The last decade has seen the humble little hashtag shoot to meteoric heights of global importance due to the prevalence of Twitter pretty much everywhere. No one saw it coming, and even the hashtag itself doesn’t even know what to make of it. What used to be the lowly pound symbol on a telephone is now a global phenomenon, and what better way to acknowledge that than taking it off its shared space on the keyboard and giving it its own digs?
The HashKey is a USB-connected single key keyboard featuring the star of the show, the hashtag. That’s literally it. The entire thing is all really tongue-in-cheek and charming, and most will pop a smile watching the campaign try to jokingly convince potential backers of the economic impact of the time wasted finding the hashtag. The HashKey is reminiscent of Art Lebedev’s mini keyboards, but where those have OLED displays that are customizable the HashKey is dedicated. In any case, a Bluetooth connection rather than a wired connection for the HashKey would’ve been nice considering its £17 (~$26) price tag. The campaign is looking for £15,000 (~$23,300) to ship out this social media novelty by March 2015.