If it's not a big project, I think you will be good with Express. I've never taken the time to get deep on it, but it seems like the default framework for Node projects, and is easy to use, especially compared to Django :)
Cool, I'm going through the tutorial guide thing right now. We're ramping up on some big Javascript projects right now for incidenttech and this might be a good chance to learn more about node :)
Django wasn't too bad, I would compare it to Cake, but then again it's been a while!
Of course I have some vested interest in that... But I do think Lit Motors is pretty cool, the new Makerbot Replicator (although I've had limited personal success with it), the new Sifteo is awesome, and I've seen some really amazing early projects that might not make it this year but have some really great promise.
Haven't had a chance to play with the Leapmotion, but that seems like it's really awesome too.
I see this as a very welcome addition to the public stance of Kickstarter with regards to physical products (which it's been relatively quiet about). One of the reasons we chose Kickstarter as a platform to get our product off the ground was the fact that it would allow us flexibility and freedom to get our prototypes to full scale manufacturing, which were already relatively mature in their stage of production (tooling already complete, near final hardware etc).
Lots of things can go wrong at every stage after you have a final production sample. You still need to get the sample certified by a number of governing bodies, set up QC and shipping, and in the case of overseas manufacturing deal with the freight/customs and finally fulfillment of the product.
I'm happy that Kickstarter is taking more of stance on the subject, as we've had to in many cases provide "returns" to people or deal with "customer service" style requests, which we've done in good faith but it really misses the point of launching a product on Kickstarter.
I think this stance will really help back up projects when they need to make an adjustment, or have to deal with something unexpected. Also, it should improve the quality of projects moving forward by making people more skeptical and aware of the time/cost-instability of the manufacturing process. We were lucky to hit a pretty happy medium with regards to initial volume, and unlike some of the blockbuster projects when we have to change things we don't end up on TechCrunch for it, only the Guardian :)
We literally got buried by all of the outreach and attention due to layering the Disrupt / Kickstarter launch, so sorry about the crazy delay...
The dock is removable, you can pop it out using a flat head screw driver pretty quickly. There's a cavity in the body and we're actually making a small change to the design of how the electronics are integrated into the dock itself instead of the underlying assembly so that if the 30 pin changes we can adapt to it. Another benefit is that through a generic expansion port we could also support other phones / devices.
The ability to dock the phone into the body was a really awesome experience, which is why we did it even with the risk of making people concerned with the form factor dependency. However, the gTar has a USB port so you can hook it up to any device that supports USB hosting. This is possible with most iOS devices with the aid of a camera adapter kit. We might eventually be able to produce such a special cable allowing you to hook it up directly to an iOS device.
The gTar tech was not originally intended to be for iPhone, that was a bit of an unintentional pivot we made when we met with a particular iOS app company we had a lot of respect for and wanted to impress them. Long story short, they weren't impressed but our next investor meeting went much better than those before it.
Either this is a bad idea, or it's a bad execution of a good idea. I don't really believe in bad ideas to be honest.
There's no real experience here, as well as no real novelty. I have my own ideas of how this might be made to be useful, but I think you should give a real hard think as to the following questions
- what is, step by step, the user experience like?
- how are they getting to your page in the first place
- what is their response when they see your page
- what is their response when they use the page (what do they click, read etc)
- what brings them back the second time, time after that?
- why would they refer others to your page?
- what problem are you solving for them and how can they not get this anywhere else?
I'll give you one point that I noticed. W(hy)TF are the emotions in text format? No one likes to write "happy" when they can ::ninja:: something, also it's much easier to click in a sea of emoticons than to find an arbitrary emotion in a list.
Soundcloud has offices in London. They just opened up a new office in SF recently as well. But you're right in that their main HQ is definitely in Berlin, although were originally founded in Sweden!
Thanks for posting this. I'm not too knowledgable about the burn rate of others, but I know that we've kept ours very low. Much of this was motivated by the fact that we have a serious hardware play, and lots of our seed capital is allocated towards that.
Regardless, when the problems are interesting and hard enough, we find that our clamp on spending is a really great recruiting filter. The people that join the team are truly passionate about our product and technology. It's painful at times, but spoiled grapes don't taste very good either.
Lots of large VCs will invest as little as $100K to both get in for the next round as well as provide the team with resources they may need that are non-monetary, some will even take on advisory roles.
Investing isn't about the amount at the seed stage. An investor at the seed stage gets a whole lot more equity for their buck earlier on, so they should provide value over that of what the money will get you.
I'm really keen on trying out node.js, have you heard much about Express? Might give that a shot, and if I hit a wall might switch.