
Our hurricane-tracking startup - wensing
http://www.stormpulse.com
======
nameless
The surfer crowd could be a good market here. You could probably find some
traffic by posting in their forums. California looks to hurricane development
off Mexico all the time for swell, but I see you are only covering the
atlanitc here...

~~~
wensing
Great idea! Have you seen www.surfline.com? Maybe we could advertise there
once we get the Pacific going (which wouldn't be a colossal amount of work
with the systems we have in place...).

~~~
nameless
Advertise? You should partner with them. Their hurricane service is terrible.

~~~
wensing
Going to check it out. Thanks for the idea. We've been thinking about
"Stormpulse as an embedded service" for a while . . .

------
wensing
Been working on this for a while, and it's time to start telling folks about
it. I'm curious to know what you all think of anything and everything you're
willing to comment on.

~~~
npk
Very pretty. I'm not sure who your audience is, but assuming its goal is to
reach the widest audience possible, here are my comments:

1) When looking at a storm, only information about that storm should be
displayed. When I looked at TS Barry, the bottom half of the site showed a ton
of images. I thought these images were of Barry, but they were of current
weather. Ultimately I found the site very cluttered.

2) If the target is a wide audience, it would be nice to have little snippets
of text that give a simple interpretation of what you're seeing in images.
Like, this is an IR channel sensitive to water vapor.

3) RGB images need some explanation of what the RGB channels are. The color
contrast is terrible. I suggest an arcsinh stretch which is linear at small
values and logarithmic at high values. I can give you more details if you
like.

4) There's a yellow line that goes across the RGB images. Is this the sunrise?

5) The main image window is awesome. Is it really necessary to display all
that other information in the bottom half? Before I said the site is
cluttered. Actually, it's just that part below the main map.

6) On the topic of clutter, what's the point of all the buoy data? I
personally can not grok it. Better to put it on the map somehow.

7) I love your use of sparklines in the windspeed. It would be cool if you
added a scale. Is it possible to put a red dot on the sparkline to show
exactly where you are? I like the color hue change, but a red dot, I feel,
would be better.

8) This is a cool site. If I hear about another hurricane, I'll definitely use
this site. Clearly this is a labor of love from people who love storms :)

~~~
wensing
1\. Point taken. 'Is this data in scope?' is something we need to take
seriously.

2\. Glad you said this. I would like to do the same. It would be nice if it
didn't take a lot of work to explain. Maybe footnotes would do for now instead
of a big 'Help' section.

3\. Also glad you said this, since I myself am not sure what the RGB channels
are. It's funny that you are criticizing the quality, not because I disagree,
but since I had nothing to do with the satellite images (they are government-
produced). I'd like to hear more about 'arcsinh stretching'.

4\. That is the sunrise.

5\. I definitely want to get as much as possible on the map. However, I do
like having the larger canvas of the HTML page for data that just can't fit. I
appreciate your feedback on this since I want to stay motivated to strive for
more density in the map window.

6\. Yeah, you're right. Should either kill the buoy table or find a better way
of organizing the data. Coincidentally, that data _is_ on the map. If you see
a blue or red square on the map you can click them. Those are buoys. We could
use a legend.

7\. Definitely possible, it's already in the code. I think the dot already
exists, it's just always the latest color hue--i.e. the shade of white to red
that corresponds to the current speed, rather than red all the time, since red
represents a Category 5 storm.

8\. Thanks a lot.

------
budu3
Great work. Keep it up. Someone should buy these guys quickly. I see you guys
are using S3. There's no doubt that you have a ton of info. The trick is not
to overwhelm the user with that info but at the same time have it easy for
them to access it and interpret it if they wanted.

~~~
wensing
Thanks for the encouragement.

S3, yes. We're happy so far.

Feel free to point out any trouble spots with information density vs.
legibility.

------
mattjaynes
I had previously ignored this links on News.YC since hurricanes aren't a
passion of mine, but glad I checked it out today. Very well done! Excellent
job on the site and the interface. I found myself engrossed and playing with
the data for much longer than I anticipated. Keep up the good work!

~~~
wensing
Thanks, Matt! I was somewhat hesitant to put this up on the news, but since it
is our startup and I've been following YC for a while now, I thought some
folks might like to see it.

Really happy to hear that you were pulled in even though you're not a storm-o-
phile.

We definitely seem to teeter somewhere between 'great interface' and 'whoa,
I'm overwhelmed, there's too much data!' Density is what we are striving for,
but legibility is paramount.

------
tyohn
So cool! I've been playing on the site and I'm impressed. Who's your ideal
customer? How do you plan on making money?

~~~
wensing
Thanks, Ty!

Ideally, anyone interested in this sort of information. That said, there's
obviously an advanced tilt to the site right now to support our marketing
strategy of going after the most avid enthusiasts first, and the general
public second.

We are planning to provide some (hopefully) very useful localization features.
Ads and sponsorships would be okay as well. We have sunk in personal
investment, but we don't owe any outside financiers; read: we don't feel
pressured to make huge sums, nor must we to make anyone happy.

------
ncorinja
Wow.. this site must have required many long nights and lots of coffee to put
together.

------
bayareaguy
Make it work on the cell phone.

~~~
wensing
By which I assume you mean: 'Make _all_ of it work on the cell phone.' because
at least part of it already does.

FlashLite is the answer to getting the Flash component to work on something
other than the iPhone :), and I haven't had the time to figure out how to make
our ActionScript 2.0 / Flash Player 8 code compatible.

I'm pretty convinced that doing so would be profitable, of course. Problem is,
I feel that way about more features/enhancements than we have the time for
right now.

------
uripides
As a storm chaser, This sounds like a great way to track incoming storms!

------
maxklein
Well, I'm sure this is useful in some manner. However, I've never even seen a
hurricane, and a hurricane has never affected my life. So I'll leave the
commentary for those people whose cat has been raped by a hurricane...

~~~
jamongkad
Then why even bother commenting on this thread? Great site btw although I had
a bit of trouble navigating the site. Help docs should alleviate that...also
it would be nice if the UI was cleaned up a bit for new users. I had no
trouble using the map and checking out the world. But the rest of the site
leaves me confused with so much information all over the place.

------
tracksuitceo
Great mashup guys! I like the cloud toggle switch.

