See active projects on a map, filter them by category, and more.
If you’re a Kickstarter fan (like me), then you’ve probably spent time surfing the Kickstarter page looking for cool projects. I often just browse the “board and card games” category and I also look at the “Portland, Oregon” section to see what’s local to me. (And, of course, you can visit GeekDad’s own curated page to see what projects are near and dear to us.)
Today a new site is launching, providing a real-time map of Kickstarter projects: ThingsWeStart.com. One of the differences in their location-based search is that it will show projects in surrounding areas; for instance, “Brooklyn,” “Manhattan,” “Lower East Side,” “Long Island,”etc. will all show up when you search the New York area, rather than having to search for each location separately within Kickstarter. As you can see on the screenshots, you can filter down in many different ways with multiple categories at once.
This map shows some projects in the Bay Area, filtered down to a few categories.
You can get email alerts for a particular search, and you can sort projects by most money pledged, newest projects, or those closest to their goal, if you want to tip the balance on something. You can watch project videos directly through ThingsWeStart, and if you like data then you can get a big spreadsheet that lets you drill down to your heart’s content.
Right now (before launch) I can’t tell if it will let me select subcategories (like “board and card games” instead of the larger “games” category, which includes videogames) or just top-level categories, but if not I hope that’s a feature they’ll consider adding. Either way, this might be a fun way to discover and track new Kickstarter projects in your area.
