Exciting news! My friend and longtime colleague Steve Doss and I have been working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week non-stop (except Thanksgiving Day) to build what we think is a pretty remarkable (in many ways) new mobile app - SeeqPod Mobile for Windows Mobile.
We wanted to get the word out that we’re giving away free downloads of the app starting today (we’ll start selling it for $9.95 on Monday, which is still about half of what most Windows Mobile apps cost, and this one is way cooler).
Steve and I have been collaborators for several years. I did all of the design and user experience architecture, putting everything I know about making a great product cool and easy to use. Steve’s been a successful mobile app designer (he’s an artist, musician, programmer, and all-around genius renaissance guy). He figured out how to do lots of things that other apps don’t do on the Windows Mobile platform.
We’ve built in a range of interchangeable color themes and skins, including a Steampunk skin (in honor of Boing Boing fans everywhere). The architecture allows customizability, so eventually we will have many skins available and people will be able to add to a growing collection of skins.
We also support both QVGA (320×240) and VGA (640×480) displays, which will be cool for people with the newest generation of Windows Mobile phones.
The village has a population of around 800 and is located 690 meters above sea level and lies in a valley between two mountain ranges (the reason for the low temperatures). The name Oymyakon means “non-freezing water” because of the natural hot spring close to the village.
The temperature this week is pretty low and the temperature tomorrow is a chilly -63C which based on the stats at Wikipedia equals the record low for December.
As I was making bath bombs to give for Christmas I felt a little heartburn. I reached for the Alka Seltzer… Wow… $8.99 for 36 tablets! One dose is made of 2 tablets, so that comes to 50 cents per dose. Then I looked at the active ingredients. Citric acid and sodium bicarbonate. Exactly what I was using for the bath bombs! Sour salt and baking soda! I made a rapid calculation: one dose comes to 2 grams of citric acid, and 3.88 grams of baking soda. If I figure that citric acid costs $4/lb and baking soda is $1/lb, the exact same dose of alka selzer’s active ingredients would cost me about 2.5 cents to make myself…. Twenty times less than the store bought version! OK to be fair, I didn’t figure the cost of filler, and the store bought alka selzer also contained aspirin, but I neither needed nor wanted the aspirin. Even if you end up spending more on the citric acid and less for the Alka Seltzer than I did, you’ll still come out ahead.
