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Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure project on Kickstarter.

Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and document the creation of an old-fashioned point and click adventure game. They are probably just a few hours away from breaking $1 million raised from backers on Kickstarter, they are already the new record holders for the fastest to raise so much and to receive backing from so many individual funders. Update: Adding tens of thousands of dollars every 15 minutes, the project just passed $1m.

David Carr and John Kestner are hoping to raise $35,000 to "connect your things to the Internet, without a nerd degree." The project, Twine, promises "the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing." No programming required.

Twine as pictured on the Kickstarter page is a tiny square that has internal and external sensors coupled with WiFi connectivity. According to the Kickstarter page, requires just two AAA batteries that will keep it running "for months."

Only two years after launching, online crowdfunding service Kickstarter has had 1 million people sign up and pledge financial support for a wide range of projects of all shapes and sizes. The site has been used to help creative people get funding for everything from art projects, music videos and graphic novels to urban farms and DIY computing hardware projects.

The growth Kickstarter has seen is astronomical. A year ago, they were just under 300,000 backers. By last week, that number had grown by well over 200%.

What happens when the Recession Apocalypse has got you down? Get a couple of buddies together, call yourselves the Defenders of the Commonwealth and launch a $5 million Kickstarter campaign to promote the state of Kentucky in the first ever crowdfunded Super Bowl commercial.

The campaign, started by three advertising creatives, will recognize the state of Kentucky as the birthplace of the Happy Birthday song among other feel-good homages to the Bluegrass State.

The incredible success of Kickstarter has demonstrated that alternative crowdfunding platforms can help fund a number of creative projects (over 7,000 projects in the case of Kickstarter).

Now a new startup from the U.K. aims to take that model and apply it to the book publishing industry. Unbound is both a crowdfunding platform and a publisher. Authors pitch an idea and if enough readers support it, the book will be published. Like Kickstarter, if a book doesn't get sufficient backing, then supporters' pledges are refunded.

It's the perfect Kickstarter success story: designer Scott Wilson posts a project to the crowdfunding website: designs for two iPod Nano watchbands - TikTok and LunaTik. The idea takes off, breaking almost every record on Kickstarter, including most funds raised ($941,718) and most backers (13,512). And now Apple announces its plans to begin carrying the designs in North American stores.

As Wilson points out in a recent interiew, his design for the watchbands really "gave the Nano a home." It also gave consumers a reason to wear a stylishly techy watch and a reason to buy an iPod Nano - an Apple device that seemed to be lost in the shuffle (no pun intended) of iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. In fact, according to a survey of the Kickstarter project's backers, over three-quarters of those who pledged actually had to purchase a Nano in order to use the watchband.

Steve Blank, author of Four Steps to Epiphany, has helped formulate the thinking behind the Lean Startup methodology, together with Eric Ries. I had an opportunity to meet him during a discussion around the Startup Genome project. He observed that most startups that succeed aren't lean: their goal is to have an exit rather than a scalable business. What would be the methodology for startups that simply want to flip?

Flip startups are agile startups that aim to exit quickly. Unlike Lean startups, their priority isn't to learn in order to create a scalable business model. Instead, their goal is to create a promising product. For example, it could be a successful single app or game. The idea is to build a hit that would make the founder(s) an appealing and quick talent acquisition (sometimes referred to as an acq-hire). This is lean development without any customer development. The focus is on building. Recent examples include Blindtype, Hipster or About.me. All three were bought before or right after launch.

The Sundance Film Institute announced today that it has partnered with crowd-funding platform Kickstarter and giant social network Facebook to offer its community of independent film makers resources and assistance in funding and promoting their work.

Sundance will highlight selected film projects on Kickstarter and Facebook has already begun offering training sessions in online promotion to film makers.

A headline from the Creative Commons blog caught our eye this past week: "New federal education fund grants $2 billion to create OER resources in community colleges." OER, or open educational resources, are those educational materials that are available with open licenses. Rather than "all rights reserved," these resources are available for users to take, adapt, and reuse - a way to make educational content more accessible and more usable by teachers and students.

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is publishing a look at the best projects the flourishing site has seen over 2010 and the award winners are really uplifting for the spirit. Journalist/cartoonist Ted Rall, for example, used Kickstarter to fund a month of reporting inside Afghanistan. His cartoons from the field were sent first to the 211 Kickstarter supporters who funded his trip.

Kickstarter helps people fund a project, almost any kind of project, by using its site as a platform for collecting donation pledges, publishing videos and updates and more. More than 380,000 people have now pledged over $30 million to fund home-recorded music projects, independent films and books and many other creative projects, in just 20 months since the site launched. Below are three of my favorite videos from Kickstarter's Best of 2010 collection.