streams email and text messages just missed his first delivery deadline. "By creating a system where it's just a series of open and direct exchanges between people with ideas and projects, and people interested in supporting them," Strickler says, "you have everyone on the same page, and everyone understanding what's going on." Today, the most lucrative projects are goods that customers pre-order from would-be merchants.Ĭomments on Kickstarter campaign pages indicate that backers expect product delays. When Kickstarter launched three years back, it was primarily fans giving money to little-known artists. And you know, I think if something did go awry, it would be - it wouldn't be my favorite day." But certainly, the kind of thing you're talking about is not a bridge that has been crossed yet. "You know, that would be new ground," he says. So I call Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler, and ask: What if Uhrman isn't able to deliver the consoles? Would Kickstarter get involved? Ouya public relations agent Tiffany Spencer adds, "That's a Kickstarter policy question." "But from a doing-the-right-thing perspective, we will treat our backers the best possible way." "Technically, from the Kickstarter perspective, I actually don't know the answer to that," she says. She takes a deep breath and pauses before answering. I visit Uhrman in San Francisco, where she's meeting with a dozen designers to hash out Ouya's boomerang-shaped controller.ĭuring a break from the meetings, I ask her, "Would you have to give money back to your backers if you weren't able to deliver?" About 57,000 backers expect an Ouya console by next March. A month later, her Kickstarter campaign closed with pledges worth $8.6 million. Uhrman asked for $950,000 - much more than the average project. If I wasn't a female, I'd say, 'big balls.' " "Effectively, we're trying to disrupt an established industry," she says in the video. Uhrman raises an eyebrow and flashes a mischievous smile about this big undertaking. "It's open for hackers that want to tweak the box and make it their own," Uhrman says in Ouya's Kickstarter video. Unlike the Nintendo Wii, it's open for developers in the Android operating system to make games. In July, Uhrman released her online video promo for a game console she calls Ouya. Uhrman admits that she got a little excited when she saw that her daughter was glued to the TV screen - although, she adds, "I'm sure my daughter's preschool won't like that." "And then to see my daughter pick up the controller and say, 'Show me how to do this,' " she says, "it just meant that this is something that's going to be around for a really long time." ![]() One day a controller was lying on the table, she says. While sales of consoles like the Nintendo Wii are down, Uhrman believes TV games are not some retro thing of the past. Julie Uhrman loves playing video games the old-fashioned way - in front of the TV. But financial backers have no clear way of getting a refund if the young businesses fail to deliver. On Kickstarter, the largest crowd-funding site, a handful of entrepreneurs have raised millions of dollars more than they'd expected, by selling the concept of products they have yet to make. But now it's expanded to entrepreneurs, and the rules aren't quite as clear. Artists could go online to pitch a new album, for example, in the hope that thousands would give small amounts. Crowd funding began as a way to support the arts on the Internet.
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