A post-hoc analysis, part 2

As I wrote in my last blog post, around 3 years ago I decided to try to build a budgeting service like mint.com for the norwegian market. After around a year, having reached the prototype stage, I decided to take a short break from further building, to think about the business details. This quickly turned into an … extended break.

In this post I’ll write out some of the reasons I stopped working on it, and finally, some lessons learned.

A post-hoc analysis, part 1

So, it’s been over a year since I “took a break” from working on my stealth startup project, and I guess it’s safe to say that I’m not going to pick it up again. Around 3 years ago, inspired by the success of the personal budgeting service mint.com in the US, and wanting something similar myself, I started investigating possibilities for making a personal budgeting service for the norwegian market. I ended up working on the project in my spare time for over a year.

In this post I’ll go through the challenges I encountered, some of the solutions, and in a later post I’ll go through the reasons I stopped working on it, and some lessons learned.

So, I was browsing exp.lore.com and came across these nifty little usb-sticks a couple of days ago. Huh, that’s a pretty decent just-in-time gift I thought - might be an idea to buy a couple of them for those occasions where you don’t really have time to buy a gift for someone. So I click the link, and end up on the fine site fab.com. For a brief couple of seconds, I see the beautiful website they seem to have prepared for me. I even manage to get a glimpse of the notification “Sale Ends in 3 hours”. Ooh, I must be quick! Unbeknownst to me, that will be the last I ever see of their sweet shop, at least in a functional state.

A lot of new exciting standards are coming to browsers these days, among them the WebRTC standard, which adds support for streaming video and audio from native devices such as a webcamera. One of the exciting things that this enables, is so called head tracking. We decided to do a little demonstration of this for the Opera 12 release, which is the first desktop browser to support video-streaming via the getUserMedia API.