Check out Digital Trends‘ roundup of the best new crowdfunding projects and product announcements that hit the web this week. On our list for this week are a wearable A. I. assistant, a flexible umbrella, and a multicharger for all of your Apple devices, among other things.
At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there — alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the fidget spinners and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting new crowdfunding projects out there this week. Keep in mind that any crowdfunding project — even those with the best intentions — can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the “gadget of your dreams.”
If you’ve ever used a program like Ableton, Logic, or ProTools, you know first-hand just how difficult they can be. They’re just too feature-rich for the average person to use, so without extensive training, taking the song in your head and recreating it with software is a hugely difficult process.
Dubler is an attempt to alleviate that. Rather than forcing you to learn how to navigate through complex digital audio workstation interfaces, it allows you to create music naturally and intuitively with your voice. By mapping various mouth noises to the sounds you want, you can build a track just by beatboxing and talking into the microphone. Check out the video to see what we mean.
Good cheese is hard to find in the US. We just don’t have the cheesemaking culture (pun intended) that places like France and Switzerland do, so we typically settle for crappy processed cheese made by Kraft or some other giant corporation. We do have good cheese too, but it’s often outrageously expensive.
That’s the problem that Formaggio is here to solve. It’s a countertop cheesemaking machine that completely automates the process, allowing you to make fresh cheese at home for a fraction of what it costs to buy in the store. It does come with a pretty hefty upfront cost, but if you eat a lot of cheese this thing could easily pay for itself in under a year.
Inflating things is arguably one of the most tedious activities you can possibly engage in. it doesn’t matter if its a bag of balloons, an air mattress, or a float tube — regardless of the vessel, inflating it blows both literally and figuratively.
Fluxbag aims to make the process less annoying. The idea is pretty simple — you inflate the bag by blowing into it once, then sealing off the end. Thanks to Bernouli’s Principle, one breath is all it takes. After that, you plug the bag’s release valve into whatever you’re trying to inflate, and squeeze the air into it. Apparently it’s faster than using a hand pump, and also requires less effort. Neat, right?
*UPDATE: as of 3/15/19, the Udrone project has been suspended by Kickstarter for unknown reasons. We’ll keep an eye on it, but for now, things aren’t looking good.
Gadgets you can control with your brainwaves have been around for ages, but due to the fact that brain-control interfaces are typically imprecise and inconsistent, they haven’t really caught on.
