Kickstarter has been growing — OK, skyrocketing — since its start in 2009, raising nearly $300 million and launching 70,000 projects. With so many campaigns and so much money comes a lot of data, leading to new ways to explore, categorize, and display Kickstarter's output. Launching into that niche today is Things We Start, a real-time, interactive, searchable data visualization map of live Kickstarters, and it brings some interesting potential for prospective campaigners and backers alike.

While Kickstarter already lets you sort by city, it's an inexact tool, built solely on the text in the 'location' field. Things We Start expands that with filters, based on one or more of Kickstarter's categories — technology, design, art, etc. It also adds a couple of additional treats: You can search for projects that are almost funded and top 25 projects within a category, and you can set alerts for new projects.

The site is a side project for its creators; it's unfunded, with no plans for monetization. So what's the impetus behind pinpointing Kickstarters geographically? Justin Wilcox, who developed Things We Start with a cadre of friends and designers, explains, "Some people back things on Kickstarter simply because they want the product. The thing is cool. But a number of people want to back the person, or back the community."

Things We Start is also designed to benefit the Kickstarter projects that cater to local backers. "One person was backing a local bookstore that was trying to raise money, and she wanted more access to books, locally," Wilcox says. "Another person donated to a farming project, an organic farming project, near their house."

Kickstarter projects in San Francisco and Oakland. Image: Courtesy of Things We Start

The map on Things We Start is populated by clickable pins, circled around each location, that display a thumbnail, a little description, some stats, and even the Kickstarter video, all pulled directly from Kickstarter's embeddable widget.

"We also give you a really nice sort of heads-up view about where interesting projects are being started," says Wilcox. "You can zoom out and you can see the entire world, and then you can click on ... design and you can see that New York and L.A., they're absolutely represented, but a place like Seattle is also doing really well, and Chicago is doing well."

Ultimately, the project is a discovery engine.

"Right now, if you are interested in backing something on Kickstarter, you basically just hear about it from two sources: You hear about it from the project owners themselves ... or you hear about it through the media," Wilcox says. "But with 4,000 projects running every day, there's no way that you're going to hear about every single project that you may be interested in backing."