The last few days I’ve been holding my breath for a response from Kickstarter. But no luck there. So that thread dies with no coherent explanation from the person at Kickstarter as to why HiLO Lens did not meet his criteria.

However I just went back to check the Kickstarter site and found the new system for project proposals. Perhaps Kickstarter were listening to criticism of arbitrary decisions in the project proposal process. If that is the case then hats off to them for actually doing something about it.

Previously you had a very limited amount of space (750 characters) to pitch the project to Kickstarter before they would allow you to work on the Kickstarter project page. That has been turned on it’s head and you can now prepare the Kickstarter project page before they review the project. But you can’t launch the project on Kickstarter until it is approved. This makes more sense as they will have more information about the project.

Regarding Kickstarter’s review of the project here is what they state : We review every project by hand before it launches to make sure that it meets the guidelines; projects that violate the following will not be allowed to launch.

This is very interesting, does it mean that they will not screen out projects based on other criteria ?

Now for the second part of my saga : Amazon.

Having created an Amazon Payments account I linked it to a business bank account and even made a small transfer of funds from the bank account to the Amazon Payments account. It seemed OK.

To be able to complete the new Kickstarter project proposal we need to “Register to Receive Funds” using Amazon Payments. Kickstarter provides a link to Amazon to create an “Amazon Payments Business account”.

But, shock, horror, upon clicking the link I was greeted with “Unfortunately, we have been unable to confirm your account information.” Hmmm. I read on. “This may be because you failed to respond to our past requests for more information or we could not verify the additional information you gave us”. I suspect this relates to some tax information that Amazon validates after validating the bank account, but I received no requests or updates from Amazon. The message gets better “As a result, we have restricted some of the features of your Amazon Payments account. Click here to find out more about these restrictions.” I clicked here almost as quickly as you did.

The conclusion :  I can withdraw money but can’t receive money or send money. There is no indication about what to do to solve the problem. I’ve sent the obvious question to Amazon but I’m not sure if real people are employed by Amazon or if it is Jeff sitting in a server room.

I’m now holding my breath for a reply from Amazon.