Kickstarter has really taken off as the world's premier crowdfunding website. If you're not familiar with it yet, it's a website that allows promising innovators and inventors a way to have their idea heard by the Internet, while offering tiered rewards for those of you who help out and donate towards their progress. Single causes and services alone have raised more than a million dollars in funding.

We've done an article in the past introducing interesting hardware projects on Kickstarter. If you're a gamer, Wasteland 2's Kickstarter project was recently funded successfully at nearly $3,000,000 (of their asked $900,000) in pledged donations.

Kicktraq is a Firefox add-on that will help you visualize the progress and success of Kickstarter projects. I started using it recently and I think it's a very unique way to look at interesting projects.

As of April 18th, Kicktraq has currently only been preliminarily reviewed by Mozilla. I've used it for a day now (on Firefox 11) and haven't encountered any issues at all. It's also an add-on that requires no restart after installation. It's very lightweight and isn't going to bog down your browser at all.

After installation, check out a Kickstarter project page and you'll notice a nice new line graph at the head of each page.

The green dotted line is a current projection of where that project will end up. As you can see, with this project, it's trending to well over its goal. The blue dotted line represents the project's goal. Each blip on the graph represents daily checkpoints that show its progress up until today.

Kicktraq doesn't use any foolproof formula and the results aren't guaranteed to be what you see reflected on the graph. However, it's a very good way to gauge the likely success of a Kickstarter campaign. If you're someone who has their own Kickstarter project up and running, this add-on is one that can really help you visualize what's going on and get you ready to push your project to the next level.

While I've got your interest, let's take a look at a few projects that Kicktraq shows ought to blow their goals out of the water!

SlingShot

SlingShot is an awesome new way to stabilize your smartphone video. The cradle fits any smartphone, can mount to a tripod, and even comes built with it's own miniature tripod as an attachment.

PhoneSoap

As someone who suffers from OCPD and just enjoys being neat and clean in general, I can appreciate PhoneSoap. It's a brand new way to both sanitize and charge your smartphone at the same time.

TriggerHappy

I'm not a big camera guy, but this project sounds really nice:

TriggerHappy is a patent-pending camera remote to control your DSLR or high-end point-and-shoot camera with an iOS or Android device. Help us fund manufacturing and development so you can get a TriggerHappy remote!

I'd like to hear all about what you guys think of Kicktraq, Kickstarter itself, and these (or other) running Kickstarter projects in the comments. I'm pretty big on Kickstarter myself and I'd be glad to hear that you are, too!