Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/05/track-hurricanes-on-stormpulse/

by sheats • 18 years ago

32 36 18 years ago

Wow, that is crazy cool. Well done.

wensing10• 18 years ago

Thanks. My friend (who is joining the Stormpulse effort) submitted this article but the site was co-founded by myself and another fellow out of Chicago. Just as a bit of background, we started collecting data for this in 2004.

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of work. If you don't mind my asking, what's the exit strategy here? Sell/partner with a newscast? Charge for premium data?

maxklein2• 18 years ago

Nice work, both on getting techcrunched and on contining work on the site. And I see the site is popular, I wouldn't have thought it, considering the limited demographic.

Anyways, congrats and do milk the techcrunch traffic!

wensing10• 18 years ago

I grew up in South Florida, so I figured it would be popular down here. But we are blown away lately by the amount of nation-wide and international interest. TV stations in Washington state have hurricane coverage. Who'd have thought that?

dkokelley• 18 years ago

People love emergencies (meaning that everyone wants to watch and see if this will be another Katrina). It's kinda sad, but national emergencies get great ratings - everyone wants to know what's happening, especially considering Katrina and the recent devastation.

jonknee2• 18 years ago

You probably don't live in hurricane country. When there is a storm bearing down it's the most important thing in the world to potentially millions of people. One of our local papers teamed up with these guys and were linking them quite a bit (perhaps in a frame, I don't remember) when Fay was coming our way. It's a handy site.

So perhaps a limited demographic, but hurricanes are huge news a few times a year and as such get a lot of mindshare.

froo2• 18 years ago

You know, there's probably an idea in there.

The stormpulse guys could perhaps build a widget that news & nedia sites could embed into their stories so there is instant tracking for each storm right there on the page.

davidw3• 18 years ago

My brother recently moved to Ft. Myers, Florida, from Oregon. It's kind of weird because all of a sudden hurricanes are not just some event that is on the TV thousands of kilometers from my friends and family. I actually read a bit about them now rather than just sort of glancing and saying "huh... that's going to be a mess".

sanj• 18 years ago

Any comments on why you think you weren't accepted?

wensing10• 18 years ago

I don't know for sure. I imagine there were a number of things not working in our favor. I don't want to suggest anything unfounded, but what I can say for sure is that I wasn't willing to move to Boston/SF (I am happily married with two wonderful children and settled in West Palm Beach, FL).

Also, we did apply late, and rumor has it that late applications aren't treated as thoroughly.

davidw3• 18 years ago

"Not willing to relocate for 3 months" seems to be pretty critical, even more so than single founders.

scott_s• 18 years ago

Not relocating makes sense, in your case. Not many people in silicon valley care about hurricanes.

npk• 18 years ago

Gosh, I remember providing feedback for this site way back when. It's been much improved. Clearly stormpulse is a labor of love and hard work. Congrats.

davidw3• 18 years ago

Check and see what advice they ended up taking:-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29516

maxklein2• 18 years ago

Oh vey, I see I was as impolite 443 days ago as I am today. But I didn't say it was a bad idea, it just is not something that is relevant to me.

wallflower• 18 years ago

TipJoy: "$1299.05 from 479 people" I think it's safe to say that perhaps this application might be breaking TipJoy into the mainstream (e.g. hurricane-news-hungry public).

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

Yeah, we're delighted by the community's response to Tipjoy. I think one reason they are doing well is the blog post about it: http://stormpulse.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/like-stormpulse-l...

But I should mentioned that you'd need to add at least 3 zeros to that total amount to consider Tipjoy close to mainstream.

j2d2• 18 years ago

Smart of them to give the interface a 24 type look. I think I'll dub it the SutherFace.

Everyone using it, in the back of their mind, will think they have access to the whole world, even if it's only displaying the weather.

wensing10• 18 years ago

I've actually never seen an episode. :-)

spydez• 18 years ago

How did the TC guy get both storms on the same map? Every link I click only ever shows one storm at a time...

I wanna track Ike and Hanna on one map like he did...

wensing10• 18 years ago

That was a bleature, but we could re-introduce something like that down the road (we've gotten a number of requests for it).

josefresco• 18 years ago

Very nice site, and in the same industry as my startup...

/begin shameless self promotion/ www.OtherWeather.com /end/

Would love to have reports from people in the path on my site as well.

snewe• 18 years ago

Blogspam:

http://www.stormpulse.com/

ajkirwin2• 18 years ago

Does this automatically update? I'd love to have it constantly running on a spare computer, just showing storm data.

wensing10• 18 years ago

Yes, although it only runs on our servers, unless we were to share the code. Alternatively, you can start collecting it from the NWS and build your own. :-)

ajkirwin2• 18 years ago

Ah, I meant more as in, if I were to keep stormpulse.com open all the time, would it automatically refresh and update and such?

Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse

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