This Week in Kickstarter

Recapping isn’t just for soda bottles too big to finish. It’s also what we do here every week, as we share a look inside Kickstarter HQ. Enjoy!

Fire up the grill and dust off the lawn darts, because—here in the States, at least—it’s Memorial Day weekend. That means three days of sun, fun, and this track playing on loop in the background. Some folks will even break out the flip flops, but we hope they’re careful.

Meanwhile, the most essential summer project ever, Coolest Cooler, just announced they’ll begin shipping this July. We’re stoked! That’s a pretty incredible turnaround on one of the biggest projects of all time. They also shared this glimpse at their engineering pilot build—a complete, assembled, functional Coolest!

What color did you order? We chose Margarita. Having this thing poolside is going to be so delightful.

Speaking of pools, earlier this week we sat down for a conversation with two pool parties. The folks at +Pool and the Thames Baths—which actually just surpassed its goal—discussed the importance and challenges of designing for urban waterways. One cool fact from the chat is that it is totally safe to swim in the East River, just so long as it’s been more than 48 hours since the last rainstorm. (Apparently rain flushes a lot of sewage into the river.)

That got us talking about who among us has ever been in the waterways around Manhattan—at least one of us has taken an unintentional dip when his kayak tipped over. Oh, did you know that it’s totally kosher to boat in the East River too? This 2012 piece in the Times answers any questions you might have about it. (TL;DR: Watch out for ships.)

On the topic of shipping, we just made Kickstarter available to creators in Spain! They can start building their projects immediately. Some folks on our team are actually heading across the pond to make an appearance at Sónar+D in June. They’ll be leading workshops and preparing our international neighbors for success. Meanwhile, creators in Spain will be able to launch their projects starting June 2.

Mail Call! The best part of working at Kickstarter is the weird and unexpected stuff that arrives the mail. This week we received our Otto. Remember that? It’s a raspberry pi-powered GIF camera! It’s still charging, but maybe we’ll share some stuff we made next week.

We also got this wickedly cool piece of original art, from the Paintings for Strangers project. Now we just need a stranger to give it to.

Oh! Have you heard of the Verrado Electric Drift Trike? We got one for the office last year, but after weeks of sick tricks and indoor drifting (NOT RECOMMENDED), we broke it. This week we finally got around to repairing the bike, so our office manager, Charlie, took to the streets to show us how it’s done.

 Looking good, Charlie.