
RailsRumble Apps that Deserve to Be Startups - railsjedi
Rails Rumble 2009 (railsrumble.com) ended this weekend. Since I'm a contestant (alertme.tv), I've been able to browse all the 157 teams who were able to get deployed. Here's an sneak peek at 11 amazing entries that I think could easily be successful as startups if they are given a chance after the competition ends. All of these apps were built by a team in 48 hours.<p>#1 LowDown - http://mcp.r09.railsrumble.com
If you are into cucumber (cukes.info), you'll love this app. It enables you to build specs, and share them them with your clients before implementation. Amazing interface, and huge SaaS potential. I would for this pay right now.<p>#2 Hi, I'm - http://hi.im
Cool way to build a landing page for yourself. This is what google profiles should be. Landing page urls look like http://hi.im/jacques<p>#3 Omnominator - http://omnominator.com
Cute &#38; useful site to choose restaurants among groups. This would be huge as a google wave widget, or integrated into an existing communications platform. The site is incredibly useful on its own though.<p>#4 Thingivore - http://thingivore.com
If you've used delicious library on the mac, this is basically the web version of that. Insanely nice ui and interactivity. This app could make a fortune off amazon's affiliate program.<p>#5 Neighborhood Watch - http://neighborhoodwat.ch 
A new peer 2 peer way to monitor web site uptime. You install it on your server and everyone checks everyones websites. Tons of additional data and alerts you could with all the additional servers checking up on you.<p>#6 Techmeets - http://techmeets.com
Nice looking alternative to meetup.com - focused on technical meetups. Crowded market, but this is a decent niche and easy its especially easy to monetize developer eyeballs (job boards, dev tools, etc).<p>#7 Straightlist - http://husohuso.r09.railsrumble.com
Allows you to post and browse installation / deployment steps. Every linux blog on the planet could integrate with this site. Some sort of simple website integration widget is needed.<p>#8 SmackSale - http://smacksale.com
Reddit like tool for tech bargains. Lots of sites already like this, but this one is nicely built and could easily compete among the others. Obvious affiliate potential if they can get traffic.<p>#9 Nybbl - http://nybblme.r09.railsrumble.com
A way to publish small bits of knowledge, with micropayments. Any good hacker comes up with tidbits of useful knowledge every week that he runs across. This could be a neat way to try to monetize that knowledge by getting paid subscribers to these tidbits.<p>#10 Last Percent - http://lastpercent.com
Nice and simple tool to check a website. Looks for broken image links, html validation errors, and css errors. Every developer should use something like this.<p>#11 Table Surfing - http://tablesurfing.com
Cool way to meet new people by setting up dinners with strangers. Would be tough to get enough people on the site to make it useful for finding random dinners, but the site's well designed and looks like it would work well just using it amongst friends<p>Some awesomely ridiculous apps that deserve mention:
- lazeroids.com (online massively multiplayer asteroids). Seriously.<p>- stomachly.com (restaurant ratings based on bowels)<p>- celebritypassage.com (tribute site to dead celebs)
======
Hates_
For convenience:

#1 LowDown - <http://mcp.r09.railsrumble.com>

#2 Hi, I'm - <http://hi.im>

#3 Omnominator - <http://omnominator.com>

#4 Thingivore - <http://thingivore.com>

#5 Neighborhood Watch - <http://neighborhoodwat.ch>

#6 Techmeets - <http://techmeets.com>

#7 Straightlist - <http://husohuso.r09.railsrumble.com>

#8 SmackSale - <http://smacksale.com>

#9 Nybbl - <http://nybblme.r09.railsrumble.com>

#10 Last Percent - <http://lastpercent.com>

#11 Table Surfing - <http://tablesurfing.com>

Some awesomely ridiculous apps that deserve mention:

<http://www.lazeroids.com> (online massively multiplayer asteroids).
Seriously.

