Nano Watch Kit Near $1M on Kickstarter (opens in new tab)

I thought the same thing when I started my startup (we make physical stuff too). Then I started learning about injection molding, tooling, materials, minimum order quantities, packaging, etc.

It turns out that very simple things are very expensive to start with because of the low quantities. I thought an order for 30,000 was massive, but some companies we worked with flat out laughed in my face.

So even though he raised a million bones, he's "only" making < 13,000 watches. That'll still be pretty expensive for him.

He does have to make and ship 18,000 watches.

I assume he planned for a lower quantity initial run, so his margins are probably pretty high now. The "fixed" costs of initiating manufacturing are probably the biggest component.

My new theory is that kickstarter actually works best as a demand gauging/preorder tool for a completely finished product that is in the process of working out a mass manufacturing deal. These guys already knew exactly where/who to go to and took care of all the business side of things for manufacturing very very quickly. I'm pretty sure they could and would have manufactured some of those watches with or without kickstarter. The only real problem kickstarter solved for them was knowing how many to manufacture. The fact that other successful kickstarter projects such as Glif, Lockpick tools, and C-loop succeeded under similar conditions seems to somewhat back this theory up.

The pledges are actually orders for the watches.

If Nanos had the right bluetooth and WiFi integration, you could have "Star Trek: The Next Generation" style communicator badges!

Yes, this is the only reason I'd ever consider this (though it does look okay, the idea of an iPod on your wrist is _unbelievably_ dorky).

On the other hand with an SDK for it I'd consider buying one, never using headphones with it and just reimplementing (that is, stealing) designs from tokyo flash (http://www.tokyoflash.com/jp/watches/1/). Customisable sleek designery-watch is cool, iPod on your wrist is not. Bearing in mind that the time-telling aspect of the watch is basically completely superfluous nowadays.

I guess it's not really apple's thing but I'd rather this design, slightly slimmer and without the audio guts of the ipod.

or open their checkbook. acquire, Applefy, and release it as the iWatch

If people want to make donations in support of a fun (or at least funky) idea, I /don't/ think they should be barred from doing so. Discouraging goodwill isn't exactly a great stance to assert. As it is, though, the bulk of the money's coming from people who are requesting the product itself - it won't be 20x better, but there'll be 20x more of it, and hopefully sufficient profit that an enhanced tooling line can be made to meet demand.

Which is not to say that your concerns don't have merit, but do note that the success of Diaspora and the ipod wristwatch projects seem very much to be outliers. Kickstarter claims that a little under half of all total projects /approved/ actually meet their funding goals, and from a glance of the site, it seems as if most successes are rather /modest/ successes - we really only notice the outliers.

The site also does warn project organizers that failing to deliver could potentially leave them legally vulnerable. Given the relatively low success rate, the human curating and the necessity of maintaining a public and accessible persona to drive up donations, I wouldn't call it a great platform to scam with.

Of course, given my limited experience with scams, I could be totally naive about this.

Even stranger is that it doesn't seem like a very good product (in general, not just the Kickstarter ones). Not a good watch, not a good running aid (even with the ugly dongle that's required), not a good iPod.

I realise that watches are almost totally (and iPods and phones are partly) fashion accessories, but it's still strange to see something so functionally awkward associated with the Apple brand.

(As a fan of factory films though, his latest update was hypnotic in the best tradition of such videos. Made the whole project worthwhile as far as I'm concerned).

That's about when you release a new model and reduce the price on the old design.

I see it as an easier way to carry around and access an object I already have to charge a couple of times a week (and it just looks cool).