Unfortunately, her cancer has returned, and has begun spreading. After multiple operations, the Easy Rider actress, says Eckelberry, “can hardly move around and is mostly bed-bound.” She now weighs less than 100 pounds.

Eckelberry now believes that a clinical study in Europe could be Black’s last chance at survival. Only thing is, it’s rather expensive. As anyone living in the U.S. knows, medical bills and the costs associated with a medical condition pile up quickly. Black and Eckelberry have now found their finances dipping into the red. So, Eckelberry and Black looked to fans to help out with some crowdfunding.

Over one week ago, a gofundme campaign was launched to send Black for the European treatments. Now, after just 11 days, nearly $30,000 has been raised – far exceeding the $22,000 goal that was set.

Eckelberry updated the campaign page yesterday, thanking the donors profusely:

Everybody thank you so much for the donations and kind thoughts. Karen and are touched beyond belief. It’s so great to know she can make this trip. I promise to keep everybody updated. Any additional money that is raised beyond our goal will go towards my going with her. THIS IS AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH

(Image courtesy Vanessa Lua/Wikimedia Commons)

Kickstarter announced that games have pulled in over $100 million over the past four years. All that money was supplied by 633,242 gamers as they pledged support to 1,476 successful projects. 2012 was the banner year for gaming on Kickstarter as the company says nearly 1,000 projects were submitted last year as many developers and game makers tried to emulate the success of the Double Fine Adventure.

Speaking of Double Fine Adventure, that particular project really kicked off the frenzy of gamers throwing money at games they wanted to see become reality. Gamers broke $1 million in total funds pledged in 2011 with $3.8 million pledged over the course of the year, but the year of the Double Fine Adventure saw that number skyrocket with gamers pledging a total of $83.1 million over the course of the year.

This year is looking even better for gamers as gaming projects have already raised over $22.4 million in the first three months of the year alone. If it keeps at this pace, games could easily break $100 million this year alone.

Kickstarter will be at PAX East this weekend with the Kickstarter Arcade showing off video and board games that have been successfully funded and brought to fruition thanks to the crowdfunding platform. Some of the games at the event will include God of Blades, Strike Suit Zero and Cards Against Humanity.

First off, users now have a new “messages view” which sorts messages in the app by inbox and sent.

Next, creator now have “better” push notifications. The Kickstarter app provides basic project analytics for creators, and they are notified on activity concerning each and every pledge they receive.

Also, video loading performance has received an update. Kickstart says that some people were having trouble with full-screen video (especially international users), and that problem has been fixed.

Here’s the full list of what’s new in v1.1:

• New Messages View: Messages in the app are now sorted by inbox and sent
• Better Notifications: Creators get better push notifications
• App Banner Fix: App now opens to just the right spot when you click Open from the website banner.
• Facebook + Signup Fixes: Some Facebook logins were failing and some new user signups saying “Name is required” even though you entered a name. It’s all fixed, it wasn’t you, it was us.
• Faster Video + Fixes: Some people were having problems with full screen video, you are now in the clear! International users should see much better performance loading a video.

“The app is a whole new way to experience Kickstarter. We took things we’ve learned from the past three years of building the site, and applied them to a total redesign for the iPhone. We redesigned the project page, browse pages, and others. And we focused on making three things really useful and fun: finding new projects, keeping up to date with projects you’ve backed, and offering great tools for creators,” said Kickstarter when they first launched the app a couple of weeks ago.

You can grab the update in the App Store today.

Browsing projects feels simple and streamlined with the new app. You can look by category, popularity, and a host of other filters. Each project page lets you watch inline videos, as well as fund the project right there in the app.

The new app also lets you browse projects by location, so you can look at local projects near you.

Once you fund a project, you can use the Activity tab to see updates from its creators. If you connect the app to social networks, you’ll receive notifications when your Facebook friends back certain projects of create projects of their own.

“The app is a whole new way to experience Kickstarter. We took things we’ve learned from the past three years of building the site, and applied them to a total redesign for the iPhone. We redesigned the project page, browse pages, and others. And we focused on making three things really useful and fun: finding new projects, keeping up to date with projects you’ve backed, and offering great tools for creators,” says Kickstarter.

For project creators, the Kickstarter app provides some basic analytics as well as notifications for each and every pledge. Project creators can benefit from in-app photos and videos that they can upload as updates to their backers.

You can grab the new Kickstarter app for iPhone and iPod touch for free starting today.

That’s why they’ve just introduced hashtags on their discover page.

“Over time, we’ve noticed certain themes and trends running through the projects on Kickstarter — some for a week, some for years. Tags give us a new way to share these patterns with everyone.

Tags aren’t tethered to a specific category. Instead they reflect a common philosophy (#Civic), shared subject matter (#Science), themes (#Zombies), accolades (#Sundance), and a bunch of other stuff too. We’ll be adding and rotating tags constantly as new trends pop up throughout the site. These will be listed in the sidebar of the Discover page,” says Kickstarter.

So these tags are different, and in a way much more specific than categories like “music” “film” or “games.”

You can check out the trending #tags on the Kickstarter Discover page. People looking to browse projects can now do so by location, category, tag, and other groupings like “recently launched” and “most funded.”

Kickstarter says that you can help make the #tags better. If you see a type of project that’s trending or want your project that you just launched to be tagged, just send them a tweet.

