[Klaus]

Yes Kickstart is a marketing platform, that provides a business model  and guidance in a contract form, for which it charges 5%.(+ 3-5% payment handling) You provide the project, the sum you wish to raise and a fixed date in which that must be achieved. Kickstart finances nothing, the public (or otherwise) provides the funding. Cleverly entitled "Crowd funding" 

 

 We must be aware of the risks of these sort of projects, many have lost money, Kickstart hasn't however!

 

What I meant was - the crowd funding isn't needed for most of the presented projects. If you have a working prototype already, the most that you need to go forward isn't money but marketing. e.g. I participated in a speaker project on Indiegogo last year. They wanted 50.000$ for production purposes (they said). However, what are 50.000$ when you have a team size of 10 people. That's merely the salaries for 2-3 weeks (and they actually took 3/4 year longer than stated to make it happen). Says it all really. 

If a project fails, it isn't really because of insufficient support from the Kickstarter campaign but because the prototype was severely flawed in the first place. Generally I would be very sceptical about projects that heavily rely on software. The software design costs are pretty much always underestimated.

 

Those Meyer-Optik projects are harmless. The development and production costs are pretty much known - off the shelf optical elements plus mechanical designs that have been used for decades. It is crystal clear that this is just social network marketing for them.