Kickstarter was not originally meant to sell real 'products' as far as I can tell. But they don't turn people away who use it for that purpose. Felix Salmon covered the the 'mission creep' of kickstarter quite well last month on his blog. Actually Felix's blog is a great place for coverage on Kickstarter and the recently-passed JOBS act, which seems awesome on the surface but actually is filled with some quite terrible things.

The bigger risk, however, is on the side of the funder - and that's the risk that the project will get funded, you will spend your money, and you will end up getting nothing in return. For original-concept Kickstarter projects, that's probably OK: you supported the arts by funding an artist, and you hoped to get a memento of that funding, but the reward was just a reward, and not necessarily the main reason you funded the project. For things like bars of soap and iPhone docks, however, the great majority of the funders are thinking of themselves as buying a thing. And they're not properly discounting the very real risk that they will end up with nothing at all.

Is there something similar out there, in google-land or elsewhere?

Expose yourself to as many useful languages as you can. Learn a bit about the (business-wise) useless ones too -- they can still teach you a thing or two. The really important thing to learn in school is the theory of developing systems that work, and doing so as simply and elegantly as possible. Any company worth working for will pick up on that. If you really learned from your CS degree, learning a new language will simply be a study in syntax. For a true nerd, it is easy enough to "master" the nuances of a specific language in your free time; learn as much of the hard stuff in school while you can!

Didn't we already cover this in the original Transformers the Movie??

"Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong"