Crowdfunding is all the rage and small businesses are lining up to get a piece of the action. We have sifted through the wide range of app  crowd-funding campaigns, below you will find three campaigns that seem promising.

 

Ubuntu Edge

Perhaps the most obvious one. Canonical is looking for a whopping $30 000 000 in financing for their future device and platform Ubuntu Edge. The Edge will basically be a mobile with a desktop in one device. It will run Android, Ubuntu Mobile, and Ubuntu Desktop, have 128 GB of storage and 4 GB RAM.

Since the Ubuntu Edge will be able to run Android its users will already be able to use a vast number of apps, had Canonical only chosen Ubuntu Mobile and Desktop they would be in the same situation as Windows Phone, without any apps.

Ubuntu Edge is an interesting project with many backers already, however we have seen attempts of it in the past, failing because of the trade-off and compromises that has to be done when developing a mobile and yet being able to use it as a desktop. However the potential is also huge, we haven’t forgotten the great Nokia phones running Linux.

 

MailPile

MailPile is a project with the aim of creating a web-based and desktop e-mail client with user friendly support for encryption such as OpenPGP. This project is interesting, especially since given the different privacy concerns on the Internet.  It also has a number of other aims regarding creating a user friendly interface with themes and a platform for plug-in development.

Unfortunately the project is currently developing for Linux  and MAC, which is a fraction of the Windows operating systems on the market, if the project is backed there will be a Windows-version as well.

 

Ghost Blogging Platform

Ghost is a Kickstarter project with the aim of developing yet another open-source blog platform and content management system.

One of the key benefits with Ghost is publishing and the attempt to make it easier to write your own blog posts within the actual platform. In order to do this there will be a split screen, on the left side it’s possible to write a blogpost in markdown, with a preview of the post on the right.

Another interesting feature is the built-in statistics dashboard, which will not only show the number of visitors, bounce rate etc, but also social media statistics and subscribers to newsfeeds.

The Ghost project also have the aim of improving the actual content management part of the blogging experience, the inspiration is the way email is handled with different labels and drag and drop. Expect a review on Syntax30 when the Ghost blog platform is released.