Kickstarter Projects Pass $1M Milestone

Kickstarter, the popular crowd-sourced funding website, is becoming even more formidable as an alternative to angel investors and venture capital: Two of its projects just crossed the $1 million mark.

An aluminum iPhone dock called the Elevation Dock that mimics Apple’s clean, curvy, shiny aesthetic got there first on Thursday. It was followed a few hours later by Double Fine Adventure, a video game from industry veteran Tim Schafer’s indie gaming studio, Double Fine Productions (one of Schafer’s more well-known games is the 1993 release “Day of the Tentacle”).

By Friday afternoon – about 26 hours ahead of its funding deadline–the Elevation Dock has raised $1.2 million. Double Fine Adventure had raised nearly $1.4 million by that time, with 32 days left in its fundraising push.

Part of what makes this so staggering is the amount by which these projects went over their goals. Casey Hopkins, whose Portland, Oregon-based industrial design and mechanical engineering firm ElevationLab is behind the iPhone dock, was only trying to raise $75,000.

Double Fine Productions set a much loftier goal of $400,000, but it surpassed that goal in its first eight hours and reached the $1 million milestone within 24 hours. And it could bring in a lot more–its Kickstarter project still has 32 days left to raise money.