Kickstarter Tech Project of the Week: Melon

Want a way-cool tech product before it officially hits the market? This week's pick for our favorite Kickstarter project is a headband and mobile app that quantifies your concentration.

Project Name: Melon: A Headband and Mobile App to Measure Your Focus
Category: Product Design
Goal: $100,000
Currently Funded: $109,397
Deadline for pledging: June 13, 2013

Are you more productive at work when listening to music? If so, does it matter if it's country or classical, with headphones or through speakers? And how do those intermittent workday detours to Facebook disrupt (or improve) your concentration?

Imagine how much more efficient you could be throughout the day if you empirically understood the environmental factors that affect your focus, whether you'd do better to fight through a mental block or break for a coffee.

Melon, a sporty EEG (electroencephalography) headband and companion app, seeks to reveal the answers to these questions. Think of the combo as a Fitbit for your mind. Users put on the headband equipped with sensors and input tags that specify their current activity, environment, behavior, and more. Using EEG and scientific algorithms, the device measures brain activity and displays the user's focus level on the app via a wavering white line. With each activity charted, Melon learns more about what helps and hurts your focus, and the app exposes trends that can help to optimize productivity.

"Melon is about taking invisible information, in this case from your brain, and turning it into something visible and helping change your behavior based on that," says creator Arye Barnehama in the Kickstarter video. When focus wanes, the app can optionally suggest ways to improve concentration, such as taking a few deep breathes or taking a short walk, and then records how the suggestion consequently influenced the user's mental state. The creators encourage people to use Melon in all different settings—while working at the office, doing yoga, or even flying a plane—in an effort to gain insight into day-to-day activities and extend the Quantified Self movement beyond just the physical.

Melon quickly surpassed its $100,000 goal. (In the time it took to write this, the project received more than $20,000 in pledges.) Its $79 early bird pledge has already sold out, but for $99 backers can get a Melon headband (in choice of black or white) plus the app as soon as this November. 

Kickstarter Tech Project of the Week: BRCK

Fancy an African safari? Pledge $10,000 toward this innovative portable hotspot on steroids and you'll be on your way.

Project Name: BRCK - your backup generator for the internet
Category: Hardware
Goal: $125,000
Currently Funded: $61,014
Deadline for pledging: June 4, 2013

Imagine a MiFi mobile hotspot that's as tough as a brick and has multiple options for connecting to the Internet. You've just pictured the BRCK, which hails from the Nairobi, Kenya-based company Ushahidi, originally formed to map reports of post-election violence in Kenya in 2008.

Ushahidi has since morphed into a non-profit, open-source tech company, but its platform carries on the original mission of building tools that improve the way information flows in the world. Ushahidi knows people from San Francisco to Nairobi—especially journalists and aid providers—need to connect remotely, and its motto is "if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."

Accordingly it's created a smart, rugged device that can connect to the Internet no matter how difficult the situation or remote the location. The brick-shaped BRCK acts as a hotspot for up to 20 devices in range and connects via Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and 3G or 4G mobile phone networks. Thanks to its eight-hour battery, it keeps running even if the power goes out, providing steady connectivity no matter where you are, how you're getting around, or which network is available.

Ushahidi is asking for $125,000 from Kickstarter to proceed with manufacturing. Right now you need to pledge a minimum of $200 to get your BRCK, scheduled to arrive by November 2013.

Ushahidi managed to earn more than 20 percent of its goal in the first day, so funding the full amount looks promising. There's the usual litany of extras such as t-shirts and stickers at various pledge levels, and you can also get a subscription to Ushahidi's CrowdMap platform starting at $300. If you're a high roller with a spare $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket however, the team will take you on safari in Nairobi to "build cool stuff" at their iHub in the center of Africa's "Silicon Savannah."