

Leftronic (YC S10) turns any startup office into a command center  - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/06/04/leftronic-turns-any-startup-office-into-a-command-center/

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sneak
Is this substantially different than GeckoBoard?

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

~~~
sonofabell
Hey Jeff, Rajiv here, one of the founders of Leftronic. Here's how we're
different:

* We have a custom push API enables you to update your dashboard in real-time. (And our pull API is going to come out in the next day or two.)

* Our interface is completely vector-based, which makes it work on any browser or screen size. And it's very flexible and configurable, so you can set up your dashboards exactly the way you want!

* We have no restrictions on the amount of data you push to us for custom feeds, nor do we restrict the number of instances of the dashboard you have simultaneously running.

* Our visualizations are minimalistic on purpose, which makes them immensely glanceable.

* Our data connectors pull data from third-party services as fast as their API's allow us to. We're only limited by the other side, not ours.

* We have dashboard templates that get you set up with your dashboards in a single click.

* Our integrations into the various data services are very thorough and robust.

* We have a couple more tricks up our sleeve that I can't mention yet, but stay tuned! ;)

If you have any other questions, I'd love to hear from you so please shoot me
an email!

Thanks!

Rajiv

rajiv at leftronic dot com

~~~
electic
I think that is one of the things giving us pause is the price.

~~~
sneak
Yeah, I have absolutely no business use case for this, but I do have a spare
30" Dell in my office and would love to play around with this. I wouldn't pay
more than $10 or $15 per month, though.

~~~
electic
I think the pricing should be setup more of a way to get you hooked on the
crack. You give some crack for free, get addicted, and want more. I think most
corporations have a need for many dashboards. So what about two for free and
get them addicted, and they want more?

~~~
ndrake
They do have a free plan, which gets you one dashboard and unlimited custom
metrics.

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sweis
Some nits about your encrypted API:

1\. The ciphertext is not authenticated. You should MAC it.

2\. The plaintext is padded with spaces to be block-aligned. "Hello world"
will collide with "Hello world_" when encrypted with the same IV, and both
will decrypt as "Hello world_____" (where "_" means a space). Use PKCS#1 or
some other standard padding.

[https://github.com/sonofabell/leftronic/blob/master/python/l...](https://github.com/sonofabell/leftronic/blob/master/python/leftronic.py#L260)

~~~
cdelsolar
Cesar here, I wrote that part of the API package. You are right that we should
likely HMAC the ciphertext for added security. I'll definitely explore the
padding issue as well. Thank you for your insight on this!

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arvinjoar
Is this really a _pain_ that companies feel? That they can't visualize or
gather critical data into a coherent view? It seems to me that this might be a
great thing to have, but companies don't necessarily know this. When you have
to _explain_ and _pitch_ to companies why they need your product, I think
you're on dangerous waters. A truly good product should have companies seeking
you out, because what you're doing makes their lives that much easier, I don't
see it for this product.

~~~
pmjoyce
It's certainly a pain that some companies feel - particularly those with a
robust and established data driven culture. With the proliferation of SaaS as
a delivery mechanism for software the pain of having to check multiple sources
for a coherent view of your business becomes more acute.

As to your broader point, customer education will always be an issue for any
novel product but that comes hand-in-hand with an opportunity to precisely
frame the problem you're solving and explain the benefits of your product.

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pg
We have one at YC showing HN stats. It has become the focus (= hearth) of the
room.

~~~
sokoloff
Publishing the URL to a (perhaps several days delayed, or even static data
snapshot, but interactive demo) of this could be very powerful marketing for
Leftronic.

Also, live demo link on the site leads to a page that is completely black on
Safari on iPad.

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ovechtrick
Would be great if there were more examples of what has been done with the API
on the homepage.

They should market this towards manufacturing companies...

Or I could see it doing really well in high performance computing... Setup a
dashboard to monitor compute clusters...

I really need to play with this!

~~~
itay
We were early adopters of the API, and we still use it to demo integration of
Splunk with 3rd party dashboards.

The beauty of the API is that it allows you to display relatively arbitrary
data in very compelling ways.

For example, we have access to quite a bit of data at Splunk, from Twitter,
server logs, etc. A lot of our customers ask us how they can use the data that
is inside Splunk and present it in a 3rd-party dashboard, so we built a demo
with Leftronic.

~~~
sonofabell
Thanks for the kind words, Itay.

For reference, here's the link that talks about the Splunk + Leftronic
integration: <http://dev.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAADSR>

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btipling
We used Leftronic at Cloudkick and I think their product idea is pretty cool.
I hope they do well.

~~~
sonofabell
Thanks Bjorn!

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arihant
I am not sure why this line is buried deep in information on their site:

"We also offer a Free Forever plan which includes one dashboard and access to
Leftronic's custom data API."

This should be the pickup line.

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bodhisaurus
We have a very geography-dependent product (peer-to-peer carsharing) and a ton
of disparate data types. I hope we give Leftronic a try because I think it has
a lot to offer. Keep it up guys!

~~~
cdelsolar
Hey Bodhi! We'd definitely appreciate the signup, feel free to reach out to us
at support at leftronic dot com if you need any help integrating Leftronic
with your product.

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fab13n
Selling the illusion of control to lost managers is a pretty good business
plan: it scratches an issue which terribly itches them, and they're paying
with someone else's money.

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electic
We are looking at using it here at Viralheat.

~~~
sonofabell
That's great to hear! Please send an email to rajiv at leftronic or support at
leftronic if there's any way I can assist you in the process!

------
jennahannon
Demoing as we speak. Great product.