<http://www.stomachly.com> (restaurant ratings based on bowels)

<http://www.celebritypassage.com> (tribute site to dead celebs)

~~~
jskopek
These are all remarkable, but the one that really gets my imagination going is
#7 - Straightlist. If they can implement embeddable widgets that can be put
into blogs and forums I can see the site picking up a lot of steam, and once
they start keeping track of hits on each page the site has the potential to
become a reddit for guides

~~~
railsjedi
Oops, they actually already do have the integration widget via an iframe link.
Missed that around the first time.

------
tortilla
Hurl looks cool:

<http://ozmm.org/posts/hurl_preview.html>

Kind of like a web-based version of HTTP Client:
<http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/>

~~~
railsjedi
yep, one of the few sinatra apps by one of the github guys. very cool.

I actually did my app in merb, i think i might be the only one

------
qrush
My team made slidechop: <http://slidechop.com>

Try it out! :)

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kentbrew
Caution: hi.im needs input filtering. See <http://hi.im/kentbrew> for insta-
sploit.

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r00k
Our team built <http://pocketsapp.com>. Pockets is visual voicemail for
twitter. Pick a user, and we'll call you and record a voicemail. They get an
@reply with a link to the voicemail (and any others left for them).

All feedback appreciated!

~~~
jbr
Hey, really nice job on pocketsapp. How did you do the phone interface? Is
there a good resource for learning that tech?

Thanks!

~~~
r00k
Thanks! We used Twilio for the telephony piece. They have excellent docs with
everything you need to get going. Check 'em out.

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wwkeyboard
There are some polished looking projects there, how did they ensure that all
of the work was done in 48 hours?

~~~
railsjedi
they monitor the github repositories. relatively easy to find people who
blatantly cheat by doing implementation beforehand

there's no restriction on paper planning so i'm guessing the top sites
probably spent weeks on design and specing. whether or not they created
photoshop comps probably doesnt matter

~~~
adamhowell
No digital assets could be created beforehand, so they better not have made
anything in Photoshop 'cause I worked my ass off to get our landing page in
and I'd be pissed! ;)

------
adamhowell
I was really happy with where we were with ours:

<http://mocksup.r09.railsrumble.com/>

Until a couple last minute changes by me unknowingly broke our main feature,
which is adding links to mockups. Dammit.

But, it was really fun and a great way to get started on an app idea.

~~~
railsjedi
Cool. Yeah, I had some trouble using the mockup tool. The landing page is
awesome though. Are you guys planning to launch as a startup fully? Here's a
domain suggestion: <http://domai.nr/mocksup/with/mock.su> :-)

~~~
adamhowell
> Cool. Yeah, I had some trouble using the mockup tool. The landing page is
> awesome though.

Thanks man. Yeah, it would still have been crippled (couldn't update or delete
links once you'd made them -- I went down a rabbit hole all Sunday morning w/
a couple of jQuery plugins that didn't work out) but adding them would have at
least worked correctly.

I actually grabbed mocksup.com a couple of months ago, so this week once we
iron out the big bugs we'll be pushing it to there.

~~~
railsjedi
Simple apache config and you can get it pointed to your linode. You should get
that set up

------
railsjedi
Hopefully the Rumble organizers drop Rails from the competition next year. At
this point it no longer makes sense. If Django, PHP, or Java folks want to
enter, they should be allowed. It would say a lot more for whatever
language/framework the winners of the competition used.

~~~
zapnap
Hi, I'm one of the organizers. Any Rack-based framework was allowed this year
(keeping it Ruby-specific). We're looking to do a more framework/language-
agnostic event in the very near future, leveraging a lot of the infrastructure
/ services we've already built. Stay tuned :). Of course, we'll keep doing
Ruby/Rails Rumbles too. <3 community.

------
jbr
I built <http://www.sharelocally.org/> for RailsRumble (solo), which I plan to
open-source. Anyone interested in the concept? I've got a lot more planned I
didn't fit in. This was my first rumble and learned a whole lot about exactly
how much fits in 48 hours. Can't wait until next year's.

~~~
thesethings
Looks great!

And I think the "space" (sharing stuff/ re-thinking owning/renting) needs a
lot of attention.

