High Fives: Cool mobile tech on Kickstarter this week

Since launching in 2009, Kickstarter has been helping individuals, groups and startups get their brilliant ideas off the drawing board and into the waiting hands of interested people. As of writing, 64,871 projects have found a home on the site where they can seek financial support from people all over the Interwebs.

Quite a lot of projects have gotten successfully funded on the site, sprung from brilliant ideas for music and art installations, comic books, industrial design, and of course tech. But the current crowdsourcing champion is the Pebble Watch. A smartwatch designed on the iOS and Android mobile platforms, it’s a truly awesome piece of tech that met and far exceeded its targeted financial backing a little over a day of being launched. It managed to gather up an overwhelming $10,266,845 worth of pledges which enabled them to begin production.

Over the past year, we’ve seen a lot of tech projects on Kickstarter. Some were simply ingenious, but others were just awesome that we weren’t surprised large tech corporations hadn’t thought of them first. This week, we take a look at the cool mobile tech is currently at Kickstarter just waiting for your help.

GameDock
Cascadia Games

Growing up feasting on 8-bit adventures on the NES, two Portland natives set out to capture that authentic retrogaming feel and came up with the GameDock. It plugs into your TV and turns your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch into a retrogaming console, complete with two NES-like controllers, iCade games support, and a dashboard app for easily selecting and launching games.

Botiful
Corebots

Botiful is a telepresence robot that adds mobility to Skype calls on your Android-powered mobile devices. With a trio or wheels for mobility, you can control this wee little bot via a console on Skype to move around environments, and even carry out human gestures like nodding, shaking during your calls.

POP
James Siminoff

POP just may be one of the most slick and cleanly designed mobile chargers we’ve seen. It’s one of the most powerful too, carrying a high capacity, rechargeable 25,000mAh (able to juice up to 10 iPhones when fully charged). It has four retractable USB cables with dual plugs that support both Apple’s proprietary port and microUSB for Android phones and other devices.

3RDi
Knight Vision Studios

While the iPhone’s camera is surprisingly good, it’s still has a long way to go if its wants to be a great image and video capturing device. Aiming to make your image outputs crisper and stunning, the 3Di is a high-end kit that easily attaches to the iPhone. It includes a wide angle and fish-eye lenses, polarizer and natural density filters, and iPhone case with detachable hand-grip and two mounts (cold shoe and tripod).

FLASHr
Phaze5

Crowded spaces and noisy areas can make it easy to miss calls and text messages on your iPhone. Unfortunately, the vibrate option isn’t really much of a help either. The FLASHr, however, will emit a colorful light display to really grab your attention. Featured here just a few days ago, it’s a four-layer iPhone case that looks nice and not at all bulky. And instead of employing additional LEDs, it uses a simple system that taps into the iOS’ built-in LED Flash Alerts and the iPhone’s flash to let loose a cool light show to notify you of new messages or incoming calls.