Thanks for the reply and your blog links.
I had mostly only received people pointing me to their website which I had been to before posting my questions because in their little overview they didn't really say much about how it worked, and seeing how people could pledge (what ever exactly that means) all kinds of different amounts, it didn't seem like they were pre-paying on an actual product if it became a reality. I guess I'll have to do more reading to figure it out.
One thing I did notice though was that it sounded like for a hardware project a working prototype was needed (though that giant robot Paul posted didn't seem to fit with that). The thing is, one might need Kickstarter to fund the prototype, development board/software, etc. in the first place. That's kind of where I might be at in creating the world's only quality, artifact free, real-time, low latency, polyphonic pitch shifter hardware unit. I've got software running on a computer now and want to go to hardware after nailing down the last few technical difficulties.
NOTE: one recent outcome of my pitch shifter programming is that I now have the world's fastest x86 based FFT's at 1024 points and below, beating out both Intel and FFTW. Super tight vectored/interleaved assembly code and my proprietary FFT loop fusion accomplished that. Suck on that Intel.
-Elhardt
--- On Sun, 8/19/12, The Old Crow <oldcrow@...> wrote:
> From: The Old Crow <oldcrow@...>
> Subject: Re: [motm] Kickstarter?
> To: motm@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, August 19, 2012, 2:38 AM
> You have to be
> careful when dealing with kickstarter projects. Too
> many people treat it like pre-ordering neato gadgets from
> say thinkgeek
> or amazon. It is a funding portal/pledging system to
> back an idea in the
> hope they achieve their goal and reward you with early bird
> swag. The
> thing is: there is no guarantee, and there is no recourse
> for claiming
> money back off a failed project.
>
> The problem is, the skilled project
> management types with a
> kickstarter are in the definite minority. Some get
> funded and find out
> they're in waaaay over their head. Other get funded
> and skip town with
> as outright fraud. I wrote about it a while back:
>
> http://www.oldcrows.net/blog/?p=125
> http://www.oldcrows.net/blog/?p=137
>
> Crow
> /∗∗/