But I know you’re a stathead, so here are the big numbers for 2012:

• 2,241,475 individual pledgers
• who pledged $319,786,629 collectively
• This funding helped successfully fund 18,109 projects
• That’s a rate of just over $606 of pledging per minute during the year

Kickstarter also touts their most valuable members – the ones who pledge for multiple projects. In 2012, 570,672 people backed two or more projects and 50,047 backed ten or more.

There’s also an elite club of 452 people who backed 100+ projects during the year.

Project backers came from 177 countries (90% of the countries in the world).

Categorically, Music had the most projects funded with 5,067 – but games had the most money pledged with $83 million. Last week, Kickstarter told us that Film was the first project category to hit $100m in funding since their launch back in 2009.

One final interesting stat: 10% of the films being shown at Sundance this year are Kickstarter projects.

If you want to check out the slideshow, go here.

$102.7M, to be exact. Out of that total, $85.7M has been collected from 891,979 total backers. This money has been used to successfully fund 8,567 projects – a truly amazing accomplishment.

According to Kickstarter, Documentary is the leading film category for pledges with $42.64M. That’s followed by Narrative Film with $31.74M and Short Film with $16.68M. Over 3,000 short films and over 5,000 feature-length films have been successfully funded since 2009.

According to Kickstarter’s stats page, Film is the first category to top $100M in pledges. Games are the next most-pledged category with $86.77M, and Design comes in third with $63.18M.

A few months ago, Kickstarter declared 2012 the “Year of the Game,” as more money was currently pledged for Games than any other type of project on the site. But if 2012 was a big year for indie games (which it was), the entire Kickstarter experiment has been all about indie films.

Kickstarter has some cool stats about the impact of its successfully funded films. For instance, 86 of the funded films have been released theatrically with 14 coming in 2013. Kickstarter-funded films have snatched up 21 awards at festivals like Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca.

And five different documentaries are on the Oscars shortlist this year, including this one called The Waiting Room.

“This would be a very impressive track record for an established studio or production company. To see these results come from outside the system in such a short time is even more inspiring. Filmmakers and audiences have come together on Kickstarter to make the movies they want to see while protecting the filmmaker’s vision for their work,” says Kickstarter.

in the first month, UK-based projects saw £2,069,164 in funding across 45,799 individual backers. 407 total projects have been launched since Halloween, and 30 of them have been successfully funded.

“Of the 400 projects that have launched, 30 have already been successfully funded and many more are on their way. A public art project called the Chime Pavilion was the first successfully funded project, with triple its funding goal. The very first project to launch, a hardware project called Picade, was successfully funded with £74,000 pledged — double its funding goal,” says Kickstarter.

Funding for these UK-based projects has been global. While 78% of backers for US projects come from the US, only 39% of backers for UK projects come from the UK.

Back when Kickstarter opened up to UK creators, company co-founder Yancey Strickler hinted that more international expansion may be based on the success of the UK launch.

“The request to expand internationally has long been one of our most requested features. We certainly are interested. We’re going to see how the UK launch goes and figure out the next moves from there. There’s a lot of places that will be interesting,” he said.

After the first month, it looks like Kickstarter is calling the UK expansion a success. They note that the over £2 million in pledges is “amazing” and that they are “thrilled by [creators] success.”

There are plenty of just-launched projects from the UK, including places like London, Belfast, Liverpool, Leeds, Edinburgh, and Cardiff. Kickstarter gave UK residents the option to start building their products about three weeks ago.

If you remember, Kickstarter added a streamlined international shipping option for both U.S. and U.K. projects earlier this month. They also explained that projects from each location will work pretty much the same, with one little change: payments.

“The mechanics of Kickstarter (all-or-nothing funding, rewards, etc.) are identical for US and UK projects. When pledging, however, backers of UK projects will enter their payment information directly on Kickstarter rather than through Amazon Payments. All pledges will be processed securely through a third-party payments processor,” they said.

And the UK may not be the only expansion we see. In an interview with the BBC, Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler said that the company was definitely looking at other countries.

“The request to expand internationally has long been one of our most requested features,” he said. “We certainly are interested. We’re going to see how the UK launch goes and figure out the next moves from there. There’s a lot of places that will be interesting.”

Stay tuned.

On October 31st, people in the UK will be able to launch their projects on the site. Kickstarter is announcing this three weeks in advance in order to give creators what they feel is “plenty of time to build and tweak” their projects. Starting today, UK users can begin to build their projects by heading to the Kickstarter Start page.

All UK-based projects will reside among the rest of the Kickstarter projects – as in there will not be a separate site for UK users.

According to Kickstarter, payments will work a bit differently in the UK:

“The mechanics of Kickstarter (all-or-nothing funding, rewards, etc.) are identical for US and UK projects. When pledging, however, backers of UK projects will enter their payment information directly on Kickstarter rather than through Amazon Payments. All pledges will be processed securely through a third-party payments processor”

One last thing as part of this announcement: Kickstarter has added a streamlined international shipping option for both U.S. and UK projects, which they hope will make it clearer when creators need backers to tack on a little extra to their pledge for international shipping costs. Creators can also cut off rewards to international backers if they please.

Last month, Kickstarter made a pretty big change to the way creators display their projects, banning simulations and forcing them to outline all risks associated with backing them.

So, UK-based project-creators, get to building! Kickstarter says that they will send you an email when your project is ready to officially launch on October 31st, just in case you happen to forget.