Contest is a great idea, but doing a contest for a closed beta product is not exactly my piece of pie. Too many hurdles to jump to see if this is going to be what I want to use in the first place.
No word on pricing on your launch page either, except for "buying widgets"
Ooops... I think we have a wrong message in our site: it's not in our plans to sell widgets (or put limitations on the # of them you can use). Probably the word "marketplace" isn't appropriate. Calling it "directory" suits better our intentions.
Also, it's not really a contest. For us is to have fun, play with cutting-edge technology, make interesting things and just hack.
I see your point about pricing, but we can only say at this stage that we are validating the final one and it will be affordable. Hope this helps to explain our view.
A cheapy crappy Android tablet for around $200 can display a webpage like that. Personally, I run my dashboard on a Logitech Revue (Google TV, $99 retail, but mine was free) and my lowest power spare monitor using an HDMI->DVI adapter.
The Logitech box uses ~12 watts of power, which is more than my TonidoPlug (3-7 watts) but is more convenient to connect to a display.
We have plans to make an interface that's less bling-heavy and more power-friendly, but it won't hit production anytime soon.
Another way is to simply write your own visualisation. If you're interested in getting early-alpha-unstable-omg access to the read APIs (HTTP and WebSockets), shoot us an email to hello@ducksboard.com
After poking around little bit, it appears you need to poll for updates. To clarify, when you say "real-time" you mean "changes are reflected quickly" and not "changes are pushed to clients"?
The exact workflow is: the initial data is pulled over HTTP, the code connects to our server over WebSockets and after that no more requests are made. The real-time updates are pushed over the WebSocket connection.
So Ducksboard is free? Are there any details about future plans to charge for services? I hate signing up for services when there is no indication about the future.
It's free during the beta... and someday we'll start charging. There's nothing more I can say you now except:
- We are validating the pricing, and it will cost like any other SaaS (different plans segmented on features and affordable [monthly fee like 1-2 hours of typical salary outside SiliconValley :D]
- If you are in the Hackathon, we will forget to send you any invoice during some months ;)
Instead of not sending an invoice I think it might be smarter to send one and have a line item "Early adopter bonus -$xx". That way once the bonus runs out, it won't be quite as surprising for the user.
We are in a closed beta, the final product will require a monthly fee. People participating in the hackathon with funny ideas will get a discount though.
The plans will be announced as soon as we feel the product is ready for daily use, which we expect to be really soon.
None of the widgets worked for me in the demo. After researching WebSockets I figured it out: WS aren't supported by IE (or so it appears, using IE9 with all default settings). see them when using my Chrome browser. Seems like IE users are still a pretty big market though, so not sure how this will succeed without support for IE.
Neat idea, although I think you need to make it a bit clearer what the product is on that page. I had to click a few times to get the executive summary. That being said, I'm a bit grumpy I didn't try to develop a similar idea I had a while ago.
The idea isn't a new one, there are other companies doing this (geckoboard is the most popular one that I can recall) -- ducksboard are just doing it differently.
I just applied for an API key, but there's a deadline of the 4th or the 7th? I'm not optimistic this particular project will percolate to the top of the stack that quickly.
