So, this is a BIG technological problem, and the only thing the developers (which I assume are legit people, they're not trying to scam) have done so far is focus on the software features.
These LCoS modules are pretty good. People around here saying picoprojectors don't do the job: I've had one for a couple years in the bedroom and they are MUCH more optically bright than the raw lumen figures give an indication of. Human sight is roughly logarithmic-ish, so this won't look too bad in a room, as long as there's no direct sunlight on the piece of wall that the clock is on. Take into account that it's a pretty small projection area, too. I'd say the choice for this module is fine.
But then...
In order to get this to work at short range and at the very shallow projection angle they show, they need custom aspherical optics. Also, they probably need some reflective field-distortion optics to get the resolution nearby to be the same as the image resolution at the farthest corner. This is NOT simple to do. With any straight (single element/dual element) aspherical focusing optics they will have unacceptable color fringing. Honestly, they need to hire an optical engineer, which is impossible on their R&D budget.
The price is also just too low. Those modules are $80 (yes, 80 us bucks) in small quantities. They only go down a little bit with larger quantity, which they will not be able to hit (we're talking 10ku+). Then they need something pretty beefy to run TCP/IP and their image composition stuff, some AC power solution, wifi and supporting electronics. Even with (not actually commercially acceptable!) ESP8266-type stuff and a pretty barebones board with off the shelf wall wart, that's at least $15 BOM. Then there's the enclosure, which again, at these volumes you're not going to get below a couple bucks per piece (I've been there, casts or molds are just a fixed price of at least $2000/piece). All in all, we're looking at $100 BOM at a minimum if they get absolute killer pricing on those projector modules. They budgeted $36 per clock at the moment of writing (532 clocks at $83981 raised). Nope. In order to break even, they need to AT LEAST multiply BOM by 2.6, but in this case about 3 because of the IGG and payment fees. So they need about $175,000 to make this work. This is essentially a $100k loss leader.
So we've got something that is technically very hard, on a pretty giant loss leader. Even if they go into full-on production after the campaign, the gross margin on their product (MSRP $299) is still only about $190. Even in the best situation (BOM x 2.2-2.4) that's only a net profit of $50 per clock. It would take something like 2500 additional, non-reduced price clock sales just to break even on the IGG loss leader. On a product that I would very much doubt is going to live up to its expectations.
Nope. This project should have been bootstrapped and should have been better prepared for the launch. There is clearly a market, they would have succeeded financially regardless of the campaign date.
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