Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak has backed Gecko-- a low powered Bluetooth device which he described as "useful as well as prankful," being made by a tiny startup in Bangalore.

It isn’t very often that Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak backs a project on crowd funding platform Indiegogo. On Thursday, he backed Gecko, a low powered Bluetooth device which he described as “useful as well as prankful,” being made by a tiny startup in Bangalore.

I contributed to this – useful as well as prankful – http://t.co/SbOL89AXCu — Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz) September 19, 2013

The only other technology project he has backed on Indegogo is Scanadu, which raised over $1.5 mn in a wildly successful crowd funding campaign.

So what really is Gecko? The slick device, about the size of a Silver dollar, adds smart features to your phone. It can be used to gesture & trigger the camera on the phone and also track things.

At the time of writing, the startup had raised $2305 of its $50,000 goal with 38 days to go.

The device, has an accelrometer inside, so it can sense motion as well.

Bahubali Shete, whose startup is building Gecko, told NextBigWhat that the company chose to crowd-fund the product because it also gives them the visibility. Shete’s startup– Connovate Technology Private Limited– makes white labeled solutions for large manufacturers.

“There are many use cases. For example it can be used with a pill box to make sure that someone you care about is taking medicines on time. Or it can be used to detect intrusion,” says Shete, an Electronics engineer who has worked for different companies for the last 25 years.

http://youtu.be/J1aB3FDCLbo

The device works with iOS and on a few Android devices (Samsung Galaxy S4 & Nexus 7). All phones that come with Android 4.3 will work with the device, said Shete.

This is one of the few interesting projects out of India and we hope its campaign doesn’t fail like that of uChek, which couldn’t find enough backers on Indegogo even though it is a great product. If you’d like to back the project, see here.

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