You should turn the "s" in Ducksboard into a duck (logo); if not, people like me will keep forgetting that the letter is there and remember it as "Duckboard".
It's probably the easiest character to draw as a duck, so it's not going to be a big problem. :)
Yes, both are dashboards for online metrics, so they will necessarily be similar.
We believe that our product puts the accents in different places. Two things we put much emphasis on are user interface and true realtime updates. We spent a lot of effort polishing the UI and making sure it's consistent and informative, we're using websockets to deliver updates as soon as our backend gets them.
Check out the demos for both of them and pick the one that pleases you more.
I like that your board is real-time. Geckoboard requires an upgraded subscription to improve update speed. Will real-time be a feature on all plans of ducksboard?
It's definitely going to be included in all plans.
To expand on that, we do real real-time. For services that provide real-time updates, like Twitter, you get notification in the exact same moment someone retweeted you or followed you. For custom widgets where you provide your data, it's the same. Your system pushes data to the dashboard and your dashboard shows it instantly. For services you need to repeatedly poll, we're doing as many API requests as their limits allow us.
What are the main things that differentiate you from similar products like Geckoboard? Also it'd be pretty cool to get a list of all the widgets that you currently have.
* real time and continuous (even when the user is not connected) data retrieval.
* a very polished UI.
* mail reports and XLS and other formats exports in a near future.
IMO you may want to re-think emphasizing "a very polished UI", currently Geckoboard's UI is much more "polished"[1]. Instead, play up the tangible benefits over Geckoboard (realtime, data export).
First, we caught bugs (not even regressions) just by writing tests. More importantly, many time when we left code without tests, we found a bug in it later. We're not 100% sure it's been a good investment, but we're 90% sure.
Second, because it wasn't that hard. With the tools available, writing tests that cover all of your code is not too painful.
Third, in private beta we're sure we'll have to change things as we face scaling problems and get failure reports. We wanted to have these tests before we started monkeying around with code.
Thanks. Glad to see cool new services coming from Europe :)
But you should think heavily about differentiating from Geckoboard. For one I would add some kind of Apple / Android appstore metrics. Geckoboard doesn't have those and I would be glad to pay you if you did.
This looks awesome. I rarely sign up for Show HN's but I just signed up for yours. I run a startup and it's inconvenient to hunt and peck between Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, etc to find this info. Good idea to bring it all together. Nice design too. Good luck with it.
Thanks, we'll try to get you an invite as soon as possible but we're still in the "too embarassed to show it to anyone else than close friends" stage :)
Thank you! Still, we are a real-time platform, where you can build a real-time dashboard like Gecko or Ducks but it also adds collaboration to all this data in the system. We believe that collaboration systems shouldn't add a new data silo to the business, so you get all this data into Streamer, and can create real-time widgets to transform data into information or Vertical Streams where users can collaborate (like, comment, share). Also, we dont follow a format, any developer with knowledge about APIs, and Highcharts can build whatever they want (they dont need to follow our format). It's 100% node.js, socket.io and MongoDB and its a 100% real-time environment. We are very proud of what we have built, and although we may be on the same space, its a different target! Congrats on Geckoboard. Well done.
Short answer: we're ashamed (if you're not ashamed of what you launched, you launched it late) :)
Long answer: we're inviting close friends first, expanding to people that signed up back when we launched the first teaser and then the rest. As soon as we see how well does it scale, we'll start sprinkling invite codes on HN.
It's probably the easiest character to draw as a duck, so it's not going to be a big problem. :)