Years ago, I worked for a company that developed color matching, formulation, correction, and quality control software for the textile industry. Before you could create a formula or correction with our software, you had to first know what color you were trying to match (and what color you had created, for doing corrections). Spectrophotometers costing thousands of dollars were required to read the colors. They weren’t portable, so you had to be able to bring your desired color to the spectrophotometer – hard to do when you wanted to match a the color of a car or a painted wall, for example. The Nix Color Sensor, an active Kickstarter project, is a tiny device that scans the color and sends color information via Bluetooth to an app on your iOS or Android phone. You can simply save these scanned colors as a collection of your favorite colors, or you can view the color in RGB, HSL, HSV, Lab, XYZ, HTML, or CMYK color space nomenclature, and you can even have the app look up a close match in paints, wood stains, makeup, etc, from established companies. It can even direct you to a store where you can purchase the color in your desired medium. A pledge of $99 (Canadian) gets you a Nix. The funding period ends Wednesday Oct 16, 10:33am EDT, with shipping expected in February 2014. (You might want to read the risks and challenges section, too.)
