sashthebash

"She can do this from anywhere"... that's often the problem.

I can work from anywhere and I'm currently single, so I'm traveling the world and living in different places (currently Buenos Aires), but a partner would make this much harder as they are usually not as flexible.

Startup idea: Have a dating site for location-independent individuals, I'll be your first customer :).

What kind of content do you have that is this large? Please send me an email at sascha at thriventures dot com and we can talk about your custom requirements.

We are looking into an import function. Currently you can use the Ruby Gem to import data with a small script. This is not perfect but should help in the meantime.

You can also directly use the RESTful API from your server, query content and serve websites in HTML.

Thanks for your feedback!

The iPhone Meetup is on the list for the next Bay area visit.

Thanks. We would love to get some feedback from you on how it is going.

We currently focus our marketing efforts on mobile apps, as this is the most obvious use case for us currently.

But actually you can of course use the CMS from wherever you want to. We already have some websites that pull content via the RESTful API. You can even use JSON-P to load content in the browser dynamically from Javascript across domains (think of widgets).

I can also imagine that our system is useful for desktop apps or games.

Please give it a try and report back if it fulfills your requirements.

We use MongoDB in the backend ourselves. But neither MongoDB nor CouchDB provide a nice interface for editors.

You cannot ask non-technical content editors to edit JSON manually and they don't want to edit content in a technical phpMyAdmin-like interface (believe me, we tried!).

We provide an easy way for an administrator/developer to set up collections for different content types. They can choose between many different basic (strings, integers, ...) and advanced (attachment, image, location) fields and configure how editors can enter the content into the fields (including validations, so that an URL field really contains a valid URL).

Developers can then query the content from their mobile applications on different platforms. In the future we will also provide open-source libraries for iOS/Android to make the integration even easier.

Our solution helps developers to quickly integrate managed content into their mobile applications. The managed content is created and edited by editors in our CMS, and the developers can then query the CMS with our RESTful JSON API.

CouchDB is useful for storing content like high scores into a central database from your mobile app, but you cannot use it to easily provide a nice interface for editors to manage news stories or points of interests (maybe you have a google map in your app that shows store locations). This is what we focus on, a flexible CMS for mobile apps with a nice interface for editors and not only a nice API for developers.

S3 on the other hand is useful to store files. You can also upload static JSON or XML files there, but how do your editors manage those? They cannot edit them manually and static files don't provide search capabilities from the app (e.g. only give me store locations around the user's current location).

This is what we used to do with Rails. But the backends were never a priority and ended up being hackish and hard to use for editors, so in the end the devs were editing the content... urg.

Hosting and maintaining those backends hasn't been fun either, in our opinion mobile devs are better off using our service. They get a better solution faster.

This is our plan. We are also already looking into creating a white label solution for agencies (cms.myagency.com), so that they can resell it to their customers without our branding.

Clickable: http://storageroomapp.com

I love the idea to show today + x days in the future and not the past.

Can somebody please build a better calendar for OS X?

Am I the only person on HN that just happily uses the default color schemes that comes with editors?

A nice interface suggestion just came up on Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/skype-5

I think it is targeted at larger companies and HP is also not only providing the infrastructure but additional software by the hour as well.

The HP website is so chaotic due to the many sub-organizations and regions fighting for attention (I worked in the HP web team in 2007/2008).

See http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/microsoft_news/s... for the services back then, I think Amazon EC2 didn't even exist at that time.

It was just not called "cloud computing".

HP already had cloud services in 2006 called Flexible Computing Services when I worked there as an intern.

These services still exists (maybe with a different name), I have friends working in those departments.

But Leo is new and HP is big, he probably didn't know about them ;).

Could they please not make everything gray scale like the new iTunes?!

Shameless but on-topic plug: If you have content that needs to be displayed within both apps you could check out the flexible CMS my startup just created for mobile applications: http://storageroomapp.com.

We are currently testing the system, let me know if I should invite you to the beta.

Does this have some form of git support?

In a couple of weeks I will launch http://storageroomapp.com and a little later move to Buenos Aires for a couple of months and work from there.

This of course has disadvantages, I cannot speak to local customers in person, but on the other hand living is much cheaper and more interesting than at the current place I call home.

I wouldn't want to manage a startup while traveling from place to place, but I think it should be no problem to just work from somewhere else and do weekend trips. This is exciting enough for me and I think I can get to know the world better with a couple of short term stays than traveling non-stop.

If I feel I need to go home to make progress, I go home, otherwise I will continue to live in different places all around the world.

Also living in Germany... I ordered it a couple of months ago from Cafepress (http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch.58024175).

It was a reasonable price and shipping was actually very fast and not too expensive. Give it a shot, it's worth it.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't know futon. It seems to be something like a phpmyadmin for CouchDB, isn't it?

Futon/phpmyadmin are great for entering or checking data as a developer or system administrator, but I think they are too complicated and technical for the average non-techie to manage content. That's why I built my solution.

Or can you configure Futon to have a really simple interface and also force it to only allow entry for specific keys in a document?

The screenshots are from an unfinished ugly prototype. I thought I blur them, otherwise ppl would have seen them and said they look terrible. Before I finalize the application I wanted to get some feedback first.

It probably was the wrong choice, I will post the original screenshots with the next deploy.

Replace "end user" with "a member of your team that edits the content" and your description is correct.

I don't know if the developer will then be sipping daquiris at the beach if he doesn't have to take care about managing the content himself, but he will have more time for more important work :).

This is great. I will try to implement this in the next release.

A free self-hosted solution is definitely competition. But many people will probably still think it is convenient to use a hosted service and pay for it.

It's the same with Gmail, salesforce, 37signals products and many other services. There are almost always free open-source alternatives, but not everybody wants to deal with installation, hosting and maintenance of those solutions.

Thanks for the feedback.

I blurred the screenshots as they didn't look nice. I just have an ugly prototype so far. I wanted to ask for more feedback and validate the market more before spending more time on making the system nicer.

Currently you cannot sign up. You can only enter your email in a list and get notified when the product launches.

Separating the application itself from the database is an interesting idea. But then you would still need to host a database yourself somewhere. If you don't trust me you must also be afraid of me messing up your own database with my solution (My solution would need write access).

A lot of mobile application developers are probably not experts in server management and backups. It is not their priority and core competence. They want to build great applications quickly.

My solution gives them an easy to use CMS with a REST API for a low monthly cost, and they don't have to care about backing up data themselves. If they don't fully trust me, they can export their data from the CMS regularly themselves, so in a worst case scenario they still have their content.

It's MongoDB, not CouchDB. And imho the benefit is that you don't have to host it yourself and you don't have to write the "x", the nice interface to manage all that data.

Because it is great to have the data in your database, but how do you or better an editor change it (I think hackers don't like editing content all day long and editors don't like to enter content in something like phpmyadmin).