I saw Newsblur quite some time back, maybe in 2011 when I decided to move myself off Reader. It didn't look like anything I wanted: so many frames!
Reader itself had a whole bunch of stuff which got in the way. One time I tried mocking it up with most of that stuff gone and I liked what I found. That's the sort of ideal I went for with my own thing: enough of a bar so people know it's a feed reader and not some scuzzy content thievery site (since they arrive when they see it in their referrer logs), and a way to flip through the posts.
The Kickstarter was an attempt to try something really "out there" for me and see if it would work. It looks like it will not.
The nice thing about NewsBlur is that it exposes the API so that, if you want, you can make a completely new front end for it. This is what I did: http://www.altfeedreader.com/
NewsBlur is also YC S12. I can't say I've tried them all to compare fairly, but I'm quite pleased with NewsBlur for my feed-reading needs. Samuel Clay has been quite responsive to the few GitHub issues I've filed, too.
API: http://www.newsblur.com/api
Open Source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.