[cjbprime]

It was funded -- which means that the project owner received the money -- but the actual product wasn't created and delivered to the users who funded it. So, it failed. The NPR article is telling you that things are going horribly wrong sometimes, and PopSockets is an example of that.

[tene]

The point of pointing out the dates is to demonstrate that it has been less than a year, which contradicts the text of the article.

[RandallBrown]

they were saying that it's only been 7 months since it was funded. It's not a year later with no PopSockets.