Is Pixate Astroturfing Kickstarter?
Pixate is trying to make native mobile development easier. The company’s Kickstarter campaign to fund initial development recently passed its funding goal of $25,000. But some of those backers have never seen the original campaign, which was cancelled before it reached its goal of $200,000, nor did they realize that the project was given a massive leg up by a single corporate sponsor with ties to the organizers. The company recently graduated from Y Combinator’s accelerator program, and is working on a product that allows less experienced developers to customize native mobile UIs with CSS. It’s a noble goal, and a difficult problem. Other precursors, like Titanium and Phonegap, are notorious for poor performance and difficult-to-diagnose bugs. And in a strange twist, the company did something that struck some people as odd: it ran a paid sponsorship for the as-yet-unfunded Kickstarter campaign.
