biggitybones

Thanks for the feedback!

Right now the site is completely free and will remain that way for students. The next release will include a variety of improvements aimed at teachers, and we plan to incorporate a freemium model of sorts that allows teachers to use the current feature-set for free for a set number of courses, while paying for unlimited use and the more advanced features.

As for marketing, we plan to meet with a few teachers in the NYC area to get a feel for what they would want / need and then promote it through schools in the area. We feel that teachers are becoming more and more familiar with the feel of web applications, especially those recently into the profession. The key for us is to create supporters out of this demographic and work from there.

Everytime I come across this I have to go to the wikipedia page to check the grammar.

I find these types of sentences incredibly creative (and confusing).

A similar thing, inspired by buffalo and illustrated: http://myapokalips.com/show/15#comic

All the flash (or lack there of) got me excited, but there are a few glaring questions left unanswered:

1) Support for multi-tasking? This is a must on something like this. Perhaps they want to ensure performance of single applications by restricting multi-tasking?

2) Flash support? When Steve was browsing the flash plugin was missing... another must on a device that is trying to act as an intermediary between laptop and phone, primarily for web usage.

3) All of the focus on the iPad as an e-reader is neglecting the fact that the screen will be difficult to read off of. The screens of Kindles and Sony e-reader products are the major attraction, in my opinion. There's no way I could read for several hours on a backlit screen.

It's a great multimedia device, and has some awesome practical implications. However, I think the things I listed above are big time issues for the intentions of this device.

Volunteer Match is great.. I worked with a non-profit to redesign their web site and it was a great experience.

Thanks for this link - I'm usually leery of simple domains that have a link to retail, so I probably would have ignored it in a google search. It seems like a great starting point.

I've been struggling with this one for a while, and finally realized that it's just an easy way of avoiding getting my hands dirty and a form of procrastination. There's really nothing bad that can come out of designing and building an app from start to finish, even if you're the only one whoever uses it. I finally dove into my first full app and if nothing else it's a great hobby and gives me something to look forward to after work.

That being said, I'm still of the thought that an identical clone isn't something worth sinking hundreds of hours into; I think you need at least SOMETHING that is different (if only just a bit). Example: After a recent 2 week cross country road trip, I created a quick and dirty travel log to track our adventure on our web comic site. When we got back, I planned to implement this as a web app, but discovered Everlater, which does EXACTLY what I wanted to write (even down to the exact target markets and usages..). Reading their development blog felt like they were stealing the thoughts out of my head, so when it gets to that point I think finding another idea is best.

Ideas are a dime a dozen - if you need help, just use this list http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html.

Didn't mean to come off too negatively about it. While I stand by my point about the feasibility of these things, this is the type of creativity necessary to encourage better behavior with respect to the environment.

Entertaining and something that may be popular at first, but unfortunately something like this isn't scalable (the novelty would wear off, not to mention cost needs to be taken into account).

The concept that fun encourages more participation is sound, but just like tourist traps it will only encourage first time use and not much after, IMHO.

This is another example of a company trying to price software like its a physical product.

The justification for the price is laughable; just because it contains more features than an unrelated product (for which it is not even a feasible replacement) is not going to convince someone to pay for an iPhone app 25-50x the normal going price.

I'm venturing a guess here by saying that a good portion of the market for graphing calculators is comprised of high school and college students, and I don't know of one teacher who would allow an iPhone during a calculus or physics test.