By: Sorab Ghaswalla

Sometimes, crowdfunding projects like those on the Kickstarter platform for example, tend to catch us by surprise. But this one takes the cake.

Some bright spark has decided to introduce a single key keyboard for the computer, but wait, that’s not the only news. Guess which key it is? The hashtag #.

Undoubtedly, the hashtag has moved up the Internet social ladder in recent times, no thanks to Online social networks, especially Twitter, but to have someone make a “pluggable” keyboard out of it, & seek funds for mass producing it, is amusing, to say the least.

But the creator of this London-based project started by former community manager Ben Gomori, too, seems to have been carried away by the moment. (Trust a social media guy to have come up with the idea). As Ben himself has put it, “he knows how annoying it can be not having a hashtag key.”

The gadget is called HashKey, & plugs into the port of your PC/laptop with a USB cable. At the other end is the single key with the hashtag symbol on it. That’s it.

Already, out of the £15,000 sought, £1,748 have been pldged for this project. The Kickstarter project has also been covered in mainline publications such as TIME.com, The Independent, & others like Gizmodo, Business Insider, SlashGear & The Gadget Show.

What the HashKey project promises is to do away with the hassle of having to press 2 keys to make # appear on your screens (at least for those who do not have a standalone key on their boards, yet, or have to use the “Shift”key to reach one). “We want to save social media nerds around the world valuable seconds and celebrate the mighty hashtag’s contribution to digital communication!”, writes Ben, while explaining about his project.

Right now, Ben has developed a prototype & completed a feasibility study on the design for HashKey. Listing it on Kickstarter is to raise funds to get HashKey into production & bring it to early-adopter social media addicts around the world, with a view to producing it in greater quantities and taking to retail if it proves a success. There’s also talk of the single key board coming out in various colors, if everything goes well.

As for me, thanks but no thanks, Ben. My laptop keyboard already has an inbuilt # key but sure lacks one for £.

Image Credit: Kickstarter/HashKey

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