RailsRumble Apps that Deserve to Be Startups

These are all remarkable, but the one that really gets my imagination going is #7 - Straightlist. If they can implement embeddable widgets that can be put into blogs and forums I can see the site picking up a lot of steam, and once they start keeping track of hits on each page the site has the potential to become a reddit for guides

Oops, they actually already do have the integration widget via an iframe link. Missed that around the first time.

LowDown, Straightlist, SmackSale and CelebrityPassage sound like names of porn sites.

The quality was much higher this year. I think teams are really learning how to compete, and it's getting a lot harder to win.

Hurl looks cool:

http://ozmm.org/posts/hurl_preview.html

Kind of like a web-based version of HTTP Client: http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/

yep, one of the few sinatra apps by one of the github guys. very cool.

I actually did my app in merb, i think i might be the only one

My team made slidechop: http://slidechop.com

Try it out! :)

Caution: hi.im needs input filtering. See http://hi.im/kentbrew for insta-sploit.

Our team built http://pocketsapp.com. Pockets is visual voicemail for twitter. Pick a user, and we'll call you and record a voicemail. They get an @reply with a link to the voicemail (and any others left for them).

All feedback appreciated!

Hey, really nice job on pocketsapp. How did you do the phone interface? Is there a good resource for learning that tech?

Thanks!

Thanks! We used Twilio for the telephony piece. They have excellent docs with everything you need to get going. Check 'em out.

There are some polished looking projects there, how did they ensure that all of the work was done in 48 hours?

they monitor the github repositories. relatively easy to find people who blatantly cheat by doing implementation beforehand

there's no restriction on paper planning so i'm guessing the top sites probably spent weeks on design and specing. whether or not they created photoshop comps probably doesnt matter

No digital assets could be created beforehand, so they better not have made anything in Photoshop 'cause I worked my ass off to get our landing page in and I'd be pissed! ;)

Yeah, they monitor your repo during the competition. You're only allowed to create paper assets before the competition begins. You can see our paper mock (for smacksale.com) by clicking the robot in the footer or here http://smacksale.com/images/sketch.jpg

I was really happy with where we were with ours:

http://mocksup.r09.railsrumble.com/

Until a couple last minute changes by me unknowingly broke our main feature, which is adding links to mockups. Dammit.

But, it was really fun and a great way to get started on an app idea.

Cool. Yeah, I had some trouble using the mockup tool. The landing page is awesome though. Are you guys planning to launch as a startup fully? Here's a domain suggestion: http://domai.nr/mocksup/with/mock.su :-)

> Cool. Yeah, I had some trouble using the mockup tool. The landing page is awesome though.

Thanks man. Yeah, it would still have been crippled (couldn't update or delete links once you'd made them -- I went down a rabbit hole all Sunday morning w/ a couple of jQuery plugins that didn't work out) but adding them would have at least worked correctly.

I actually grabbed mocksup.com a couple of months ago, so this week once we iron out the big bugs we'll be pushing it to there.

Simple apache config and you can get it pointed to your linode. You should get that set up

I haven't gotten a chance to actually use the app yet, but clicking around, I have to say that the app is just gorgeous.

I look very forward to using this.

Hopefully the Rumble organizers drop Rails from the competition next year. At this point it no longer makes sense. If Django, PHP, or Java folks want to enter, they should be allowed. It would say a lot more for whatever language/framework the winners of the competition used.

It might be too large to support all the judging & infrastructure (hosting, etc). However, if they could, I agree it would be awesome!

Hi, I'm one of the organizers. Any Rack-based framework was allowed this year (keeping it Ruby-specific). We're looking to do a more framework/language-agnostic event in the very near future, leveraging a lot of the infrastructure / services we've already built. Stay tuned :). Of course, we'll keep doing Ruby/Rails Rumbles too. <3 community.

I built http://www.sharelocally.org/ for RailsRumble (solo), which I plan to open-source. Anyone interested in the concept? I've got a lot more planned I didn't fit in. This was my first rumble and learned a whole lot about exactly how much fits in 48 hours. Can't wait until next year's.

Looks great!

And I think the "space" (sharing stuff/ re-thinking owning/renting) needs a lot of attention.

* https://neighborgoods.net/ Neighborgoods is currently in private beta right now. They seem to be a social site centered on finding people to borrow/loan/rent stuff in your immediate area for free/small fees. Hopefully they will have an API, and projects like yours could benefit. spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it.

* For a Yahoo! Hack day project, somebody took the Yahoo! Mail API to make Freecycle data available "on the outside." It looks like this was done only as proof-of-concept, and since each Freecycle community is its own list, this might be hard, but I think there is a LOT to gained by scraping the goods out of there.

* Maybe take the eBay reputation data out via API, and display in your system?

A related idea is being done

It's actually really exciting that neighborgoods exists. Do you have any idea how they're planning on monetizing? I did this as a weekend project and am considering open sourcing because it doesn't really seem like there's a demographic that's clamoring to pay. I guess maybe small brick-and-mortar businesses might want hyperlocal targeting, maybe.

As far as reputation system, instead of pulling eBay's reputation data, I was hoping to build a sharing-borrowing reputation system. I don't have any reason to think that being a good eBay seller/buyer would make someone a timely and careful borrower/lender.

"Stuff lending" seems like the sort of thing us internet folks could help with, though, which is why I built ShareLocally.

Do you know where the beta of NeighborGoods is starting?

I know just a little about Neighborgoods. @mickipedia (twitter id) is the founder, she's based in Los Angeles, and even before starting this site, she's been interested in the environment for a bit. I don't know her personally, but she seems constructive and smart and funny.

