@geko just shared a Bloomberg article on Sony’s innovation department which mentioned Sony has used Kickstarter type campaigns twice for new products as a form of market research to gauge market interest. Obviously they didn’t care about raising $50,000.
Their Indiegogo campaign for Mesh made it look like a product from a start up company and listed only 8 staff members. (But it’s an official Sony project!) You had to get all the way into the Privacy Policy on their website to find the Sony name.
I’m seeing more and more of this, in some ways it’s similar to Quirky’s “influencer” votes.