(Just posted on HN) my new (ad)venture http://songsasaservice.com the idea is every week people submit suggestions for a song subject (and a bid) and within one week the winning bidder will receive an original song written on the subject. The idea is based on a little 10 week challenge I set myself earlier in the year. This time I thought I'd try and generate some revenue of it :) and use it as an opportunity to create the most minimal MVP ever, whilst simultaneously learning a minimum about python/ appengine and using existing web services to minimise my workload (e.g. Gumroad, soundcloud, appengine, bootstrap). Hope you like it?
thanks! It's just me. Would love it people contributed ideas (appropriate ones obviously :) I've had to clear out a lot of inappropriate submissions since posting on HN
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.
I tried Hittail a year ago, and didn't quite work for me. I ended up writing a few scripts myself.
But I heard in Rob's latest podcast that Hittail is growing 30% per month.
Don't bet too heavily on this...HitTail is having a rough time with Google's (very slow but incremental) roll-out of removing the search phrase from the inbound referrer headers...
Not really a start-up, but some things I've been working on, mostly in an attempt to get in the habit of shipping stuff opposed to writing.
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.
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.
I'm working a nights/weekend startup that positively conflicts with the subject matter: a better kiteboarding forecast service/app. http://kitecaster.com The idea is to model how kiteable a spot is based on the location, your schedule/equipment, and of course the weather. Prototype is going slow, kiteboarding gets in the way! And I am enjoying doing the full stack using the tech I want (node, Parse, etc) when I should outsource some things, but we're looking good for 2013!
http://offensivest.com/books/ ranks the most vulgar English books. The books are from a DVD released by Project Gutenberg. The offensiveness scores for individual words and word phrases come from votes cast by visitors to The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com/).
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.
I made AppLens (formely AppSnap) a iphone app that lets you install any other iphone app by taking a picture of its icon (on other phones or laptop screens or anything else).
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).
I've been some time developing a solution for most of us. It's a website called Parkuik that will use a wiki-like environment to make us easier to find parkings (some of you may have had this problem on your city :-P) with the help of all of us.
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 :)
Thanks! Us too – it's something that we feel just hasn't been executed in the right way yet.
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.
I like your approach: test the market without taking risks, and learn on how locals handle it themselves.
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.
I'm working on Scribe, web-based sheet music notation software for songwriters and composers. Right now the public-facing URL is just a landing page, but if you ping me (contact info in profile) I'd be happy to give you access to the prototype.
Experiment on making a browser/android-based MMO using GWT to offload a lot of heavy processing to the client (and save on those pricey cloud cpu charges)
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!
Been involved in CityBikes[1] for a while, both an Android app to find stations on public bike schemes, and an API[2] that homogenizes and provides the same information for projects, applications and statistical research.
In pursuit of a casual passive income generator, I've been working on a meme creator. It uses HTML5 canvas rather than Flash. I'm only a weekend or so into it, but would appreciate any constructive feedback.
I recently shipped WOPR, a subtractive polyphonic synthesizer with an embedded Game of Life grid. The GoL modulates the various parameters in time with an internal (or now, external) clock. It's for iPad 2 and up. I started it a year ago to learn a bit more about iOS and DSP. It had 9 months of sporadic evening & weekend development over a very busy year, with a 3 month hiatus over the summer.
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.
A kind of Google Now for Movies. Instead of searching for movies, new releases automatically land in your inbox once available as stream and you just need to sort them into "Want-watch", "Saw-and-liked", "Saw-and-disliked" or "Dismiss" folders (for later auto-sorting).
A beta version is available at http://exkino.de for all you native German speaker and learner.
72 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIt'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.
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.
A mobile friendly web app for monitoring and helping to manage heroku apps.
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.
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.
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).
http://bit.ly/Szmy7X
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 :)
http://farmly.net/
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.
http://scribeapp.com
http://www.gloopsh.com/
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!
[1]: http://www.citybik.es
[2]: http://api.citybik.es
http://mememachin.es
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.
http://www.omnivoresoft.com