To build on that base, the company on Wednesday said it had raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics, an investment company focused on supporting personal robotics. Previously, Swivl raised about $175,000 from Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns and less than $1 million in angel funding.

Since the device’s debut, Swivl co-founder and CEO Brian Lamb said the company has shipped about 10,000 units, with uses ranging from pet monitoring to corporate videoconferencing.  But he added that 75 to 80 percent of its customers are coming from education.

“There’s a very powerful ongoing discussion about using video for [several] use cases [in education] that this plugged right into,” said Lamb. “It’s a tool to open the doors of the classroom and get people participating online.”

For teachers aiming to “flip” their classrooms with videos students can watch online or get feedback on their teaching styles from peers, the Swivl provides an easy way to self-record lectures and classes. The $199 device, which the company likens to a robotic “personal cameraman,” includes a sensor that tracks the subject’s movements, panning and turning the camera as necessary. (For more details on how it works, you can check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s review of the first-generation Swivl.)

Already, it’s being used in 1,000 K-12 schools and 250 universities, Lamb said. With the new funding, the company plans to accelerate the production and distribution of the company’s second version of the Swivl, which includes more classroom-friendly features like iPad compatibility and a feature for attaching additional microphones to capture audio from students.

Even though it may have been unintended, Swivl’s rise in education makes sense given the surging interest in using technology to enhance and extend the classroom. In addition to the “flipped classroom” trend and growing calls for better teacher feedback systems, teachers are increasingly turning to video technology to support distance education programs and capture lectures for students to review or watch later on.

For example, companies like Torsh and Edthena provide tools for teacher observation and evaluation, while McGraw-Hill’s Tegrity and Echo360 are among those offering schools lecture-capture services.  But given its focus on developing hardware and eventually offering connected cloud services (although Lamb wouldn’t elaborate too much on that), Swivl is more of a complementary rather than competitive startup.

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Over the past few years, the San Jose, Calif.-based life sciences venture capital firm has co-invested with accredited individual investors on a handful of deals.  On Friday, the firm went one big step further with the launch of VentureHealth, an equity crowdfunding site for biomedical technology companies.

As report after report has shown, venture capital funding for life sciences companies has been on the decline. This week, for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) revealed that venture funding in the life sciences sector dropped 14 percent in the first quarter of this year.

VentureHealth wants to give health startups — both early, but particularly later stage — a new option for raising funding, while embracing a model that enables doctors, health care professionals and others with sufficient means to support companies addressing issues they care about.

“The life sciences venture industry has been shrinking – there’s less capital available for really exciting companies,” said InCube managing director and VentureHealth co-founder Andrew Farquharson. “To the extent that we can mobilize capital into companies that need it, we’re meeting our mission.”

VentureHealth isn’t the first attempt at bringing crowdfunding to health care. MedStartr and Health Tech Hatch offer entrepreneurs a platform for raising relatively small amounts of seed capital without giving up equity. And last week HeathFundr launched an equity crowdfunding site targeting medical device and other health entrepreneurs looking for Series A-range funding.

But unlike HealthFundr, CircleUp and other equity crowdfunding sites that have recently emerged, VentureHealth doesn’t offer securities through a registered broker dealer. Instead of taking a commission on each transaction, it’s compensated through a combination of fees and carried interest, which is a percentage of the profits earned by investors when a company is sold or experiences another kind of liquidity event. While the amount can vary, the company said it will tend to be about 20 percent.

That’s a decent-sized payout, but Farquharson said its model means that VentureHealth only wins when its investors win so it’s extra incentivized to find the best deals.

Over the past decade or so, Farquharson and his co-founder Mir Imran, a medical inventor who holds more than 200 patents, have invested in a range of companies, from BodyMedia, a wearable technology company recently sold to Jawbone to epilepsy treatment company Neurolink. Given their track record and experience, he believes VentureHealth could give interested investors a well-curated selection of deals and entrepreneurs the extra support they may need.

For now, Farquharson said, they interact with every accredited investor on the site but, when it’s implemented, the JOBS Act will enable VentureHealth to reach a broader pool of investors and expand its options.

The site currently has no active deals listed, but Farquharson estimates that it could offer five or six deals over the next 10 months. Once VentureHealth scales sufficiently, InCube plans so spin it off as a standalone company.

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In case you missed it, the controversy turns on Toronto’s buffoonish mayor, Rob Ford, who has embarrassed the city numerous times in the past but has now outdone himself: Reporters from Gawker and the Toronto Star claim to have witnessed a clear video tape that shows Hizzoner sucking on a glass crack pipe and calling the leader of Canada’s Liberal party, Justin Trudeau, “a faggot.”

