"It's a platform for creating widgets for the mobile web". Platforms don't make money. A platform is not a business.<p>"We don't really know what widgets are." Following on the point above, you're creating a platform (a non-specific, generic "thingy") for creating widgets (non-specific, generic "thingies") for the mobile web (something that's not even really defined properly yet. Non-specific businesses are almost without exception failures. Only huge businesses like Sun and Microsoft and Amazon can afford to release "platforms" without going broke.<p>Here's the most valuable advice you can get at this point if you want to build a start-up (that's a <i>business</i>, meaning it needs a path to making money) is:<p>Find one or two specific customers who have a need that this fills, and fill it, and get them to pay for it. Specific wins the day.<p>Since you've built a platform, you may well have to go one step closer to customers before you can help them. Design an application that people will be willing to pay for, using your (admittedly very cool) platform. Then, once you have your app and you have profits, over time you might want to open up the platform to other people.<p>Repeat once more: a business is an entity that makes money. A platform is not a business.
I agree with most folks that it does really solve a problem, but in an effort to try and be constructive, one potential problem are forms on mobile devices. It is very difficult to port web applications or forms to mobile platforms because the display area is so small. Creating a conversational interface via chat might be a good angle to creating usable, yet complex, forms on mobile devices.<p>One good example might be ordering a pizza at a party. It is loud and you don't know the address. You can start texting a pizza place your order and let some other aspect of the application handle the GPS position.<p>Anyway, it looks like you guys have been doing a good job so if this idea makes you millions or something feel free to send an email or something ;)<p><a href="http://ionrock.org" rel="nofollow">http://ionrock.org</a>
I think this is actually really cool. I agree with the other commenters that you're probably a long way from this being a "startup" (at least in the post-Oct2008 world that would like to see some business model), but you are certainly doing some interesting things.<p>How you turn this into a business is another problem but I think you will probably see people picking up on the ideas here and rapidly creating their own innovations. That might seem like a bad thing, but I think it's good because it means you've come up with something very powerful.<p>Probably the most interesting thing to me is the subset / scripting language that makes interacting with various services and providing the backend infrastructure for performing that automation.<p>Good luck!
What's the technical underpinnings of the stateful stuff? Is it more than multithreading? Ruby specific? Seems neat, but hard to tell if it will really be useful (in possibly the same vein as javascript-based "OS in a browser"s). Can you come up with a killer app? Or reproduce a well known mashup with very few lines of your own code?<p>On the backend, you'll definitely need sophisticated monitoring/resource allocation stuff once you have users, right?
Looks very interesting and promising. I'm not sure if I have much use for it just yet but I think I would be easily convinced after seeing more examples of useful apps. I also like the domain name and applaud you both on the immense amount of work I'm sure it took to make the product.
Very nice, but can you skip the first step? You have to send "ping" first?<p>If I use a service multiple times, I would already know what input the app needed. For example, "Weather NY".
I don't have time to watch videos, sorry.<p>Meaning: I'll happily take a look at your site, and have many times in the past here. What I don't want to do is sit through a video that I can't jump around, explore, and so on, like I might with a site, or a brief article.
You've made a kind of Automator software (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_</a>(software)) for the web. This is pretty nifty! With more integration with services it could actually be pretty useful.<p>Don't know how you can make money though :(