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How we raised $484k on Kickstarter to make Glowing Plants
- euphemize 12y agoRead bits and pieces of the article, looked interesting. I usually like to go check out what it is I'm about to go read up on first though. Where's your kickstarter link? Couldn't see anything on the page. CTRL + F, nothing. I even went to google and typed "glowing plans kickstarted", and even though nature.com and washingpost.com showed up, kickstarter did not. I give up.
- technotony 12y agoGreat point, added.
- Morgawr 12y agoI just typed "!kickstarter glowing plants" in my address bar which directs me to a duckduckgo search. It was the first result. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit?ref=discovery https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla... for reference :)
- technotony 12y agoI ran the campaign and I'll be hanging around here for the next hour or so if people have questions
- ABS 12y agovery cool project. Reading the website (not the post) I found myself thinking "this is a hoax" more than once :-) Unsolicited feedback: please get rid of all the annoying overlays on the website. I counted 3, one cannot be closed (join mailing list) and another keeps opening even if I keep closing it (chat)
- technotony 12y agoThanks for the feedback. I'll make them less annoying/better designed.
- frenchfriesyum 12y agoAlso, the images at the bottom/text at the top look a tad bit blurry (on Home page)
- mixologic 12y agoyeah, and wow. It says its 12 pt font, but it looks like 8 pt.. so small ?
- rohansingh 12y agoI'm confused, apparently Kickstarter has a ban on GMO rewards, but one of the rewards for your project is glowing seeds. Is that not GMO?
- technotony 12y agoThe ban was introduced after our project was funded. This article is a great discussion of what happened: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2149613,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2149613...
- streptomycin 12y agoHave you guys actually succeeded in making a plant that visibly glows in the dark, or is it still proving difficult to make something bright enough for the human eye to see?
- technotony 12y agoIt's dim, but visible. This is a 30 second exposure: http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/ http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/ We are working on improving the luminosity (note I edited this one as couldn't reply to the following reply yet)
- sterlingross 12y agoIs the plan to make them brighter?
- streptomycin 12y agoHow visible? Any pictures without really long exposures?
- technotony 12y agoIt's comparable to glow in the dark paint or other bioluminescent animals.
- dnautics 12y agois the plant biosynthesizing its own luciferin (the critical compound that produces the photon) or are you feeding it to the plant?
- JohnHaugeland 12y agoWooooo, explicit bias time! This is the kind of thing we like over at Crowdtilt: fun enough to be fun, sciency enough to be sciency. We have a platform called Crowdtilt Open ( http://open.crowdtilt.com/ http://open.crowdtilt.com/ ) that would be great for this, if you're interested. Disclaimer: I'm saying "we" because I work there.
- duckingtest 12y agoCan the modified plant reproduce?
- dm2 12y agoWhat will it take before I can line my driveway with these or these and they be effective? This is the only competitor I saw of yours, is your plant currently better than theirs? http://bioglowtech.com/ http://bioglowtech.com/ Your wikipedia page says that your estimated ship date is June of 2014, this isn't correct, is it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glowing_Plant_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glowing_Plant_project
- bravura 12y agoVery cool. My friends make light sculptures that look like plants (http://www.sustainablemagic.org/magic-flowers.html http://www.sustainablemagic.org/magic-flowers.html) At first blush, that's what I thought your project did too. I see now that you're creating biological glowing plants.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 12y agoI'm having trouble telling: have you improved signficantly on the original publications from the 80s in any of the dimensions? Given the amount of money you raised, and what you learned, how could you make the engineering cheaper next time? CAn you use CROs?
- technotony 12y agoOur current prototype is way brighter than the 80's project. About 1,000 times. It's still dim and needs to be viewed in a dark room, but it's very visible to the naked eye which others glowing plants aren't. We've still continuously improving it with a long way to go to realize our full vision. Wall Street Journal took this picture of it last week, I don't believe anyone has ever recorded reflection from such a plant before: http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/ http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/ (note that this is a 30 second exposure with a 4,000 iso)
- dekhn 12y agoum, 30 second exposure with 4000 ISO can take pictuers in near absolute dark without a light (I do microscopic photography).... but OK. Is this enough to actually illuminate things more than 10 feet away? Do you have an idea of what the max achievable illumination (quantum efficiencysurface areaflorophore denstiy)?
- technotony 12y agoWe need a lot more work to get it bright enough to illuminate other object to the naked eye, but we are working on that! DNA isn't like code where you write it and are confident about how it works. We have to test a lot of different designs to see which works best which is a long slow process of incremental improvement.
- dekhn 12y agoSure... I have a PhD in biophysics and the thing that got me into it was a picture of a glowing tobacco plant on the cover a book. I'm curious because 20+ years ago I assumed that glowing plants would be solving world hunger, or something. But in grad school they beat all the synthetic biology out of me because it didn't get NIH grants. It's not really clear to me this has a use. It's neat from a technology perspective, but like glowing yogurt, I struggle to see this being a clear improvement over conventional lighting systems.
- Duhck 12y agoAwesome post! Note that the "Direct traffic" row in the traffic sources at the end of the blog post is likely attributed to https as well as dark social and not someone typing in the URL manually. This can come from email campaigns, social referrers, and even IM clients.
- technotony 12y agoYes, also many of the 'Kickstarter' sources were most likely people reading print articles and then searching for the project on Kickstarter. There's no doubt however that the Kickstarter itself brought a huge amount of traffic (over 50%) which is worth thinking about when you are deciding between different platforms.
