Have you ever wondered where most of the Kickstarter projects are based? Now you can get your geography nerd fix with ThingsWeStart, a handy interactive website map that lets you filter all of them to your liking.
The site launched on Monday, but it’s still in beta. ThingsWeStart has already got some great stuff up on day one for the team, and we can expect even more cool tricks and tools from them.
Dive right in to the map yourself and see what you can come up with. You can search by city, state, or zip, and filter based on project categories. The site also supports email notifications for specific map settings, which should be handy for anyone looking to keep an eye on projects in their area. Projects within a map can be sorted depending on how much money they have raised, how new they are and how close they are to being funded.
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ThingsWeStart founder Justin Wilcox told TNW in an interview that the idea for the map came about while doing research on Kickstarter for a project of his own.
“I had actually wanted to run my own Kickstarter project and so in preparation for that, I decided to collect some data that wasn’t easily available…I wrote a little app that would go and collect that information for me. Once I started seeing the information that was coming in, I had an epiphany,” he said.
According to Wilcox, Monday’s launch attracted interest from the mapping community, as well as the tech community. As for next steps, the founder said the team is focused on seeing what kind of interest the beta is generating before deciding where to go from here.
If you’d rather have someone else arrive at the conclusions for you, head over to the team’s blog to check out the infographics they’ve put together with their data. Or, if you’re the opposite and want to get your hands on the raw numbers, ThingsWeStart offers a full spreadsheet of its dataset.
Kickstarter itself lets you search for different cities and categories on the Discover section of its website, but it’s not nearly as intuitive, fun or robust.
Header image via Flickr / Axel Bührmann
(hat tip Hilary Mason)
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