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Minutes after the Scribble Pen campaign relaunched on CrowdTilt, the associated video went private and was then removed for over an hour before a replacement appeared without comment from the team. We originally didn’t think much of it after the numerous missed deadlines and mysterious omissions from the project, but new information provided by a hawk-eyed backer reveals that the video has more to it than just crappy camera cuts.
After a bizarre decision to completely shut down their Kickstarter campaign rather than simply produce a better product video, the team behind the Scribble Pen went virtually radio silent for over a week despite repeatedly broken promises to relaunch their campaign. They finally broke that silence today revealing some unsettling changes to their project.
Author’s note: Portions of the research for this project were provided by reader K. Thank you for your help.
Every few weeks, we see another crowd funded campaign trying to revolutionize the way we look at our wrists to see the time. While most of these products aim to add new features to a standard watch, Ritot claims that they can display the time in a whole new way. Not content to look at the simple display of virtually every watch ever made, Ritot is trying to take it a step further with a watch that projects the time on the back of the hand.
Presumably, using the back of a hand provides a larger “screen” for displaying the time and other information, but anyone who’s tried to read a PowerPoint slide in a sunny conference room can think of at least a dozen problems with this solution. Instead of providing demonstrations of their unique solution, all Ritot has managed to produce is misleading graphics and shady details about their level of progress. This is one campaign where I wish I had a chance to dive in earlier, but with just three days left in the campaign, it’s better late than never.
The long anticipated Scribble Pen finally launched this week to immense if very short-lived success. The project became wildly popular back in June when they first announced their product to the tech media, but several delays prevented them from launching their fundraising campaign until Monday this week.
The team’s marketing efforts paid off though as the pen, which allows users to scan colors off objects and then reproduce them in ink, reached its $100,000 goal in just a few hours.
Unfortunately, this magical ink/pigment mixing pen raised a few concerns among backers (this author included), and the comments section of the project quickly became filled with requests for a better demonstration of the pen’s capabilities. The project’s video contained just two short clips of the pen drawing which many believed didn’t demonstrate the main feature of the pen which is the ability to change colors quickly. Concerns were largely over how long it took the pen to change color and how much ink was wasted in the process. Continue reading →
In a backers only update this week, the team at Carbon released drawings showing some more details on their proposed solar panel design. As you may recall, the team’s solar powered wristwatch had a solar panel barely large enough, at its best, to charge a 650mAh battery in 8 hours. We brought up concerns that creating a hole for the requisite watch movement to poke through the panel would require the panel to be split into a number of smaller panels as it’s impossible (or at least very hard) to drill a hole in a monocrystaline solar panel. This would reduce the effective size of the panel due to the gaps between the sections drawing into question the original 8 hour charge time spec.