The video in question is now in possession of shadowy figures who want cash for it. The Star, a respected newspaper, turned down an offer to sell it for $40,000 and Gawker, which says the price is now $200,000, has taken to Indiegogo – a site normally used to raise money for artsy people — to ask the public to buy the video. The “Rob Ford Crackstarter” (see pic at right) has 10 days to reach its goal and has already pulled in $26,000 as of Friday afternoon.

Gawker’s gambit raises some very juicy ethical questions. First, while bringing down crack-smoking mayors is clearly in the public interest (see Barry, Marion), it’s less clear whether it’s acceptable to pay people who are likely serious criminals in order to advance the story.

And while check-book journalism has been around for centuries, turning it over to the public could have unforeseen consequences. Until now, publicly funded journalism has been largely been contained to organizations like Pro Publica that launch investigations into things like patient safety and vote buying. Is the world ready for a publicly funded version of TMZ where everyone can pool money to see celebrity’s private lives?

For now, the political dimensions of the scandal are moving too fast to assess the media fallout. We’ll report back next week on what happens to the tape — and the money collected by Gawker.

(Image by Chris Howey via Shutterstock)

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Healthfundr, a startup launching Thursday, wants to give health entrepreneurs another option while opening up investing options to a wider pool of people.

Generally speaking, these are pretty good days for digital health startups. According to accelerator Rock Healtb, for example, funding in digital health was up 35 percent in the first quarter of this year.

But Healthfundr founder and CEO Jared Iverson said that not all areas in health technology are getting strong investor interest — for example, medical device startups haven’t received the same kind of backing as health IT startups. And he added that he wants to make investing in health and medical technology less intimidating to the average investor.

“We want to broaden our reach and move past what I call the good ol’ boys’ clubs, angel groups and people in the know, who get access to these deals, to reach doctors and other people that qualify as accredited investors but may not know how to plug,” he said.

Since June of last year, Iverson, a former securities attorney, and his small team have been working to build Healthfundr’s platform, identify potential startups, reach out to investors and make sure it’s compliant with regulatory requirements.

Similar to San Francisco-based CircleUp, which provides an investment platform for consumer startups, securities on HealthFundr’s site are offered through broker dealer ARI Financial Services, Inc. With each startup accepted to the platform, it negotiates a commission based on the amount raised or an equity stake.  When it’s implemented, the JOBS Act will enable a broader set of investors to participate in crowdfunding. But even now, Iverson said Healthfundr supports investors under an existing regulation.

Instead of an AngelList or Gust, which offer open marketplaces of startups for investors, Healthfundr deliberately keeps its community of startups small. So far, Healthfundr has accepted three startups to its site and will add two more soon.

Part of its mission, Iverson said, is to make health investing more accessible to investors, and careful curation is an important part of that. In an effort to educate investors, it also helps founders present themselves through explanatory videos, arranges conference calls and enables one-on-one phone calls and meetings through the site.

While it doesn’t have hard requirements for startups, Iverson said it looks for those that have already gained some traction, earned revenue and raised funding from investors. The point of the site isn’t to be an option of last resort for startups struggling with traditional investors, but to work with companies that may want more flexible terms than what a venture capitalist would offer and support a new model of investing.

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If launching the project via Kickstarter was a gamble — and one that apparently took a certain amount of convincing before Planet Money’s corporate masters would sign off on it, according to Blumberg — it certainly seems to have paid off: the campaign hit its goal in a single day, and has since raised about $300,000 or six times as much as it was originally looking for (the audio of my interview with Blumberg is on SoundCloud and also embedded below).

Crowdfunding and public radio both go direct

Blumberg, who works for This American Life and created the Planet Money show in 2008 along with NPR economics reporter Adam Davidson, said that when the show decided to set up the T-shirt project — an idea that stemmed from a book by Pietra Rivoli called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” — he thought Kickstarter was the most obvious way of allowing listeners to not only follow the experiment, but to become participants in it as well.

“We wanted to try and figure out a way to do the project, to do the journalism, but also to sell the T-shirts to people who wanted them, as a way of involving them in the project — so you can either guess about how many you need and borrow the money or sort of get it pre-funded, or you could just go on Kickstarter and find out exactly.”

One of the reasons why it seemed like such a good fit, Blumberg said, is that public radio and the NPR model already involve reaching out to listeners and supporters directly, so it seemed natural to blend the two (a public radio podcast called 99% Invisible took a similar route last year and raised more than $180,000).

“The other part about Kickstarter is that it’s just a great way of sort of involving folks in the project as you go along, and… it felt like with our audience there’d be some interesting overlap there between Kickstarter and public radio — it felt like they would sort of feed on each other. The public radio audience and the Kickstarter model are so close anyway, so why not combine them — it’s sort of surprising that it hasn’t happened before.”

The internet turns everything into public radio

In fact, Blumberg said, it feels like “the internet is driving the entire world towards a public-radio model” in a way, as more media companies — and even individuals such as Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is relying on direct reader funding for support — try to find a way of surviving when advertising revenue is declining and other business models are not obvious.

