There doesn't seem to be any mention of what exactly new technology is this. I would expect all the patents filed at this stage and this information be public - unless there is something fishy or they are going trade-secret route which would be very difficult.
They say the device can detect materials of 1% concentration. But what kind of materials? Spectroscopy is hard, precise measurements are even harder.
Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.
> Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.
A lot of people use Kickstarter as a marketing means rather than a fundraising means. At least one of their cofounders is a VC thus I expect they already have VC funds or at least very significant angel funds.
I managed to come upon a couple interesting pertinent articles. One about other, similar Kickstarter projects that turned out to be scammy[1]. And another article, written by the same journalist about scio[2].
Hopefully it wasn't a "Clever Hans" type of demonstration for the second one. IE, someone watching on camera and then manually entering data into the interface from a different room.
It's a common Kickstarter practice to set intentionally low goals. It makes the project seem more achievable to those pledging before the goal is met, it makes the project seem more successful mid-campaign as it exceeds the goal within a short time, and you can later brag to the press and potential customers about exceeding the target goal by hundreds of percents or more.
Look at all the successful projects of late, most of them adopted a certain Kickstarter formula in terms of goal, videos, page design, marketing language and so on. There's nothing casual about Kickstarter anymore, at least not in the big money campaign.
Also, if they fail to reach their goal they get nothing. Outside funding is basically a given. They're likely just using Kickstarter as an extremely lenient pre-order service.
I think he was referring to the technology, as in the hardware.
To do this stuff properly, you often need big expensive equipment, so the real question is what they are doing to achieve results using cheap hardware.
It is probably very similar to how Ubisoft made Just Dance using the Wii controller. The Wii controller was really horrible in terms of what you could read from it, but if you stored what measurements you got from people dancing properly you could score people against that. Basically there was enough degrees of freedom to identify decent dancing to a degree and if you hid what was actually going on people bought it. Although it Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic.
They say the device can detect materials of 1% concentration. But what kind of materials? Spectroscopy is hard, precise measurements are even harder.
Also why are they running $200K campaign? It seems they already have significant staff and $200K would be peanuts as a goal.