Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse | Hacker News Reader

Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse

techcrunch.com

32 pointssheats36 comments

TipJoy: "$1299.05 from 479 people" I think it's safe to say that perhaps this application might be breaking TipJoy into the mainstream (e.g. hurricane-news-hungry public).

Yeah, we're delighted by the community's response to Tipjoy. I think one reason they are doing well is the blog post about it: http://stormpulse.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/like-stormpulse-l...

But I should mentioned that you'd need to add at least 3 zeros to that total amount to consider Tipjoy close to mainstream.

Gosh, I remember providing feedback for this site way back when. It's been much improved. Clearly stormpulse is a labor of love and hard work. Congrats.

Check and see what advice they ended up taking:-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29516

Oh vey, I see I was as impolite 443 days ago as I am today. But I didn't say it was a bad idea, it just is not something that is relevant to me.

Smart of them to give the interface a 24 type look. I think I'll dub it the SutherFace.

Everyone using it, in the back of their mind, will think they have access to the whole world, even if it's only displaying the weather.

I've actually never seen an episode. :-)

Nice work, both on getting techcrunched and on contining work on the site. And I see the site is popular, I wouldn't have thought it, considering the limited demographic.

Anyways, congrats and do milk the techcrunch traffic!

I grew up in South Florida, so I figured it would be popular down here. But we are blown away lately by the amount of nation-wide and international interest. TV stations in Washington state have hurricane coverage. Who'd have thought that?

People love emergencies (meaning that everyone wants to watch and see if this will be another Katrina). It's kinda sad, but national emergencies get great ratings - everyone wants to know what's happening, especially considering Katrina and the recent devastation.

The hurricanes are covered quite thoroughly in Canada too (including live coverage). I don't think it's sad though since it's something that can directly affect millions of people and can indirectly affect 10s of millions more (fuel prices, travel, relatives). Events on that scale deserve wide-spread coverage.

One aspect that could be considered sad is the relatively low amount of air time international emergencies receive, even ones that are much larger in scale.

..travel plans. The Caribbean and SW U.S. are huge tourist destinations of course.

You probably don't live in hurricane country. When there is a storm bearing down it's the most important thing in the world to potentially millions of people. One of our local papers teamed up with these guys and were linking them quite a bit (perhaps in a frame, I don't remember) when Fay was coming our way. It's a handy site.

So perhaps a limited demographic, but hurricanes are huge news a few times a year and as such get a lot of mindshare.

You know, there's probably an idea in there.

The stormpulse guys could perhaps build a widget that news & nedia sites could embed into their stories so there is instant tracking for each storm right there on the page.

We have that. That's actually how we 'got big' (although we're still very small compared to the NHC, CNN, etc.).

http://stormpulse.wordpress.com/stormpulse-api/

Nice, that's probably what the St Pete Times was using when I first saw you guys.

awesome work guys, I admit I only had a very quick skim around the site and couldn't find it.

Not to sound more successful than we are :-), but since it's the kind of thing folks on here might like to know ... if we made it any more visible it would probably not be a good thing at this point.

My brother recently moved to Ft. Myers, Florida, from Oregon. It's kind of weird because all of a sudden hurricanes are not just some event that is on the TV thousands of kilometers from my friends and family. I actually read a bit about them now rather than just sort of glancing and saying "huh... that's going to be a mess".

Very nice site, and in the same industry as my startup...

/begin shameless self promotion/ www.OtherWeather.com /end/

Would love to have reports from people in the path on my site as well.

How did the TC guy get both storms on the same map? Every link I click only ever shows one storm at a time...

I wanna track Ike and Hanna on one map like he did...

That was a bleature, but we could re-introduce something like that down the road (we've gotten a number of requests for it).

Wow, that is crazy cool. Well done.

Thanks. My friend (who is joining the Stormpulse effort) submitted this article but the site was co-founded by myself and another fellow out of Chicago. Just as a bit of background, we started collecting data for this in 2004.

Wow, that's a lot of work. If you don't mind my asking, what's the exit strategy here? Sell/partner with a newscast? Charge for premium data?

All of the above (except selling) have presented themselves as opportunities in the last few weeks.

Blogspam:

http://www.stormpulse.com/

Any comments on why you think you weren't accepted?

I don't know for sure. I imagine there were a number of things not working in our favor. I don't want to suggest anything unfounded, but what I can say for sure is that I wasn't willing to move to Boston/SF (I am happily married with two wonderful children and settled in West Palm Beach, FL).

Also, we did apply late, and rumor has it that late applications aren't treated as thoroughly.

"Not willing to relocate for 3 months" seems to be pretty critical, even more so than single founders.

I would also add that if you aren't re-locating, then you're missing at least 50% of the value of YC (probably more). They'd be doing someone a favor to pass on their company over this question...because the company wouldn't be getting a very good deal. Good investors don't invest when they know they can't provide good value to the company, and YC is a good investor.

Not relocating makes sense, in your case. Not many people in silicon valley care about hurricanes.

Makes me wonder what it would be like for an earthquake startup if NYC were the Valley.

Does this automatically update? I'd love to have it constantly running on a spare computer, just showing storm data.

Yes, although it only runs on our servers, unless we were to share the code. Alternatively, you can start collecting it from the NWS and build your own. :-)

Ah, I meant more as in, if I were to keep stormpulse.com open all the time, would it automatically refresh and update and such?

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