If you’ve read our weekly Awesome tech you can’t buy yet column, you’re well aware that we’re huge fans of crowdfunding here at DT. Simple crowdsourced funding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have made it possible for anyone to get financial backing for their ideas, and in the process have flung the doors to innovation wide open. More and more, the latest and greatest tech products get their start on a crowdfunding site, so if you want to keep up with the cutting edge of tehcnological development, you’ve gotta keep up with crowdfunding.
The problem, however, is that the biggest sites (Kickstarter and IndieGoGo) have limits on how you can browse projects. Kickstarter, for example, only lets you browse via categories (tech, design, food, publishing, etc) or broad filters (most funded, popular, staff picks, etc), and doesn’t allow you to do both at the same time. So, let’s say you want to browse through recently launched projects, but also want to limit your results to only show projects from the technology or music categories. Through Kickstarter’s browsing interface, you simply can’t do it.
IndieGoGo’s navigation controls handle this problem better than Kickstarter’s, but then there’s the fact that in order to keep up with everything going on in the crowdfunding scene, you’ve got to visit two (or more) separate sites. It’s all rather cumbersome.
Frustrated by this clunky browsing process (as well as the fact that neither site offers an iPad app), indie iOS developer and full-time systems engineer David Knell decided to build his own solution. “I have personally backed many projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo and have been waiting for an iPad app from either of them,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Nobody has delivered, so I built one that works for both sites.”
With the FunderCloud mobile app for iOS (sorry, no Android app yet), users can browse both Kickstarter and IndieGoGo via categories and filters simultaneously. In other words, the app allows you to view projects by site, popularity, creation or end time, but also filter the results to show only projects in the categories you care about. It also lets you favorite certain campaigns and get alerts when they’re nearing their funding goals. What a novel idea!
The app is not without its flaws, but as people that constantly check up on the crowdfunding scene, it’s definitely a breath of fresh air. The interface is simple and straightforward, and while it doesn’t display absolutely everything about each project, it does show you the most important information – things like the pitch video, backing incentives, and funding goals. As it stands, this is arguably the best way to cruise through the two major crowdfunding websites while you’re on the go.
You can snagg FunderCloud right now in the App Store for just $1.99
