58°
By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist
Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear about a new project that's trying to raise money on Kickstarter. There are Emerson College student films pulling in $1,000, camera case designers collecting $24,000, and wearable data storage startups raising $13,000.The New York-based site lets artists, designers, and entrepreneurs set a fundraising goal and essentially run an online telethon; backers at various levels get different kinds of payouts, from a digital download of an album to a limited edition iPad case.
I'd missed the fact that last year, two Berklee College of Music students used the site to raise $7,200; the money went toward recording and making a video for "The Boston Song," a pop anthem for the city.
And just yesterday, Tufts student Brett Andler e-mailed about his Kickstarter project: trying to raise $10,000 for a game called Whozit. It's a version of the guessing game "Guess Who" that taps into your collection of Facebook friends.
I've written here about how the MIT spin-out Supermechanical used Kickstarter to raise $550,000 to design a new kind of wireless sensor, and also talked about the larger crowdfunding trend in my Boston Globe column.