Share your weekend/part-time startup (December 2012)
Tell us about your ventures!
It's had pretty decent reception so far. Beer money only, but enough that I could have a few every day if I wanted to! It's done better than I ever thought it would; I think because no musician can ever resist another synth.
Subsequent versions will increase in price as more features are added. Right now I'm working on a huge v1.2 upgrade with a ton of stuff people have requested.
It's a free app + ads, most of its users are from china and japan.
Money-wise definitely not an hit!
I spent quite a bit on time to develop the backend part (in C) and optimized it to query 3mil icons in few ms on a commodity server (cheap).
1. Kill long meetings (http://killlongmeetings.com/). Counts the time and calculates the money you're spending in a meeting.
2. Where to pee in Antwerp (http://antwerp-wheretopee.apphb.com/). The city of Antwerp (Belgium) has opened up some of its data. This mobile web app get all the toilets in Antwerp and sorts them by distance. Shows that the browser is already capable of running these sort of apps; beats building 3 native apps.
3. Culture in Antwerp (http://antwerp-culture.apphb.com/). Also for the city of Antwerp. This is just a POC which should show that their current site (http://www.antwerpen.be/eCache/ABE/80/34/031.html) is visually very unattractive.
It desperately needs an "About" page describing the data and the methodology.
Later, I hope to expand the number of books we analyze and also analyze other forms of media.
Building it "to scratch my own itch" of having something to read on the subway and getting rid of the "infinite streams of news" devices such as the iPad suck you into.
Still pretty alpha, but everyone's welcome and feedback is appreciated :-)
General idea is that each player controls a bunch of soldiers that they can equip and give battle tactics to (flank, use abilities, etc). Battles get auto-resolved with a nice graphical replay (you can check out an early version of that by clicking the bottom right button on the page), so anybody can attack anybody else on the map regardless of whether they're 'online' or not.
Currently coding up a stock exchange based economy for the game so that there are caravans moving between cities for players to raid and generally make the world seem a bit 'alive'.
Obviously a pretty big project to be doing with one guy and part time, but it's surprisingly coming along pretty nicely!
I can just develop it when I have some time on weekends, but it is starting to have some users and I hope sooner than later It'll be one of the reference websites for this :)
You can find it here: http://www.parkuik.com
Hope you can visit it and tell me whatever you think that can be done to improve it :)
1. https://github.com/armhold/ocarina - a Ruby gem for doing simple OCR.
2. http://wordhelper.net/contact - helps you win at Letterpress. Uses my OCR library to find playable words on the board. Have only tested it on an gameboards generated on an iPhone 5.
I created the first project just to see if I could write a simple OCR library (yay, I can!) I created Wordhelper mostly to find a practical use for Ocarina.
It's only a landing page at the moment, working on finishing the MVP within this month.
What I'm trying to build is a SEO tool that analyze your inbound traffic and gives you a list of keywords to target. It'll analyze the keywords and related keywords and check how competitive they are for you, automatically.
Give me lots of feedback please. If anything confuses you, please let me know.
(http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/11/21/bizodo-launches-signupasa...)
Sadly I feel like its become moot, with some rather big players doing that as well. But I might be able to white label it in some fashion.
I made http://tunesicles.com but am sort of re writing it and making it look better and have some more features using MeteorJS to learn in.
For now that one is at: http://tunes.meteor.com
Just a landing page right now for the user, but I have a prototype I'm almost done with that I'll be launching soon. Sign up with your email and I'll invite you when I'm ready if you're interested.
A google maps mash up for backcountry travelers that does things like find avalanche prone slopes by analyzing image maps of elevation in canvas/javascript.
Started it mostly for my own use but it has been getting some traction.
Check it out at http://www.umarkonline.com
Sync your Facebook friends albums to Dropbox
What's your plan on handling distribution?
We're focussing first on creating a platform for local producers & consumers to connect before we tackle distribution. We've got some interesting ideas on the cards though when the time comes. Would be great to hear your thoughts on it.
Can't think on a better way of doing it. Distribution can kill your idea. At the same time, it's the best selling point of it. If users are buying through the website, they expect a quality deliver, which is not always easy to get, and is expensive too.
On a sidenote: let sellers express themselves. I would not buy groceries from a craigslist-sort site. I would if I can see photos, location, and know more about the product and the business ethics of the seller.
For sure – something we really want to emphasise is the people behind the produce, their story and what makes the things they sell so good.
A mobile friendly web app for monitoring and helping to manage heroku apps.