As for monetizing it, since their system will/does support renting/loaning between people, I imagine they can take a cut of that? Maybe membership? (Now i'm just guessing)

I in no way mentioned Neighborgoods as a reason you should stop working on your project, but rather something to validate it! (Yep, I'm one of those polyanna's... :D)

I really do think you should open source it though, or at least big chunks of it, even if you do a hosted service. (I can save the reasons for this for another time.)

As for eBay rep, I don't think it should replace an internal reputation system, but especially in the early goings, what could it hurt? And not just eBay, selective data from as many 3rd party places as possible. Even a Twitter account that's more than 6 months old could make some people (like me) more comfortable loaning certain kinds of things.

And man... I think there's so much wasted cycles on sites like Freecycle and Craigslist free section... basically there is no item "management." Even when stuff is free, so many inquiries on stuff that's gone, or redundant follow-up letters to tell people it's taken, etc. I know your system is a different use-case than give-aways, but I see an overlap in need and purpose, and stuff + relationship management is applicable to multiple situations (and similar demographics of people who like to be resourceful).

As for beta of NeighborGoods, I have an invite for you. I will hit you up on the email I found in your profile.

(oh man, too late for me to edit, pretend this line, "spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it." and this line, "A related idea is being done" are erased. Sloppy me!

We built http://howsmycode.com -- We didn't get time to finish the "marketing side", and a couple of big features didn't make it either (we were too ambitious, I think), but we're still happy with the result. And we plan to continue work on it :)

Man, http://stomachly.com got a mention. Thanks!

Stomachly is awesome! Great design, even better tagline! Nice work!

RailsRumble needs a prize for most hilarious app. We should lobby for that next year.

This year, stomachly wins.

Had a lot of fun putting this together and I'm thrilled everyone's enjoying the site!

Still reeling from the weekend; my first Rumble.

We also got an app built and deployed, a simple little game: http://marryboffkill.com

The whole time I expected that it would be the smoothing-over of rough edges, double-checking, and doing general "cleanup" that would take the most time, but even so was surprised how quickly the deadline snuck up on us the last day.

I have a feeling if the rumble was over a long weekend instead we would have been able to clean up all the rough edges, but I have a feeling there are many other teams in this boat as well. :-)

Was definitely a great way to spend a weekend (creating something) with friends and a real learning experience. I'm already excited to do it again next year.

Heh, your app is pretty hilarious. It definitely needs a gender section though. Since 99% of the users will be male for the time being, maybe you should have made it female only list.

Having to think about boffing Salman Ruschdie was too terrifying to continue playing.

I'd like to mention http://give-a-box.r09.railsrumble.com/ The idea is pretty cool -- organize boxes all around the world with things to give away packaged in nice little topics of their own.

What? No ZenVDN? http://zenvdn.com

Seems startup worthy to me.

I'm happy with how my entry AffiliApp turned out -http://affiliapp.com. It let's web app developers instantly create an affiliate program for their app.

I love the design for http://omnominator.com/. How do they get their inputs to be slanty? A quick peek at the CSS didn't reveal much.

  -moz-transform: rotate(6deg);
  [...]
  -webkit-transform: rotate(4deg);
  [...]
  transform: rotate(4deg);

http://webkit.org/blog/130/css-transforms/

https://developer.mozilla.org/web-tech/2008/09/12/css-transf...

Our team made "Diversion" - http://diversion.r09.railsrumble.com/

We want to bring to normal human beings the cool things that Git and Github bring to developers! Instead of collaborating like you would on a wiki, you "divert" (fork) other people's work, so that both can keep working on their documents and grab each other changes.

You can see the history of everybody's documents, the past and the possible futures, who grabbed from whom, etc... And it works!

Your app is awesome. Nice job!

Me and a friend created Snapshare. The design part took up way to much time for us since we are both hardcore coders, we will be bringing a dedicated designer on the team next year. It was loads of fun though and we created a good codebase to build upon.

Read about our product on http://weblog.brightlight-ict.nl/2009/08/we-are-not-trying-t....

Stay tuned throughout the week, peoples. Our expert panel has just started qualifying applications and the homepage will soon be updated to reflect the apps that are in-the-running for the top spots.

Later this week, Thursday if all goes well, we'll use the expert panel advice to whittle the list down to a top tier and open up public judging to decide the winner. I hope everyone here will want to participate!

Winners will be announced next weekend.

Our team built http://loanit.to as our entry. It allows you to track things you've let friends borrow. Some great potential for Amazon affiliate integration.

Very impressed with the quality of the apps this year. Some awesome ideas! It's going to take days to go through them all!

lazeroids.com is all javascript + canvas. not flash.

My team built http://operatorapp.com/

It's only open for a demo at the moment. We don't have an easy way for people to set up their own accounts because it has to go through twilio. We plan to keep working on it after the competition is over.

There really are some great entries this year. I particularly like the implementation for "Hi, I'm" and "Table Surfing". This is our effort: http://decafsucks.com/. A site for finding and review cafés.

I've created a table at TableSurfing! Anyone in Pittsburgh that wants to show up, here you go:

http://tablesurfing.com/tables/double-wide-get-together

Best website idea ever.

Official judging starts today, with public voting on apps at the end of the week.

Thanks a ton for the props on Lowdown! After the rumble we plan on doing a lot more with it. If you're interested, give us a follow on twitter @lowdownapp to stay on top of what we have planned. Peace.

Some applications are really amazing!.

This year I came with http://www.planettoaster.com and this week end was really intense (doing solo).

I created http://www.triptrackerapp.com as a solo project - let me know what you think!

Voting is now available on the top 22 apps. http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries

What is annoying you? http://annoying-us.r09.railsrumble.com

Our entry: http://ideabitbucket.com

My entry is http://twitabrew.com