Kickstarter, also known as the iAccessory Preorder Store Back in February, I wrote about a quirky experiment, called the Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane , by a young designer named Robb Godshaw. The idea is that people could use the metal cube as a tactile thermostat for checking the outside temperature. Like I said, quirky. But the concept was also strongly panned by some readers, here and elsewhere. Godshaw emailed recently to tell me he'd started a Kickstarter campaign to explore whether there might be a market for his invention. Well, there isn't; the campaign failed . Looks like the critics won. If only the Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane could be wrapped around an iPhone. It would probably have generated three times the $80,000 being sought. Or maybe I'm just being conditioned by headlines and stories such as this , this , this and this , to think that if it's an iPhone or iPad accessory and it's on Kickstarter, it's going to be a phenomenal success. Clearly, Kickstarter isn't just about feel-good social enterprise projects and boot-strapping, entrepreneurial high-schoolers anymore. In fact, I wonder if eventually it may not longer be about those campaigns, at all. That would be a shame. But certainly, the platform is evolving into a big business incubator of sorts. In the video below, IEEE Spectrum does a good job of explaining how and, to a certain degree, why. Image: Kickstarter screenshot Mary Catherine O'Connor Mary Catherine has written white papers and marketing material for technology companies and