Thank you for taking the time to write all this great feedback.
I am very appreciative.
Photos: Yes I actually recently added support for photos. It just resizes them to 1080p resolution. So not very flexible but all software must start somewhere. Give it a shot? They tend to be around 0.1MB.
I bought the domain 8mb.app .. maybe should switch names since it does more then video?
What kind of watermark do you want to add? text? graphic?
What video resolution do you want? Right now it reduces video to 720p, or keeps it the same if already smaller.
> It would be nice to see the options before I click upload file.
What do you mean?
> Perhaps it would be nice to add some javascript trick to change the link from "Download xyz.mp4" to "You have already downloaded the video. Click here to upload a new one."
Yes! Good idea! Will do.
> Perhaps it should be something like "8mb.uploaded_file_name.mp4".
That would make sense. I will consider it.
If you have more feedback, I'm listening because those were great points.
The neat thing is that incoming bandwidth to AWS is free, so people upload 100's of megabytes and we only get billed for the 8MB we send back. (CPU time/cost to transcode is negligible).
Let novice users (or even lazy pros) create a professional quality podcast without needing extra software or hosting.
Re: upload an audio file
Soundcloud built their business around doing just this, albeit for a different market. They do support Podcasts but you can tell from the interface it is meant for music primarily.
I'm not saying there's not a market here -- I'd like to hear more details (especially as someone starting a podcast).
Your landing page doesn't provide any information, and I'm still unclear what the specific pains you're solving are?
There's already several podcast-specific hosting companies (libsyn, blubrry, acast, buzzsprout), so what are you adding?
There's the RSS feed management and submitting to iTunes (most of the above have that).
On the audio creation part, there's Auphonic (automatic leveling and some mixing) and not much else (that I'm aware of) that's automated.
From my point of view, editing, transcribing, splicing ads, chapter-marking, compiling show notes, etc., are all manual processes right now, so automating or streamlining them would be great.
Something on the ads/sponsor side of things would be valuable: Google had tried doing this for radio spots back in the mid 2000's, but it flopped (not enough good inventory, among other things). I think with podcasts, there's a market that could be created.
I've made a website that gives you a disposable phone number, similiar to popular mobile apps (Burner, Extra Phone Number, etc.) (The latter of which I built.)
For HN only (I haven't posted this anywhere else yet) you can use the service for free (yes you will get a disposable phone number to use how you like). Just click Purchase Credits and use the credit card number 4111111111111111. I will disable this once I get enough testers.
If you do sign up, please try it out and report feedback, since it does cost me money to tun.
There is also https://dash.by which works with many cheap OBDII devices, including Bluetooth ones. I was actually about to get started with them, but your setup is actually a cool idea. That is to say, you are combining an OBDII dongle and a cheap phone into what is essentially a single "device" which is actually internet connected.
My suggestion would be to research Automatic and Dash and see if you can improve on their setup by bundling all three components into one: try to actually create a device that combines and OBDII dongle, a GPRS modem, a GPS chip, etc. Also see if you can find and white label a cellular provider similar to RingPlus do you can do the whole thing as a service: $5/month plus a $100 device is not a bad deal.
I have one from 2008, which I don't use anymore. It speaks NMEA and it sends the data over GPRS. I guess there are 3G devices now. An advantage of GPRS is that it's everywhere (at least in Europe) because basically it's data over GSM. It's cheap. A data only SIM with 2 MB per month per year (yes MB) was 12 Euro per year. But you're not sending many positions and it's few bytes per position. I made a site like gping.io back then. Not enough customers but it could be different now.
A word of caution for any kind of GPS device, phone included. The GPS antenna needs to see the sky, best if a lot of sky. The roof of the car is enough to severely shield the GPS signal. You need assisted GPS then.
I agree users will want something better. I want to learn a little more about who the potential users are before implementing an authentication system for them.
For example, if this were to be strictly a consumer app, then Google or Facebook auth would make sense. If this ends up being used by businesses, that speaks to another solution perhaps.
I agree the connection is weak. The similarity is that both services provide a short URL for a resource. In the case of TinURL, it is a longer URL. In the case of gping.io, it is your vehicle.
Gimme a mulligan on the tagline and I promise to come up with something better :)
Why are people so hung up on the url? What's important is the information that you can access. Its like describing Facebook as a set of urls for people
