
Ask HN: would you pay for a "Tell me when" service? - tectonic
I&#x27;m thinking about productizing something like Huginn (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cantino&#x2F;huginn) plus Siri, with a human-driven coding &#x2F; interaction layer and a simple UI.<p>A simple form that says &quot;Tell me when ____________&quot; and the user can type anything they want.  Examples could range from &quot;tell me when it&#x27;s going to rain tommorrow&quot; to &quot;tell me when the price per watt of solar panels drops below X&quot;.  What standing alerts would you want?  How much would you pay per alert, and would you accept variable pricing by complexity?  When you make these, a real person will evaluate them and use proprietary software on the backend to set them up.  Concierge alerts about the world.<p>What do you folks think?
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mindcrime
I think it's an interesting concept. Coming at it as a geek myself, my thought
is "I want this". In fact, I've given some thought to building something like
this myself in the past, but never had time. What I wonder, though, vis-a-vis
making a business out of it is "will normal people want (or even understand)
this"?

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bwh2
Tell me when...

    
    
      * my website is down for >n minutes
      * my car needs (an oil change, new tires, etc.)
      * my credit card balance is within $x of $n
      * Justin Verlander is starting, 12 hours in advance
      * my softball game is rained out (and notify my entire team)
      * we've only got enough coffee grounds left for 2 pots
      * my (bus, train, flight) is running >5min late

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swanson
I'll add some of mine.

    
    
        * I can watch MOVIE XYZ on Netflix/Amazon
        * Small indie movie is playing at the local Arts Cinema
        * A band is releasing a new album
        * I've spent more than my monthly budget
        * Someone links to my blog from their blog
        * Important European soccer games are being aired on TV

~~~
tectonic
And would you pay for any of these?

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mikemcdonald
I think IFTTT covers a lot of what you've mentioned. For example you can set
an alert IF(its going to rain) THEN(send me a text), and a lot can be
customized. What kind of alerts were you thinking that would need human
evaluation?

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dscb
"tell me when it's going to rain tommorrow"

Would the service tell you what time it would be raining/not raining the next
day?

Or would it alert you the first day that the weather told it that it would be
raining the day after?

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eksith
This would depend which weather data provider is being used. On my AccuWeather
app, there's a graph showing the temps and whether it will rain etc... by the
hour, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

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palidanx
From a southern california who drives a lot, I would like a tell me when
service when I am going to hit traffic. We always have random freeway closures
and accidents and I sometimes forget to look at the map.

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97-109-107
For some of the simpler stuff here Google Alerts can be used to be notified of
new occurances of a keyword.

