The META is the last thing you’ll need to kickstart before you’ll be coming up with ridiculous Kickstarter projects of your own.
A truly absurd amount of money flows through Kickstarter every day. It’s a great system: all you need is a clever idea to get started. And now you don’t even need that, because we’ve finally managed to outsource creativity to the machines. A little box called META (that’s Motivational Electronic Text Advisor, by the way) will generate Kickstarter ideas for you, while you reap the profits.
META is a “unique, handcrafted, hackable, retro, open source, Arduino-powered” device. And if you think that’s just a bunch of buzzwords haphazardly thrown together, well, just wait until you turn it on! META seems to draw from thousands of hot topics and mash them together, rationality be damned. One press of a button could serve you the inspirational idea of “Laser-Cut Hands-Free Aluminum Leggings for Moms.” Hey, there’s no guarantee that these will be good ideas.
There’s a little more value than meets the eye, since META’s open-source-ness means you can repurpose the box for your own projects, but there’s only so much use you can get from a recycled cube with three buttons. The idea-generation algorithm is accessible for free online, so this thing is really just a novelty item. And at $60 for the basic model, that’s a pretty expensive paperweight. The internet seems to agree; META only has a week left to achieve 80% of its funding goal.
On the upside, though, the creator has promised that your crowdfunded dollars will never be used to sell out to Facebook.
Source: Kickstarter
Published: Apr 24, 2014 03:55 am