

Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse - sheats
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/05/track-hurricanes-on-stormpulse/

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wallflower
TipJoy: "$1299.05 from 479 people" I think it's safe to say that perhaps this
application might be breaking TipJoy into the mainstream (e.g. hurricane-news-
hungry public).

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ivankirigin
Yeah, we're delighted by the community's response to Tipjoy. I think one
reason they are doing well is the blog post about it:
[http://stormpulse.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/like-
stormpulse-l...](http://stormpulse.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/like-stormpulse-
leave-a-tip-with-tipjoy/)

But I should mentioned that you'd need to add at least 3 zeros to that total
amount to consider Tipjoy close to mainstream.

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npk
Gosh, I remember providing feedback for this site way back when. It's been
much improved. Clearly stormpulse is a labor of love and hard work. Congrats.

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davidw
Check and see what advice they ended up taking:-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29516>

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maxklein
Oh vey, I see I was as impolite 443 days ago as I am today. But I didn't say
it was a bad idea, it just is not something that is relevant to me.

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j2d2
Smart of them to give the interface a 24 type look. I think I'll dub it the
SutherFace.

Everyone using it, in the back of their mind, will think they have access to
the whole world, even if it's only displaying the weather.

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wensing
I've actually never seen an episode. :-)

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maxklein
Nice work, both on getting techcrunched and on contining work on the site. And
I see the site is popular, I wouldn't have thought it, considering the limited
demographic.

Anyways, congrats and do milk the techcrunch traffic!

~~~
jonknee
You probably don't live in hurricane country. When there is a storm bearing
down it's the most important thing in the world to potentially millions of
people. One of our local papers teamed up with these guys and were linking
them quite a bit (perhaps in a frame, I don't remember) when Fay was coming
our way. It's a handy site.

So perhaps a limited demographic, but hurricanes are huge news a few times a
year and as such get a lot of mindshare.

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froo
You know, there's probably an idea in there.

The stormpulse guys could perhaps build a widget that news & nedia sites could
embed into their stories so there is instant tracking for each storm right
there on the page.

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wensing
We have that. That's actually how we 'got big' (although we're still very
small compared to the NHC, CNN, etc.).

<http://stormpulse.wordpress.com/stormpulse-api/>

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froo
awesome work guys, I admit I only had a very quick skim around the site and
couldn't find it.

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wensing
Not to sound more successful than we are :-), but since it's the kind of thing
folks on here might like to know ... if we made it any more visible it would
probably not be a good thing at this point.

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josefresco
Very nice site, and in the same industry as my startup...

/begin shameless self promotion/ www.OtherWeather.com /end/

Would love to have reports from people in the path on my site as well.

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spydez
How did the TC guy get both storms on the same map? Every link I click only
ever shows one storm at a time...

I wanna track Ike and Hanna on one map like he did...

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wensing
That was a bleature, but we could re-introduce something like that down the
road (we've gotten a number of requests for it).

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run4yourlives
Wow, that is crazy cool. Well done.

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wensing
Thanks. My friend (who is joining the Stormpulse effort) submitted this
article but the site was co-founded by myself and another fellow out of
Chicago. Just as a bit of background, we started collecting data for this in
2004.

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run4yourlives
Wow, that's a lot of work. If you don't mind my asking, what's the exit
strategy here? Sell/partner with a newscast? Charge for premium data?

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wensing
All of the above (except selling) have presented themselves as opportunities
in the last few weeks.

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snewe
Blogspam:

<http://www.stormpulse.com/>

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sanj
Any comments on why you think you weren't accepted?

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wensing
I don't know for sure. I imagine there were a number of things not working in
our favor. I don't want to suggest anything unfounded, but what I can say for
sure is that I wasn't willing to move to Boston/SF (I am happily married with
two wonderful children and settled in West Palm Beach, FL).

Also, we did apply late, and rumor has it that late applications aren't
treated as thoroughly.

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davidw
"Not willing to relocate for 3 months" seems to be pretty critical, even more
so than single founders.

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SwellJoe
I would also add that if you aren't re-locating, then you're missing at least
50% of the value of YC (probably more). They'd be doing someone a favor to
pass on their company over this question...because the company wouldn't be
getting a very good deal. Good investors don't invest when they know they
can't provide good value to the company, and YC is a good investor.

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ajkirwin
Does this automatically update? I'd love to have it constantly running on a
spare computer, just showing storm data.

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wensing
Yes, although it only runs on our servers, unless we were to share the code.
Alternatively, you can start collecting it from the NWS and build your own.
:-)

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ajkirwin
Ah, I meant more as in, if I were to keep stormpulse.com open all the time,
would it automatically refresh and update and such?