- arctansusan 12y agoSeriously. Glowing plants. This is what people want to donate their money for. A noble and worth cause on the same worthiness as killing cancer and poverty.
- HCIdivision17 12y agoBoth of those enjoy positively enormous amounts of funding, both via commercial and social means. Glowing plants, by contrast, get virtually none. Even with this half million, the amounts are unfair to compare. Further, there's immense potential here. Many people around the world - in the billions - cannot afford night time illumination. This is essentially free for most of us, but is immensely costly without our advanced power infrastructure (including astonishing power reliability and stability). What if all those people could have a plant light their home, even just a little, just enough to walk about safely? Without the awful smoke of oil and wood, and for only the cost of the water to feed it? THAT is easily, undeniably worth half a million dollars. Don't be silly derailing something of such worth with shortsighted and irrelevant comparisons.
- groby_b 12y agoI can't seem to make the math for that work. Plant energy generation is around 1 W/kg. Lighting an average room requires around 10,000 lumen. Maximum luminous efficacy is 683 lm/W. Lighting a room requires ~15W w/ perfect efficacy. Assuming the plant requires no energy to maintain its metabolism, that'd be 15kg of plant. Realistically, you can assume that it'll need at least double that, to maintain the metabolism. That's a whopper of a lighting plant.
- hrjet 12y agoWhy do you need 10,000 lumen to light a room? What sized room are your considering? And, if you are responding to your parent post, it says light enough to walk around. Even 100 lumens would be sufficient to walk around a 100 sq ft room.
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- hmottestad 12y agoThe title is rendered to a canvas element. Doesn't detect retina display, so that's a pity. Anyone know what the benefit of rendering text to canvas is? Is it done server-side to protect the font info?
- solox3 12y agoThat's Cufon -- poor man's web fonts. Cufon uses flash to show text with the font you wanted instead of loading a font file, which wasn't possible until CSS3.
- batuhanicoz 12y agoIt now uses canvas element instead of Flash, AFAIK. Maybe it falls back to Flash when the browser doesn't support HTML5. A bit OT but: Shouldn't it better to use native CSS3 font feature instead of canvas? Guess I know what I'll research this evening.
- sxtxixtxcxh 12y agoweb fonts were available in the late 90s... long before css3
- zafka 12y agoYour article says you can't wait to ship next summer. Does this mean I might get seeds in July of 2015? I don't remember, what was the original goal?
- technotony 12y agoThis was written initially for sending to people who asked me tips on how we ran the campaign, and I missed that in editing. We are targeting a shipping date now in October, having raised more than our goal the research is taking longer as we can do more.
- dnautics 12y agooriginal goal was April 2014. Having said that, there are plenty of kickstarter projects that have succeeded quite well even after having delays. I'm sitting here at my table with my copy of Antimatter Matters, which is late, by about 6 months, but I'm happy with it. The Ouya also was late, IIRC.
- technotony 12y ago84% of kickstarter projects are late. That doesn't make it ok, but we asked our backers in January if they wanted a shipment on time or if they wanted us to ship when we are ready, over 90% said to wait. I think people understand that they are backing a long term project and we try to keep them engaged with updates etc.
- zafka 12y agoI was one of those who voted to hold off shipment until it was ready. But even though I am enclosed in an adult size body, I am like a little kid and want my toys. While I get the updates I usually just skim them as they typically say: "we are making progress, be patient" Regards jhk
- njloof 12y agoSeems premature to take a victory lap on a product that hasn't shipped yet!
- seszett 12y agoThis seems fun, but apparently you can't get them shipped outside the US.
- dnautics 12y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1e5rti/whats_wrong_with_the_glowing_plant_kickstarter/# http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1e5rti/whats_wro... Early on in your project, one of your partners, Dr. Omri Drory, claimed that you would be doing two things in particular with your project. First, I wanted to respond to the critique in several ways: check out our post "radical openness": This will be totally transparent project – we will introduce a novel concept called "constant peer review" – In academia no one publish things that didn’t work – we will publish everything. Can you please comment on your commitment to 'constant peer review'? I'm presuming this means that you intended blogging your "ups as well as your downs" (c.f. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/posts/469999); https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla... but your blog has been short on scientific details. Secondly, in the statement, Dr. Drory stated We take being a good Steward of our backers funds as #1 priority. Our budget will also be publish online and you can see where the money went. Can you provide a link to this budget? Thirdly, as far as I can tell from your scientific posts on your blog, you are still feeding the plant luciferin (the glow-in-the-dark chemical), in the photo that that the WSJ showed. Is this true? Or is the plant photographed biosynthesizing its own luciferin?
- technotony 12y ago1. We've published everything we've been doing to our Kickstarter backers, including when it has/hasn't worked. 2. We'll publish the budget. Currently we have $230,000 left from net proceeds from the Kickstarter of $430,000 3. WSJ photo is fed firefly luciferin. We also have a (dimmer) plant which is making it's own, that's where our research focus is going.
- possibilistic 12y agoDid the luciferin/luciferase metabolic pathway get elucidated? AFAIK it has not been. You'll probably have to supply exogenous substrate for this to work. Additionally might need a super long exposure.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- slacka 12y agoAs a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. Plants that eliminated the need for petro fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover and were resistant to disease and insects. Instead I somehow ended up in this Bizarro World, where Dr. Evil runs Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops. How can we turn the tide back, so that government serves the people instead of big corporations? You’d think the “corporations are people” would be a wakeup call, right? I’m glad to see there’s still people out there like those at Glowing Plant that see the potential in this technology before the world gets fed up and just bans GMO.