

Review my Startup: Radius - location based message broadcasting - Skywing

Radius is my current project. My goal is to create a multi-dimensional, location-based communications platform without any walls. My inspiration for this is Citizen's Band radio.<p>Currently, the service itself is simple. You visit the stream page, and you may broadcast messages to other users within a 5 mile radius of you. Messages are transmitted to other users in real time. Messages are also indexed with their geographical location, basically creating a geo-tagged message board where the message threads are real world locations (this enables non real time communication).<p>I'm going for a non room-based approach because I feel like that hampers the utility of this, and ultimately my vision is closer to CB radio than it is to IRC. I'm working on several different clients at the moment. The only one I'm showing here is the web front end. I'm finishing up an iPhone application for communicating over Radius.<p>Gotcha's: This relies on browser geolocation reporting, at the moment. because of that, this doesn't seem to work at all on IE. Firefox connects a little slowly. It seems to work best in Chrome. You must allow geolocation reporting when the browser prompts you for it. It also relies on websockets which restricts browsers to more modern versions.<p>Requests: I'm looking forward to feedback on this. So, if you check this out and have any feedback for me I will make sure to fix it, or incorporate it if I can. I made a thread about this about a week ago, but it didn't get much attention because I posted it at around 1AM.<p>I'm severely lacking in the UI and UX department. All of my time has been focused on the back end, so far. I'm looking for suggestions on how to make the message stream visually appealing and engaging, too! :)<p>The fun part! Check it out, let me know what you think:<p>http://useradius.com/
http://useradius.com/map (fun page, simply shows all messages from anywhere, as they come in)
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printerjam
The UI/UX is really nice. Give yourself some credit on that part.

One thing to keep in mind: CB worked because it was a communication tool for a
very specific community (truckers). You may want to start out with a user
niche to get initial traction.

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Skywing
Thanks. I have thought about which audiences to target initially. I think
students would be an easy early adopter crowd to pitch this to. I just need to
figure out how I can spread the word on my own campus.

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ecaroth
If you are targeting students, I think it would useful to allow an option
location input as well, so they can specify exactly where they are
broadcasting from in addition to the geolocation. AKA "University Center" or
"123 Science Hall" so the can more accurately tell where the people are they
are conversing with.

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Skywing
Cool idea. I'll see if I can work it in! Thanks.

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Skywing
click: <http://useradius.com/> <http://useradius.com/map>

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ecaroth
why not use fallback IP-addy based geolocation if the browser's isn't
available? And a fallback for no websocket support?

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Skywing
I plan to, in the future. Both of those features are essentially layers on top
of my current set of features. I've only got a small number of additional
things to add to what you see before I begin to go back and polish everything.
I'm still focusing on making the back end into something that can grow.

