Rails Rumble 2009 (railsrumble.com) ended this weekend. Since I'm a contestant (alertme.tv), I've been able to browse all the 157 teams who were able to get deployed. Here's an sneak peek at 11 amazing entries that I think could easily be successful as startups if they are given a chance after the competition ends. All of these apps were built by a team in 48 hours.<p>#1 LowDown - http://mcp.r09.railsrumble.com
If you are into cucumber (cukes.info), you'll love this app. It enables you to build specs, and share them them with your clients before implementation. Amazing interface, and huge SaaS potential. I would for this pay right now.<p>#2 Hi, I'm - http://hi.im
Cool way to build a landing page for yourself. This is what google profiles should be. Landing page urls look like http://hi.im/jacques<p>#3 Omnominator - http://omnominator.com
Cute & useful site to choose restaurants among groups. This would be huge as a google wave widget, or integrated into an existing communications platform. The site is incredibly useful on its own though.<p>#4 Thingivore - http://thingivore.com
If you've used delicious library on the mac, this is basically the web version of that. Insanely nice ui and interactivity. This app could make a fortune off amazon's affiliate program.<p>#5 Neighborhood Watch - http://neighborhoodwat.ch
A new peer 2 peer way to monitor web site uptime. You install it on your server and everyone checks everyones websites. Tons of additional data and alerts you could with all the additional servers checking up on you.<p>#6 Techmeets - http://techmeets.com
Nice looking alternative to meetup.com - focused on technical meetups. Crowded market, but this is a decent niche and easy its especially easy to monetize developer eyeballs (job boards, dev tools, etc).<p>#7 Straightlist - http://husohuso.r09.railsrumble.com
Allows you to post and browse installation / deployment steps. Every linux blog on the planet could integrate with this site. Some sort of simple website integration widget is needed.<p>#8 SmackSale - http://smacksale.com
Reddit like tool for tech bargains. Lots of sites already like this, but this one is nicely built and could easily compete among the others. Obvious affiliate potential if they can get traffic.<p>#9 Nybbl - http://nybblme.r09.railsrumble.com
A way to publish small bits of knowledge, with micropayments. Any good hacker comes up with tidbits of useful knowledge every week that he runs across. This could be a neat way to try to monetize that knowledge by getting paid subscribers to these tidbits.<p>#10 Last Percent - http://lastpercent.com
Nice and simple tool to check a website. Looks for broken image links, html validation errors, and css errors. Every developer should use something like this.<p>#11 Table Surfing - http://tablesurfing.com
Cool way to meet new people by setting up dinners with strangers. Would be tough to get enough people on the site to make it useful for finding random dinners, but the site's well designed and looks like it would work well just using it amongst friends<p>Some awesomely ridiculous apps that deserve mention:
- lazeroids.com (online massively multiplayer asteroids). Seriously.<p>- stomachly.com (restaurant ratings based on bowels)<p>- celebritypassage.com (tribute site to dead celebs)
Hurl looks cool:<p><a href="http://ozmm.org/posts/hurl_preview.html" rel="nofollow">http://ozmm.org/posts/hurl_preview.html</a><p>Kind of like a web-based version of HTTP Client:
<a href="http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/" rel="nofollow">http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/</a>
Our team built <a href="http://pocketsapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://pocketsapp.com</a>. 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).<p>All feedback appreciated!
I was really happy with where we were with ours:<p><a href="http://mocksup.r09.railsrumble.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mocksup.r09.railsrumble.com/</a><p>Until a couple last minute changes by me unknowingly broke our main feature, which is adding links to mockups. Dammit.<p>But, it was really fun and a great way to get started on an app idea.
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.
I built <a href="http://www.sharelocally.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sharelocally.org/</a> 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.
We built <a href="http://howsmycode.com" rel="nofollow">http://howsmycode.com</a> -- 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 :)
Still reeling from the weekend; my first Rumble.<p>We also got an app built and deployed, a simple little game: <a href="http://marryboffkill.com" rel="nofollow">http://marryboffkill.com</a><p>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.<p>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. :-)<p>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.
I'd like to mention <a href="http://give-a-box.r09.railsrumble.com/" rel="nofollow">http://give-a-box.r09.railsrumble.com/</a> The idea is pretty cool -- organize boxes all around the world with things to give away packaged in nice little topics of their own.
I'm happy with how my entry AffiliApp turned out -<a href="http://affiliapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://affiliapp.com</a>. It let's web app developers instantly create an affiliate program for their app.
I love the design for <a href="http://omnominator.com/" rel="nofollow">http://omnominator.com/</a>. How do they get their inputs to be slanty? A quick peek at the CSS didn't reveal much.
Our team made "Diversion" - <a href="http://diversion.r09.railsrumble.com/" rel="nofollow">http://diversion.r09.railsrumble.com/</a><p>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.<p>You can see the history of everybody's documents, the past and the possible futures, who grabbed from whom, etc... And it works!
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.<p>Read about our product on <a href="http://weblog.brightlight-ict.nl/2009/08/we-are-not-trying-to-be-flickr-or-picassa/" rel="nofollow">http://weblog.brightlight-ict.nl/2009/08/we-are-not-trying-t...</a>.
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.<p>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!<p>Winners will be announced next weekend.
Our team built <a href="http://loanit.to" rel="nofollow">http://loanit.to</a> as our entry. It allows you to track things you've let friends borrow. Some great potential for Amazon affiliate integration.<p>Very impressed with the quality of the apps this year. Some awesome ideas! It's going to take days to go through them all!
My team built <a href="http://operatorapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://operatorapp.com/</a><p>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: <a href="http://decafsucks.com/" rel="nofollow">http://decafsucks.com/</a>. 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:<p><a href="http://tablesurfing.com/tables/double-wide-get-together" rel="nofollow">http://tablesurfing.com/tables/double-wide-get-together</a><p>Best website idea ever.
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!.<p>This year I came with <a href="http://www.planettoaster.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.planettoaster.com</a> and this week end was really intense (doing solo).