node.js ko
Ron Hornbaker
Entrepreneur-in-residence, Sequoia Capital
Votes (12)
I love this. One of those ideas that seems so obvious that it should have been done by now.
It has big potential, and wish you the best of luck getting it off the ground.
I love this. I think I love the idea of giving others tasks more than them giving them to me, though. A little scary. :)
Great video, great name, great design. This has real potential. I'd recommend making mobile apps asap, and drop the FB login requirement. Try to leverage mobile contact lists for virality.
Good luck!
petrbela
contestantThank you very much. Especially for suggesting the importance of mobile, we haven't thought about it that way yet but it can really be the key platform here.
Okay, this is pretty neat. :) Great design (love the Cinzel font), and it's an innovative twist away from virtually all other social games.
If you can figure out a way to make it really engaging long-term... maybe look at some mechanics from Spore where your world evolves... it has potential. And you'd be riding on the momentum of Farmville decay, where FB users are looking for something new and different.
Watched the video. It was about twice as long as necessary, and a little over-produced with the titles and soundtrack. Get right to the meat of the product, and a human voice would be great.
Tried to login with Twitter, but got "Internal Server Error"
That said, I've wanted to see a product like this for a long time. I think of it more as "live blogging" than "streaming", so you may want to consider using those words. But there's a real business to be made here if you can be a live-blogging platform that can be used by anyone.
Good luck!
jfromaniello
contestantthank you Ron for the tips, I agree with you that voice will be much better
About the terminology, I think I agree with you "streaming" sounds more like video or something like that
thank you very much
Tons of potential here. Great design so far. Suggestions:
Default to 16 segments (natural 4/4 with 16th notes) - your default of 12 is a "weird" time signature for pop music
The instrument selections for "kick", "snare", and "bass" were all pretty lousy, and I was unable to scroll past the bottom where the list clearly extended. Curate this list, and don't give so many options. Put only the best instruments up top, and have only 10-12 choices. Perhaps default to a complete kit with drums, bass, guitar and keyboards so you don't lose users' attention early.
The big dealbreaker for me: there's a noticeable delay when the loop repeats, making it sound completely unnatural and something I wouldn't use. Hope that's solvable. (I'm on latest Chrome on a 2011 MacBook Air.)
Overall, love the simplicity and design. Just need to work on the initial user experience, minimize the options and work needed to get a good beat going fast, and solve the timing delay.
Nice design! More polished than most entries, and you're building on a proven engaging game concept. Hope you get enough traction so it's easy to join other players... perhaps you can get an AI opponent up and running to engage solo players in the interim?
After trying and failing to play on my Mac, then trying and failing with my iPhone from my office chair, I figured out I had to get up and move to where the zombies are. (I'm a little slow.)
Your video didn't help your cause much, as the tiny screen on the right was too small to figure out. Best way to demo would be a camera facing down at the mobile device as you walked around IRL, and make it nearly fill the screen.
There's something here, but you've got to make it engaging to a stationary player. Perhaps an attack from a distance. And let me play at my desk, from my browser, somehow.
Gotta lower the barriers to play entry to build up some critical mass of players.
stringhq
contestantThanks for the feedback, we'll definitely enable a static playing feature as it has been a recurring issue.
I'm skeptical of the main thesis, that breaking up a story into chunks and branches makes the story better.
The design was confusing, and the titles of leaflets overlapping one another made it look broken. I didn't log in due to the FB requirement, but got the gist of what was going on.
I see the value in good conversation tools on the web; imo good threaded comment forums like Reddit with voting and algorithmic surfacing of the best comments are the current state of the art.
I think you're on to something here, and the tech is cool, but I'm not sure it's best applied to story telling or capturing conversations. It reminds me most of mind-mapping applications for brainstorming purposes.
evolvingtech
contestantThanks for your vote
Very nice! Love the idea of mining Twitter to surface interesting content, and you've done a nice job keeping the design clean and simple.
The content was a little thin at points (only 2 videos for Pets & Animals?), and it'd be nice to see some meta data on the videos (how many ranking points, when it was spotted, how long the video is, etc).
imsky
contestantThere is actually an analytics backend that just needed a UI, but we ran out of time. As far as an even distribution of content, I agree, it would be useful to have videos in less-tweeted categories have shorter expiry times. Thank you for your vote!
Really impressive tech! Using my iPhone 5, was tough to figure out the controller inputs to get my ship to move predictably, but was reasonably responsive to input. Perhaps a quick visual tutorial at the start to show the proper movements?
I could see this getting some traction if it's polished up and you can keep the latency down even with heavy traffic.
Okay, that's pretty cool tech! There weren't any others around, so I played it by myself. I found it even more fun to goof around with than Apple's Photo Booth, which is saying something. I think it will be more popular when played alone than with others.
Suggestions: 1) spiffy up the design, make it more compact to fit on narrower screens; 2) the "snap" and "stitch" buttons had no meaning to me, and there was no indication of anything working when they were clicked. Make it One button, maybe called "Capture", then show a spinner below while it's working. And figure out an easier way to save the image than clicking on it and using Ctrl-S in the browser – ship it up to S3 or Imgur or something and return a short URL to it. For extra credit, return 3 sizes of gifs. Put a small domain name in the lower right corner and BOOM, viral. :)
Great job overall!
Couldn't get the video to work, and nobody else was around, but I love the name, logo, and concept. Kind of a blend of chat roulette and turntable. It could really take off if you nail the execution.