“You can get lots of stuff for free now, and so the trick is to get people to pay for stuff they can get for free. It’s a trick that public radio has gotten pretty good at, but now other people are sort of eclipsing us — Kickstarter is very ingenious in the way you can involve people in the story, you can build all sorts of different levels, and it’s very very easy. So part of it is about learning what we can from our Kickstarter experience and then feeding that back into the public-radio world.”

Blumberg said that he was pleasantly surprised at the amount of money the project has been able to raise, and that he originally expected it would take most of the campaign’s time limit to even get to the $50,000 goal. The majority of the money raised will go towards travel and production costs, as well as the cost of buying and making the shirts, he said — and anything left over will be used to create a development fund for NPR member stations and put on a series of workshops about the kind of reporting Planet Money does.

A chance for a public-funding revolution

And will evangelizing Kickstarter be part of that program? Blumberg said that the project seems to be doing its own evangelizing, just because of the overwhelming response, which he says executives at NPR and throughout the public-media world are watching closely and are “very excited about.” The American Life producer said he also hopes the project will spark more discussion about the ways in which public radio can use crowdfunding platforms.

“Public radio has been a little insulated from some of the ways the internet has changed other media organizations, but the internet is upending radio as well, in a way that I think can be very advantageous, it just depends on how you do it. I think there’s always been a realization within the public radio system that there’s revolutionary potential, and I think this will add to that conversation and hopefully move it forward.”

Blumberg said that he believes public radio can learn a lot from seeing how crowdfunding works in practice with a focused project like the T-shirt campaign, and that the connection between fans and creators that Kickstarter and other platforms help to create is very much like what public media has been doing for some time without the internet. “I feel like we’ve been out ahead of this whole thing for a long time,” he says, “and we didn’t even know it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz and Shutterstock / Wilson Rosa and Shutterstock / higyu

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The original story, as told in first person on the Kickstarter page, is a great feel-good tale: Mackenzie Wilson talks about how she boasted to her older brothers that she could design a video game, and they didn’t believe her. So she asked her mother Susan if she could go to a STEM camp (which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics) at a local university, where she would be able to study computer games and eventually design one of her own. The original goal for the campaign was just $829.

An inspiring story that turned sour

After the campaign got picked up on Twitter and elsewhere, Mackenzie and her mother raised more than $10,000 in less than 24 hours, and that figure quickly grew to more than $22,000. As with the bus-monitor story, many people seemed inspired to donate far more than was required because they wanted to support the girl and her desire to do something positive. But what happened next shows just how quickly the attitude toward such crowdfunding efforts can reverse itself.

As reported by the Daily Dot, a member of Reddit raised red flags about the campaign with a post about Mackenzie’s mother — including the fact that she was a self-declared multimillionaire entrepreneur who sold a company she co-founded to Kinkos for $100 million, was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Georgetown University, and ran several different businesses, including one that helps banks get money back from customers who default on their loan payments.

The post also included screenshots of a series of identical tweets asking celebrities such as Lady Gaga to promote her daughter’s campaign, something that is against Kickstarter rules.

Wilson told the Huffington Post that she didn’t expect this kind of reaction, and that she never claimed the family couldn’t afford to send her daughter to computer camp. She said that she viewed it as a way of encouraging Mackenzie to stand up for herself and raise her own money for things, like a lemonade stand might have in the past. She also pointed out that there is nothing in the Kickstarter rules that says it is only for people who can’t afford the thing they are raising money for, saying: “I don’t think it’s a need-based system.”

As the Reddit campaign against her picked up speed, Wilson said she was the target of death threats and offensive comments, and that she was afraid to let her daughter find out about how much anger her campaign had caused. In the comments on the Kickstarter page, she said: “I wish I could find a way to make this stop. I’m tired of fighting.”

Crowdfunding campaigns rely on trust

What’s fascinating to look at is how the tone of the comments on the Kickstarter campaign changes over time: at first, they are resoundingly positive, cheering for Mackenzie and her mother for encouraging her to do this. Then after the information about Wilson’s background gets posted, they turn more negative — but there are still lots of people telling her she is doing the right thing. Over time, however, the number of negative responses increases, and some commenters start to question whether it was even Mackenzie’s idea, and criticize Wilson for saying she plans to identify her attackers.

For me at least, this episode feels a lot like what happened to musician Amanda Palmer when she raised more than $1 million from her fans in less than two weeks for a new album and tour. Even though she detailed exactly how she would be using the money, there were still questions raised when she started to invite musicians to play with her for free as part of the tour. She eventually had to respond to those criticisms publicly and repeatedly, and pay the musicians the standard rate.

