Social Icons

Press ESC to close

Crowd Funded

464   Articles in this Category
Explore

Today, we’ve got a bit of a last-minute Kickstarter notice for you. I know normally we bring these to your attention with plenty of advance notice, but this one fell into my backlog, and, well, I’d rather pop this one up there than ignore it, as it’s bringing something to the table that I’ve not seen in a watch before. If you’re looking to have a survival kit built into a watch, the Ralston Recon 6 is your device.

I like finding good values in a watch, without resorting to too many compromises. There are values to be had at all different price points, but at the entry level point, I find that you have to sacrifice more of what you would want to get a good value. Enter a kickstarter campaign for the Brigade 7 Scope watch, an automatic with a lot of features for a very low introductory price.

There are a lot of kickstarter watch projects where the creator has a dream of designing a watch, and then connects with a manufacturer in China to produce the watch. Well, element watches adds a twist to that formula, in that the watch manufacturer back in China is owned by the designer’s father. The Orbital by element watch is the company’s second bite at the kickstarter apple, and in my opinion it is a more attractive watch than the (unsuccessful) first project.

The other day I wrote about 2 new smart watches that are driven by a single purpose, one to give you the score for your favorite soccer team, and the other to help you track your fitness. Today’s watch goes in the other direction, a connected device that has the goal of being a complete interface with your smart phone. The Moment Smartwatch is more of a full screen smart bracelet that interacts with your phone, and also tells the time.

A lot of smart watches I see try to be everything. Email, facebook posts, texts, weather, and so on and so on. They are not watches in a traditional sense, but rather wearable computers that display the time. Today, I wanted to highlight two watches that are more “connected” watches than a do everything wearables. The HotBlack by Hoptroff.com and the Withings Activé, with the former connecting you to your favorite football (soccer) team and the latter tracking your daily fitness goals. Interestingly, both watches are coming out of the UK.

Kickstarter has been good for the Padron Watch Company, so they are back for their third (hopefully) successful campaign on the site. The Hennepin watch is a chose-your-own movement project, with options for Swiss quartz, or Chinese, Japanese or Swiss automatic movements in the watch. In 2012, the hand wound Vuelta was launched, followed by the automatic Tessera in 2013. Both these watches far exceeded the funding goal, and with the Hennepin at more that 50% less than a day in, it looks like this will be 3 for 3.

Trintec Industries Inc. lays claim to being the first company to produce modern aviation instrument themed watches, dating back 30 years. Now, I don’t want to wade into debate here, but they make a pretty decent argument. And with that, they also make a pretty cool looking watch. With their current Kickstarter campaign, they are also making two interesting 30th anniversary watches, the altimeter inspired 9060SE and the airspeed indicator inspired 9061SE.

One of the nice things about writing for a widely read site is that companies will send us notices of upcoming designs and products in advance of the public release. This was the case with the Can Watch, who sent us a notice a while back. I will be honest, my reaction at the time was not positive. But in reflection, the watch project on Kickstarter is definitely unique and will give anyone who gets one of these watches a story behind the product, and the project does hope to do good on a couple of levels.