

Show HN: Ducksboard, from nothing to private beta in four months - wulczer
http://blog.ducksboard.com/2011/06/ducksboard-from-nothing-to-private-beta-in-four-months/

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kmfrk
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. :)

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wulczer
Ah, our quest for a logo was truly epic. One day we'll write a blog post about
99designs...

Anyway, I hope that this exact conversation will make you remember it's
duckSboard.com ;)

~~~
kmfrk
I can't unsee the duck s now.

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aitorciki
For people asking for an invite, this is how we are going to share them:

1\. The first batch goes to close friends. This is not favoritism, we just
feel more comfortable sharing the rough edges with them :)

2\. The second batch will go to people who helped us validating and testing.

3\. Lastly, we will provide invitations on a first-come/first-serve basis (you
can subscribe from the site's sign up form).

We will give out the invites as fast as we can… but be patient!

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andypants
Your product looks like Geckoboard: <http://www.geckoboard.com/>

~~~
wulczer
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.

~~~
andypants
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?

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wulczer
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.

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biaxident
Looks really cool.

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.

~~~
aitorciki
Hi, glad to hear you liked it.

To answer your question, our main assets are:

    
    
      * 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.

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kaylarose
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).

[1]<https://demo.geckoboard.com/dashboard/B6782E562794C2F2/>

~~~
redemade
beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I prefer db to gecko, it looks great. +1
on very polished

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gavinballard
Very nice! I'm currently building our wallboard, so thinking about this space
a lot recently.

Are you planning on providing a means to create custom widgets?

~~~
aitorciki
We provide a write API where customers can send their own data. Any existing
widget can be used to display those values.

Custom widgets are currently our top priority.

Expect it to land in the next few weeks.

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k7d
If I may ask, what were you considerations for having near 100% unit-test
coverage even before private beta?

~~~
wulczer
A very good question.

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.

~~~
k7d
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.

~~~
wulczer
Thanks, we've taken note. Definitely something to think about.

On a tangential note, our main objective is not differentiating from
Geckoboard, it's creating the best online dashboard out there.

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dgurney
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.

~~~
wulczer
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 :)

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Spines11
Looks good, how many people do you have working on it?

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wulczer
We're two technical people and one biz.

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timjahn
I like this. A simple place to get a snapshot of what's happening with your
stats across all channels.

Hope I get an invite. :)

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MatthewB
Well...this is definitely pretty. I am going to play around with the demo but
I'd like an invite code as well if possible.

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troels
Within the last couple of hours, I have received a newsletter from chart.io,
Ducksboard and Geckoboard. Coincidence?

~~~
pmjoyce
My attention was drawn to Streamerapp who also announced today!

Welcome to the space :)

<http://betali.st/startups/streamer> <http://www.streamerapp.com/>

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dterra
Hey Paul,

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.

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markbao
Invite codes? :P

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wulczer
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.

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paulnelligan
This looks and feels great. Great idea and concept. I've already requested an
invite. Best of luck!

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noodle
your front page animation is broken in chrome (but not ff).

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wulczer
Yeah, we found that after we already made the page public and didn't want to
touch it right after launch.

We have a fix that we'll apply in a few minutes. Thanks!

