On Monday, USHAHIDI’s Kickstarter project “BRCK – your backup generator for the internet” hit it’s goal of $125,000 with eight days to spare.

USHAHIDI, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a non-profit tech company that originally began in early 2008 as an online platform tracking reports of post-election violence in Kenya. They began as a group of volunteers and have now grown into a full-fledged organization with a stated purpose to “Build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. We’re a disruptive organization that is willing to take risks in the pursuit of changing the traditional way that information flows.”

Since 2008, USHAHIDI has focused on developing and building software to easily crowdsource, filter and make sense of real-time information. In early May, USHAHIDI launched the Kickstarter program for the “BRCK”, its first offering in the hardware market.

The BRCK is a “modem for the global, mobile market”. It’s a small box, roughly the size of a real brick, designed to be portable and to function in a variety of environments:

“It works like a mobile phone, intelligently and seamlessly switching between Ethernet, Wifi Bridge, and 3/4G connection whenever the user’s preferred network is down. Plug in a SIM card — the same card that measures the minutes of talk and megabytes of data for a phone — and with its 8-hour battery the BRCK provides a fully functioning network anytime and anywhere in reach of cell service.

The BRCK is also a software infused device, operating in the cloud with its own website that you can access from anywhere to check how WiFi and electricity are performing, or manage alerts and applications.”

With eight days to go and the target reached it will be interesting to see the variety of uses and places around the globe that the BRCK gets put to over the coming months.  For more information vist the BRCK site, USHAHIDI, or their kickstarter campaign.