This is the first time I am coming across this, and I wonder if it works on mobile (saw the webcam feature on the site). Also, as an sdk, integration to mechanical turk would be great so you could workflow it through moderation. Also, document format conversion (not just images) would be great if you piped them through Google drive somehow...
As long as big companies are adopting mobile as a service channel, there will be a market for click to call. Their army of reps in a low cost location somewhere won't worry about floodgates opening. It will take you into the large enterprise space where the big bucks are. Good luck!
Yes. Single founders can build successful companies. It is what keeps me going. I am not successful yet, but I have been at it for 4 years, and I haven't had the fight kicked out of me yet.
What makes it harder for me is that I am not a technical founder. I am a product founder with vision. I can rent programmers, but I can't rent vision. I can't rent hunger. I can't rent ambition. I can't rent tenacity. These are the things that a founder brings to the table. There's nothing that guarantees that a crowd of 4 founders has this in greater force than a single motivated founder. If I had listened to advice like this, I would not have invested my life's savings to build a consumer proposition currently in private beta, and already making a couple of bucks a month per user.
You sound like a motivated and hard working person who is totally into what you're doing. Why care what other people think?
Whether you're lone or part of a team, entrepreneurship is a lonely road. Only your own faith and strength will give you the staying power. And as long as you're not doggedly chasing a poor idea or paying the price of being a lone wolf with poor execution...
The functionality is handy, but it is down to the execution of each app developer to decide if this goes the annoying hosting-provider-chat-with-our-advisor thing, or genuine customer/prospect management. There's definitely a gap in the market in real time customer conversations on mobile, which is counter-intuitive of everything being more immediate on the mobile. Integrating with a click-to-call VOIP feature would be neat. Even if it is just a Skype implementation.
I estimate I have around $200 a month in EBS costs for volumes and their backups that need cleaning up, if I can get round to it. But there's just me in my startup, and I have no choice but to leave it lying around for the moment. But the lesson is that what I spend on that in a year (if I leave it that long) will pay for a temp resource for a month easily. That's a lot of harm things lying around can do to a cash strapped startup.
Very nice as a hack. I am not sure about the usability of it, and a lot of the comments already capture that. If you really wanted to hack this, how about the following:
1. You package it as an app (not that hard to do, from where you'll be starting)
2. You let people set parameters for how often they want to be notified, for which city and in which scale
3. You use the push notification feature to push them the notifications as per their settings.
But all that's just trying to create the better weather app/notifier. And there's tons of ways to do that.
What you've done is really cool with the icon becoming the widget, and for that, it is a great idea. Makes me think what else you could be using this hack for - not just weather. Imagine sponsorship space - share icon space with main advertiser for a content app. Or display your high score in a game. Or show the last badge you earned in a gamified app....the possibilities are endless. Very cool hack!
I use a similar one to access Facebook when traveling to China.