Leftronic (YC S10) turns any startup office into a command center | Hacker News Reader

Leftronic (YC S10) turns any startup office into a command center

xconomy.com

37 pointswaderoush30 comments

Is this substantially different than GeckoBoard?

http://www.geckoboard.com/

Hey Jeff, Rajiv here, one of the founders of Leftronic. Here's how we're different:

* We have a custom push API enables you to update your dashboard in real-time. (And our pull API is going to come out in the next day or two.)

* Our interface is completely vector-based, which makes it work on any browser or screen size. And it's very flexible and configurable, so you can set up your dashboards exactly the way you want!

* We have no restrictions on the amount of data you push to us for custom feeds, nor do we restrict the number of instances of the dashboard you have simultaneously running.

* Our visualizations are minimalistic on purpose, which makes them immensely glanceable.

* Our data connectors pull data from third-party services as fast as their API's allow us to. We're only limited by the other side, not ours.

* We have dashboard templates that get you set up with your dashboards in a single click.

* Our integrations into the various data services are very thorough and robust.

* We have a couple more tricks up our sleeve that I can't mention yet, but stay tuned! ;)

If you have any other questions, I'd love to hear from you so please shoot me an email!

Thanks!

Rajiv

rajiv at leftronic dot com

To expound on the value of their API, I'm non-technical and was able to figure out their API and rig up a pretty fancy dashboard using custom data feeds from one of our vendors in a few hours. It was pretty great being able to actually make something using someone's API that quickly.

I'm pretty sure Geckoboard does push now too. That said Leftronic is clearly better, but also more expensive.

You could also checkout the more recent one at https://my.infocaptor.com

Better visualizations, direct database access, sound alerts and better price (free)

Paul from Geckoboard here. Just to clarify that we offer both a polling and push API.

I think that is one of the things giving us pause is the price.

Yeah, I have absolutely no business use case for this, but I do have a spare 30" Dell in my office and would love to play around with this. I wouldn't pay more than $10 or $15 per month, though.

I think the pricing should be setup more of a way to get you hooked on the crack. You give some crack for free, get addicted, and want more. I think most corporations have a need for many dashboards. So what about two for free and get them addicted, and they want more?

They do have a free plan, which gets you one dashboard and unlimited custom metrics.

Some nits about your encrypted API:

1. The ciphertext is not authenticated. You should MAC it.

2. The plaintext is padded with spaces to be block-aligned. "Hello world" will collide with "Hello world_" when encrypted with the same IV, and both will decrypt as "Hello world_____" (where "_" means a space). Use PKCS#1 or some other standard padding.

https://github.com/sonofabell/leftronic/blob/master/python/l...

Cesar here, I wrote that part of the API package. You are right that we should likely HMAC the ciphertext for added security. I'll definitely explore the padding issue as well. Thank you for your insight on this!

Is this really a pain that companies feel? That they can't visualize or gather critical data into a coherent view? It seems to me that this might be a great thing to have, but companies don't necessarily know this. When you have to explain and pitch to companies why they need your product, I think you're on dangerous waters. A truly good product should have companies seeking you out, because what you're doing makes their lives that much easier, I don't see it for this product.

It's certainly a pain that some companies feel - particularly those with a robust and established data driven culture. With the proliferation of SaaS as a delivery mechanism for software the pain of having to check multiple sources for a coherent view of your business becomes more acute.

As to your broader point, customer education will always be an issue for any novel product but that comes hand-in-hand with an opportunity to precisely frame the problem you're solving and explain the benefits of your product.

I'm biased, but yes, this is a real pain for many companies. I will grant you that not every company that has the visibility problem is aware of our solution, but we will change that. =) And companies are actively seeking us out.

Would love it if you would test-drive our solution and give me your candid thoughts. Email is rajiv at leftronic.

Thanks!

We have one at YC showing HN stats. It has become the focus (= hearth) of the room.

Publishing the URL to a (perhaps several days delayed, or even static data snapshot, but interactive demo) of this could be very powerful marketing for Leftronic.

Also, live demo link on the site leads to a page that is completely black on Safari on iPad.

Would be great if there were more examples of what has been done with the API on the homepage.

They should market this towards manufacturing companies...

Or I could see it doing really well in high performance computing... Setup a dashboard to monitor compute clusters...

I really need to play with this!

Thanks for the feedback, yes, we will include some great case studies in the near future!

I'm Rajiv, by the way, one of the founders. Please shoot me an email (rajiv at leftronic) and I'd love to help you get set up!

We were early adopters of the API, and we still use it to demo integration of Splunk with 3rd party dashboards.

The beauty of the API is that it allows you to display relatively arbitrary data in very compelling ways.

For example, we have access to quite a bit of data at Splunk, from Twitter, server logs, etc. A lot of our customers ask us how they can use the data that is inside Splunk and present it in a 3rd-party dashboard, so we built a demo with Leftronic.

Thanks for the kind words, Itay.

For reference, here's the link that talks about the Splunk + Leftronic integration: http://dev.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAADSR

We used Leftronic at Cloudkick and I think their product idea is pretty cool. I hope they do well.

Thanks Bjorn!

I am not sure why this line is buried deep in information on their site:

"We also offer a Free Forever plan which includes one dashboard and access to Leftronic's custom data API."

This should be the pickup line.

We have a very geography-dependent product (peer-to-peer carsharing) and a ton of disparate data types. I hope we give Leftronic a try because I think it has a lot to offer. Keep it up guys!

Hey Bodhi! We'd definitely appreciate the signup, feel free to reach out to us at support at leftronic dot com if you need any help integrating Leftronic with your product.

Selling the illusion of control to lost managers is a pretty good business plan: it scratches an issue which terribly itches them, and they're paying with someone else's money.

We are looking at using it here at Viralheat.

That's great to hear! Please send an email to rajiv at leftronic or support at leftronic if there's any way I can assist you in the process!

Demoing as we speak. Great product.

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