thehickmans

Accounting/record keeping/informatics systems, industrial controls - anything that would lead to a catastrophic loss of some kind.

Did you do any validation on the book idea before you started writing? How much time did you invest before you decided to publish it?

What was the response like when you originally posted on Reddit? Which subreddit did you post in?

Reddit seems like a great place to test ideas, but I'd be concerned about being labelled as a spammer.

Another point - I agree that adding customer reviews would be a nice addition, but how about a twist - allow for "trip advisor" style reviews to show off the designer's end product. This niche has a large emotional buying component to it and so a story and pictures would lend itself better than a 5 star system.

First, beautiful design and implementation!

A couple ideas for growing and monetizing:

- partner with wedding planners to help grow your community of designers and users - start subtle (prime placement or pro's choice) advertising relationships with magazines, planners, and other communities - expand to include other aspects of the wedding "package", i.e photographers, florists, dressmakers/designers

I did a few quick searches and Vancouver would be at 25 on their scale for a single-family detached house. That's using a median listing price of $900,000 and median rent of about $3000/month.

The data is out there and the Canadian real estate sales market could certainly use the shakeup of someone like Trulia.

Plug and Play Tech Center is supposed to be opening a branch office here, but nothing concrete has happened AFAIK.

What an excellent app, great job!

Have you thought about adding a social angle, i.e. allowing users to make comments on or recommend specific seats? Perhaps another heatmap layer to display desirability?

Personal beef - Rogers Arena in Vancouver is "Seating Chart Pending" with no ETA... coming soon?

You could combine IP geolocation and caller ID phone verification. Geolocate the user's IP during the sign-up process and provide the user a code to activate their account through a 1-800. Compare their area code against the location they provided and see if they're close enough to trust.

Thanks for the painfully juvenile replies, guys. I was looking for something more insightful than the press releases and media coverage that turn up in search results.

That is fun to play with! It reminds me of Circuit Simulator? from the MacPlus days.

I think you should make the simulator stopped/active control more obvious.

This idea has a lot of potential, especially if you were to focus on a few situations that I've seen over and over in the corporate world. The most common scenario I've seen is data coming in an extract format like CSV, containing information required for another business process. You've got data coming from an expense reporting web app that needs to processed before entries can be made into an accounting system. A spreadsheet or database is created by a computer-savvy manager, and a clerk uses it on a weekly basis to do their work of posting entries. If the data format changes, the manager tweaks macros and formulas to adjust, and life goes on. Any new clerks coming on board learn how to use "the spreadsheet" and the business process keeps chugging along. Change managers, and 9 times out of 10, a lack of documentation and knowledge transfer will cause things to blow up in a short period of time. If you were to introduce a tool that exposes the funky macros and formulas in a more visual, understandable fashion, I think it becomes more easily maintainable. Providing some data validation, error handling and notifications would be valuable. Finally, provide some version control to prevent accidental deletion or modification of important functions. The key would be a much better user experience than the Excel function editor.