The lesson from both of these incidents is the same, I think. If you are going to appeal to the crowd for support, then you are essentially striking a bargain with them: they provide money, but you have to do more than just provide whatever the end product is. You have to be as open and transparent as possible and do whatever you can to maintain the trust of those supporters, and that changes the dynamics of the situation completely. And once that trust is lost, the game is effectively over.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz

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To date, backers have chipped in $378 million to more than 34,000 successful campaigns in every category on the crowdfunding site. And this year, for the first time since its 2009 launch, not one, but 17 campaigns crossed the million dollar mark, with one project reaching the major milestone in just over eight hours.

As our founder Om Malik has said, Kickstarter is more than a startup. It’s helping open the door to a new kind of economy that rewards the “makers,” not just the industrialists.

Yes, crowdfunding has problems that need to be ironed out — studies have shown that the majority of projects in design and technology miss their deadlines and questions remain regarding what happens when creators aren’t able to complete their projects. But Kickstarter has undeniably helped spark a crowdfunding craze, with new sites popping up to serve nearly every industry, from health and science to philanthropy and investing.

Given the collection of creativity on Kickstarter, singling out just a few noteworthy campaigns was a challenge. But here’s a roundup of our favorite crowdfunding campaigns to launch this year.

ArduSat

ATOMS Express Toys

LUMO Smart Posture Sensor

Matter

OUYA

Pebble E-Paper Watch

Safecast X

SmartThings

To Be or Not to Be

Ubi

View as a single page.

Go to page 2 (of 12) on GigaOM .

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But this split is causing increasing growing pains for Kickstarter as it tries to deal with the second category, which now represents more than one third of all the money successfully raised. The problem is that people who back these projects have come to think of Kickstarter as a store where they pre-order products, a perception that Kickstarter continues to fight.

The issue was raised again this week when CNN reported that just eight of the top 50 projects with a deadline of November or earlier actually hit their deadline. Most of the delays were for tech, design and game campaigns in which many backers are expecting a finished product for their support. The delays gives rise to concerns that Kickstarter is promising products that may not ever be delivered.

Strickler countered in a blog post that lateness doesn’t equate with failure, that many projects need more time to finish and the results are usually worth it. And Kickstarter has stressed recently that it is not a store and isn’t in the business of processing pre-orders of goods. But CNN’s report, however, points out that many people still don’t understand that distinction. When they give, they expect something back as if they’re just pre-paying to get something at a specific time.

So how do we solve this? Here’s my solution:

The company needs to establish a separate platform for Kickstarter hardware and product design projects. It could still be known as Kickstarter (maybe Kickstarter Product?) but spinning out these projects could help Kickstarter set clear expectations for how these campaigns will work. Right now, most of the same rules apply across all Kickstarter campaigns. There have been some changes recently prohibiting the rewarding of multiple units and limiting simulations and renderings of tech and design products. But it’s still not enough for the average user to undertand how these projects are different.

By establishing a Kickstarter Product destination, Kickstarter can emphasize specific rules that protect both creators and backers. For example, there could be an overall limit to the number of delays on these projects, a more specific update policy or a stricter refund policy. Then we wouldn’t get as many people wondering why they’re not getting their pre-orders on time or questioning if they’ll be waiting forever. Clearer rules wouldn’t just help backers but it could give more certainty to creators, so they’re more protected against potential lawsuits should they fail to deliver.

Christie Street, a new crowdfunding platform for hardware projects, shows why a spinoff might be good for Kickstarter. The site, for example, doles out money in three stages so supporters know that a project is making progress before it accesses all of their funds. Users can also pay an additional 10 percent to get their full money back if they want. Christie Street also does some upfront due diligence to ensure a project is actually viable, something that is likely too much work for Kickstarter, which takes a hands-off approach to reviewing submissions. But I think Christie Street shows there is a need for a crowdfunding platform designed for products.

Having a more dedicated platform for products gives Kickstarter a chance to focus on this opportunity rather than try to manage it on its original platform, which wasn’t designed for products. A separate platform could also allow Kickstarter to let more projects in. Currently it’s turning away an increasing number of hardware projects that don’t fit its rules, which bans things like home improvement projects, medical and safety-related products and Exercise and fitness products.

I have very little confidence that my idea will fly with Kickstarter. A spokesperson told me the company is not thinking along these lines. And I can see why Kickstarter wouldn’t want to break up its platform. There’s something powerful about saying it is the complete destination for all kinds of creative projects. There is also a danger that breaking out products might actually reinforce the notion that Kickstarter is becoming a marketplace or may cause people to expect Kickstarter Product rules to apply to the main Kickstarter campaigns.

But I think if Kickstarter took action now, it has a chance to shape its relationship with products, rather than have to keep reacting to their growing prominence. And it could reaffirm its commitment to the original artistic projects that threatened to get overshadowed by product campaigns. It wouldn’t be easy, but I think there’s a lot of upside to making formal the split that’s already happening on Kickstarter.

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