Ok, maybe not everyone is aware but, while I'm mingling with numerical models and computational geo-fluid dynamics by day, by night I keep working on this rather low-profile web-project with some friends called PointPontoPt, which is Portuguese for the domain name http://point.pt.





Basically we do twitter bots that send useful alerts to whomever finds them useful. Bots like daily weather forecasts, futebol live scores, cafeteria daily menus, lottery results etc ...
And we've just released a Euro2008 bot. It was tweeting live-scores successfully, before the end of the Portugal-Turkey match. Yay!
Update: However, it failed to work properly for the Germany-Poland game (2-nil) :( Fixed, should work fine now.

Some of you (rare but beloved) readers might have seen my WeatherLisbon twitter bot post. Basically, since that post, we've extended the service to other types of alerts, registered a trademark, made a (poorly simple) site, invited some friends to join the bandwagon, and attended an entrepreneurship course. The latter one of which I heartily recommend. Given an idea and the right will, you'll learn how to write a proper business plan (with financial forecast) that, hopefully, will reach the VC's attention. In the end, I wasn't sufficiently prepared to my final audience of VC's and BA's, so I really believe our potential is completely under-estimated. But I don't mind, as I won't be able to dedicate myself full-time, not until I finish my "#$%"%"#$ phd thesis. Our audience of subscribers has been growing quite steadily and we're nearly topping the 3k followers. (Disclosure: please bare with the show off :p)



Technologically speaking, we're still doing our bash and gnu-tools scripts, only a bit more refined. I'm really looking forward to implement them in ruby, and to develop xmpp bots (though twitter on jabber is now down for some time). We've already been designing a really smart looking relational database for the business. However, it's the web-page that needs more refinements. And I could blog more often about the project.

We've had several requests from different businesses, but most of them I had to decline, due to lack of professional commitment. I only do them on my spare time. Nevertheless, I'm gathering skills, contacts and potential co-workers... There's no rush, as the emerging mobile ecosystem requires a lot of XP before one can really start making good business, and I'm slowly cumulating more than one year and a half of XP on how to give a proper UX on SMS. It's all about second fast with the right UX here.