Would love to know what you guys think.
Beware of the discontinuity @ 6:44 :) Sorry, no public demo available (yet).
"We don't really know what widgets are." Following on the point above, you're creating a platform (a non-specific, generic "thingy") for creating widgets (non-specific, generic "thingies") for the mobile web (something that's not even really defined properly yet. Non-specific businesses are almost without exception failures. Only huge businesses like Sun and Microsoft and Amazon can afford to release "platforms" without going broke.
Here's the most valuable advice you can get at this point if you want to build a start-up (that's a business, meaning it needs a path to making money) is:
Find one or two specific customers who have a need that this fills, and fill it, and get them to pay for it. Specific wins the day.
Since you've built a platform, you may well have to go one step closer to customers before you can help them. Design an application that people will be willing to pay for, using your (admittedly very cool) platform. Then, once you have your app and you have profits, over time you might want to open up the platform to other people.
Repeat once more: a business is an entity that makes money. A platform is not a business.
In fact, I ended up building this because I didn't want to pay for the other mobile services platforms (there are a few of them) when attempting to add mobile features to another project I'm experimenting with.
But to your original point, I absolutely agree, pitching this as a "mobile" "platform" for "widgets" is probably hopeless. Quite simply, it must solve somebody's problem. And I believe that we can get it to do just that. One area that we think is promising is using email to invoke applications that do interesting things because (1) everyone knows how to send email, and (2) you can attach lots of useful things to email.
So, what if we added the ability to recognize a ton of different file formats and allowed you to query the data within an attached file to invoke other web services?
For example, lets say you have a site that does group payments, and you want to let your users send you an Excel spreadsheet with the names of your friends and how much they owe you for that trip you just took together and automatically create an invoice on your site, and then notify everyone that they owe money. That seems interesting, and our product could support that pretty easily.
Anyways, it is definitely our immediate burden to focus this technology on solving _real_ problems.
If you've built most of a "platform", you should be in a good position to turn out cool apps quickly. Hide the platform, let people wonder why you're so good.
I would argue that a platform can make money if structured properly–most notably if it allows platform developers/users to make money and takes a cut (a la iPhone apps or iTunes music).
If his widget platform allowed widget developers to sell widgets and/or process transactions, then it most definitely could be a business.
Maybe our definition of "platform" is different.
If I use a service multiple times, I would already know what input the app needed. For example, "Weather NY".
everything@mybot.im .. instead of having 10 bots for 10 different things.. (would clutter things up pretty fast)
Just send an identifier to the bot when you first ping it to tell it what app you want to access.
On the backend, you'll definitely need sophisticated monitoring/resource allocation stuff once you have users, right?
I don't think we have the killer app yet, but we implemented a mobile interface to google calendar with ~5 lines of code which I've been using for a little while, and its surprisingly useful. When all is said and done, I think we might want to simply pitch this as a platform for adding mobile features to your existing app, so it becomes more of a developer tool than a consumer facing product.
As for monitoring, yes, it becomes a tricky task to achieve high availability (and scalability), but its a really fun problem to tackle :)
One good example might be ordering a pizza at a party. It is loud and you don't know the address. You can start texting a pizza place your order and let some other aspect of the application handle the GPS position.
Anyway, it looks like you guys have been doing a good job so if this idea makes you millions or something feel free to send an email or something ;)
How you turn this into a business is another problem but I think you will probably see people picking up on the ideas here and rapidly creating their own innovations. That might seem like a bad thing, but I think it's good because it means you've come up with something very powerful.
Probably the most interesting thing to me is the subset / scripting language that makes interacting with various services and providing the backend infrastructure for performing that automation.
Good luck!
Meaning: I'll happily take a look at your site, and have many times in the past here. What I don't want to do is sit through a video that I can't jump around, explore, and so on, like I might with a site, or a brief article.
Don't know how you can make money though :(