Related:

* <https://neighborgoods.net/> Neighborgoods is currently in private beta right now. They seem to be a social site centered on finding people to borrow/loan/rent stuff in your immediate area for free/small fees. Hopefully they will have an API, and projects like yours could benefit. spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it.

* For a Yahoo! Hack day project, somebody took the Yahoo! Mail API to make Freecycle data available "on the outside." It looks like this was done only as proof-of-concept, and since each Freecycle community is its own list, this might be hard, but I think there is a LOT to gained by scraping the goods out of there.

* Maybe take the eBay reputation data out via API, and display in your system?

A related idea is being done

~~~
jbr
It's actually really exciting that neighborgoods exists. Do you have any idea
how they're planning on monetizing? I did this as a weekend project and am
considering open sourcing because it doesn't really seem like there's a
demographic that's clamoring to pay. I guess maybe small brick-and-mortar
businesses might want hyperlocal targeting, _maybe_.

As far as reputation system, instead of pulling eBay's reputation data, I was
hoping to build a sharing-borrowing reputation system. I don't have any reason
to think that being a good eBay seller/buyer would make someone a timely and
careful borrower/lender.

"Stuff lending" seems like the sort of thing us internet folks could help
with, though, which is why I built ShareLocally.

Do you know where the beta of NeighborGoods is starting?

~~~
thesethings
I know just a little about Neighborgoods. @mickipedia (twitter id) is the
founder, she's based in Los Angeles, and even before starting this site, she's
been interested in the environment for a bit. I don't know her personally, but
she seems constructive and smart and funny.

As for monetizing it, since their system will/does support renting/loaning
between people, I imagine they can take a cut of that? Maybe membership? (Now
i'm just guessing)

I in no way mentioned Neighborgoods as a reason you should stop working on
your project, but rather something to _validate_ it! (Yep, I'm one of those
polyanna's... :D)

I really do think you should open source it though, or at least big chunks of
it, even if you do a hosted service. (I can save the reasons for this for
another time.)

As for eBay rep, I don't think it should replace an internal reputation
system, but especially in the early goings, what could it hurt? And not just
eBay, selective data from as many 3rd party places as possible. Even a Twitter
account that's more than 6 months old could make some people (like me) more
comfortable loaning certain kinds of things.

And man... I think there's so much wasted cycles on sites like Freecycle and
Craigslist free section... basically there is no item "management." Even when
stuff is free, so many inquiries on stuff that's gone, or redundant follow-up
letters to tell people it's taken, etc. I know your system is a different use-
case than give-aways, but I see an overlap in need and purpose, and stuff +
relationship management is applicable to multiple situations (and similar
demographics of people who like to be resourceful).

As for beta of NeighborGoods, I have an invite for you. I will hit you up on
the email I found in your profile.

------
foca
We built <http://howsmycode.com> \-- We didn't get time to finish the
"marketing side", and a couple of big features didn't make it either (we were
too ambitious, I think), but we're still happy with the result. And we plan to
continue work on it :)

------
jaswope
Man, <http://stomachly.com> got a mention. Thanks!

~~~
nestlequ1k
RailsRumble needs a prize for most hilarious app. We should lobby for that
next year.

This year, stomachly wins.

------
bryanwoods
Still reeling from the weekend; my first Rumble.

We also got an app built and deployed, a simple little game:
<http://marryboffkill.com>

The whole time I expected that it would be the smoothing-over of rough edges,
double-checking, and doing general "cleanup" that would take the most time,
but even so was surprised how quickly the deadline snuck up on us the last
day.

I have a feeling if the rumble was over a long weekend instead we would have
been able to clean up all the rough edges, but I have a feeling there are many
other teams in this boat as well. :-)

Was definitely a great way to spend a weekend (creating something) with
friends and a real learning experience. I'm already excited to do it again
next year.

~~~
railsjedi
Heh, your app is pretty hilarious. It definitely needs a gender section
though. Since 99% of the users will be male for the time being, maybe you
should have made it female only list.

Having to think about boffing Salman Ruschdie was too terrifying to continue
playing.

