Une Bobine: A Kickstarter succeeds, expands to another market
Une Bobine is a stylish and handy iPhone cable that went from zero to 1000 percent funded on Kickstarter in just 19 days. I covered the device on an episode of TUAW TV Live a few weeks ago, and just love the way that the flexible-but-somewhat-stiff Une Bobine works with an iPhone or iPod touch to not only connect your device for charging and syncing, but also works as a stand. As a result of the hot start this Kickstarter project received, the team decided to expand the product's use to micro-USB devices as well.
Not all Mac users use iPhones -- there are a surprising number of TUAW readers who have Android-based phones -- so it is nice that Jon Fawcett and the [Fuse]Chicken team have taken the extra funding from Kickstarter to meet the needs of another market.
Fawcett noted that "Micro-usb took significantly more work to achieve because it has one major flaw compared to the Apple 30 pin connector when attempting to do what we are with it. It is simply so small that the phone tends to rock side to side. To solve this, we have engineered a custom micro-usb connector housing that will make the micro-usb very stable on most phones. Because it seemed like an eternity was passing for us to finalize the details for this, we held a spontaneous 'Kickathon' with all of our employees (our name for the Kickstarter version of a hackathon) from 12:01am today until 5:01pm today. The Kickathon had one goal; to finalize the entire design for the micro-usb connector, which included design, engineering, prototyping, and testing. All of these came together by the hard work of our great team!"
Une Bobine will be available in a 12" version (Petite Bobine) and a 24" full version, and since the company surpassed a $90,000 "stretch" funding goal, they're adding in a free 3-foot USB extension cable. And of course, it'll be in both Dock connector and micro-USB flavors. Check out another one of [Fuse]Chicken's well-done product trailers below.
