The Melon headband is a brain-sensing device that monitors brain activities while you are studying, dancing, or just doing yoga to help you track your progress and productivity.

At Melon we are really interested in the idea of Understood Self, which we are trying to add to the movement of Quantified Self. We want people to have a great feedback system for the data we’re capturing, so it can help with the activities users already do day-to-day, go beyond numbers and scores, and move towards insights and understanding.

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Spark Core is an inventive project for hackers and makers – the device is a small Arduino-compatible, wi-fi enabled module. This means that for as little as $39 you can connect practically anything to the internet. All you need is some imagination.
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At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles last week, L.A. Tech & Media Law Firm founder David Sharifi predicted how the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act will change fundraising for movies and tech startups.

You can read the complete JOBS Act at this PDF link. Sharifi outlined what still needs to be implemented with the bill and how the SEC could make it much easier for larger projects to raise funds. Sharifi explained:

[Hypothetically] I can’t offer you guys a thousand dollars per share and raise a million dollars right now. Unless you’re an accredited investor and I’ve registered with the SEC and I’ve done basically the amount of legal legwork needed to do an initial public offering. So it’s tremendous hurdle for today’s entrepreneurs or any startup. And that barrier is being relaxed a little bit through the JOBS Act.

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Amy Holman Edelman hopes to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter for Rabble, a website with aggregated book reviews from trusted and verified sources. The site aims to be like rottentomatoes.com or metacritic.com for books with reviews of both traditionally published and self-published titles.

Here is more  about the project: “Rabble’s team, made up of zealous and intrepid book-lovers (and many of the same people who brought you IndieReader), will scour the publishing landscape, pull a sentence or two from each review (pre-vetted to insure its credibility, with a link to the complete review source) and come up with a consensus for a final Rabble score—to insure that you, the busy reader, don’t have to.” We’ve embedded a video of the project above for you to check out.

Idreambooks.com, which launched last summer, also aggregates reviews from professional book critics including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

If you gave money to a Kickstarter project in 2012, then you are one of the 2.24 million people who did so last year.

The company earned almost $320 million in pledges last year and successfully funded 18,109 projects. The company shared these numbers and a bunch of other metrics today via Twitter. According these numbers, the music category had the most projects funded (5,067) and video games had the most money pledged ($83 million).

Kickstarter funded a a range of projects including: a weather predictor app called Dark Sky that estimates the weather in real time; 10 percent of the films at Sundance; and even a bus stop in Georgia. To check out all of Kickstarter’s 2012 metrics, follow this link kickstarter.com/year/2012.

Cultural anthropologist Michael Leifer and app designer Jory Prum, aka ecodads, hope to raise $20,000 on Kickstarter to fund the development of two educational iPad apps for the California Environmental Protection Agency. The apps will be distributed to schools, teachers, parents and students in California to help build awareness around environmental issues in the state. We’ve embedded a video about the project above–what do you think?

Here’s more about the project: “Upon completion, these APPS are going to initially be used in theManteca and Calaveras School Districts in California but will be available to anyone who wishes to download them. ecodads and CALRECYCLE are also currently in the final stages of negotiating a cumulative license for all 85 Units.”

If you want to start your own project, check out GalleyCat’s post How To Use Kickstarter to Fund Your Publishing Project.

Kickstarter has a new iPad/Kindle stand project up on the site that aims to make it easier to read and watch movies in bed. Here is more from the listing: “The Tavoletta is a new tablet stand designed specifically for when you are relaxing or lying down. It’s perfect for watching movies in bed, reading in your favorite recliner or surfing the web on the couch.”

Bids begin at $1, but for $60 you can get your hands on the stand and for $80, you can get two different kind of support bases –one for Kindle and one for the iPad. The project is looking to raise $30,000, and so far has only raised $845, but still has 30 days to go. If you’d like to support the project and get your hands on an early Tavoletta.

Choose-your-own-adventure storytelling meets social networking in Kickstarter project TaleTown, a Facebook game that lets you win Kindle books.

Here is more about the project: “Players in TaleTown actually unlock download-able content for their Kindle or any other e-reader!  That’s right, the free to play Facebook game will be giving out free e-books of short stories, flash fiction, and serial fiction.  It’s long past time for games to start giving out real rewards to players.”

The creators are looking to raise $6,000 for development, marketing and to pay the content creators. You can give as little as $1, but if you give $10 or more, you’ll get a short story for your Kindle. Follow this link to learn more.