------
_glass
I'd like to mention <http://give-a-box.r09.railsrumble.com/> The idea is
pretty cool -- organize boxes all around the world with things to give away
packaged in nice little topics of their own.

------
fowlduck
What? No ZenVDN? <http://zenvdn.com>

~~~
Heff
Seems startup worthy to me.

------
smeade
I'm happy with how my entry AffiliApp turned out -<http://affiliapp.com>. It
let's web app developers instantly create an affiliate program for their app.

------
alex_c
I love the design for <http://omnominator.com/>. How do they get their inputs
to be slanty? A quick peek at the CSS didn't reveal much.

~~~
carbon8

      -moz-transform: rotate(6deg);
      [...]
      -webkit-transform: rotate(4deg);
      [...]
      transform: rotate(4deg);
    

<http://webkit.org/blog/130/css-transforms/>

[https://developer.mozilla.org/web-tech/2008/09/12/css-
transf...](https://developer.mozilla.org/web-tech/2008/09/12/css-transforms/)

------
jjggss
Our team made "Diversion" - <http://diversion.r09.railsrumble.com/>

We want to bring to normal human beings the cool things that Git and Github
bring to developers! Instead of collaborating like you would on a wiki, you
"divert" (fork) other people's work, so that both can keep working on their
documents and grab each other changes.

You can see the history of everybody's documents, the past and the possible
futures, who grabbed from whom, etc... And it works!

~~~
railsjedi
Your app is awesome. Nice job!

------
Maran
Me and a friend created Snapshare. The design part took up way to much time
for us since we are both hardcore coders, we will be bringing a dedicated
designer on the team next year. It was loads of fun though and we created a
good codebase to build upon.

Read about our product on [http://weblog.brightlight-ict.nl/2009/08/we-are-
not-trying-t...](http://weblog.brightlight-ict.nl/2009/08/we-are-not-trying-
to-be-flickr-or-picassa/).

------
zapnap
Stay tuned throughout the week, peoples. Our expert panel has just started
qualifying applications and the homepage will soon be updated to reflect the
apps that are in-the-running for the top spots.

Later this week, Thursday if all goes well, we'll use the expert panel advice
to whittle the list down to a top tier and open up public judging to decide
the winner. I hope everyone here will want to participate!

Winners will be announced next weekend.

------
joefio
Our team built <http://loanit.to> as our entry. It allows you to track things
you've let friends borrow. Some great potential for Amazon affiliate
integration.

Very impressed with the quality of the apps this year. Some awesome ideas!
It's going to take days to go through them all!

------
visnup
lazeroids.com is all javascript + canvas. _not_ flash.

------
guitsaru
My team built <http://operatorapp.com/>

It's only open for a demo at the moment. We don't have an easy way for people
to set up their own accounts because it has to go through twilio. We plan to
keep working on it after the competition is over.

------
makenosound
There really are some great entries this year. I particularly like the
implementation for "Hi, I'm" and "Table Surfing". This is our effort:
<http://decafsucks.com/>. A site for finding and review cafés.

------
steveklabnik
I've created a table at TableSurfing! Anyone in Pittsburgh that wants to show
up, here you go:

<http://tablesurfing.com/tables/double-wide-get-together>

Best website idea ever.

------
railsjedi
Official judging starts today, with public voting on apps at the end of the
week.

------
scottymoon
Thanks a ton for the props on Lowdown! After the rumble we plan on doing a lot
more with it. If you're interested, give us a follow on twitter @lowdownapp to
stay on top of what we have planned. Peace.

------
Spyou
Some applications are really amazing!.

This year I came with <http://www.planettoaster.com> and this week end was
really intense (doing solo).

------
dpickett
I created <http://www.triptrackerapp.com> as a solo project - let me know what
you think!

------
railsjedi
Voting is now available on the top 22 apps.
<http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries>

------
codezone
What is annoying you? <http://annoying-us.r09.railsrumble.com>

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jschoolcraft
Our entry: <http://ideabitbucket.com>

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bjclark
My entry is <http://twitabrew.com>

