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This does the same thing as deadmanswitch.net BTW there is one feature that I requested from dms and they told me no. So here is your chance to differentiate y

This does the same thing as deadmanswitch.net BTW there is one feature that I requested from dms and they told me no. So here is your chance to differentiate your product. Instead of every x weeks of time, I'd like it if the are-you-alive check would trigger on news events. For example a major industrial accident / terrorist attack / war breaks out in the general region of the world I happen to be in.

wingerlang 7y ago
Seems like it would require constant upkeep in multiple countries?
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  I envision some sort of news skimming bot that just looks for key words in the article feed from a handful of major sources.
  - imhoguy 7y ago
    And who would pay for that... for life?
    - IIAOPSW 7y ago
      Plenty of people. Skimming the news for "[x] people dead" and "[city name]" is not computationally expensive and the script only needs to run maybe twice a day. The infrastructure costs associated with running the service should be pocket change. All the users in the same city would be triggered by the same event. The service per user actually gets cheaper with the number of users. In fact nothing in the dead man switch is computationally expensive and all of it is event driven. Its basically just a database of (email, location, last_checked_in). Thousands of users would take up mere kilobytes of storage. You could run the entire thing severless and it would take years before it would even be worth billing you. I would totally pay $1 a year for this. Maybe more but probably not much more. With just a few hundred users, you'd be well into respectable side project money.
brewdad 7y ago
This seems like a recipe for many false positives and negatives. One example: I live on the west coast but ran the Boston Marathon the year of the bombings. People closest to me knew I was there and we were able to get in touch eventually. Would this app know to alert my friends and family who didn't know I was in Boston? Alternatively, we had a 6.something level earthquake near my home at a time I was traveling overseas. My grandparents eventually got in contact but they were needlessly worried since I was thousands of miles away from the event.

wingerlang 7y ago

Seems like it would require constant upkeep in multiple countries?

IIAOPSW 7y ago
I envision some sort of news skimming bot that just looks for key words in the article feed from a handful of major sources.
- imhoguy 7y ago
  And who would pay for that... for life?
  - IIAOPSW 7y ago
    Plenty of people. Skimming the news for "[x] people dead" and "[city name]" is not computationally expensive and the script only needs to run maybe twice a day. The infrastructure costs associated with running the service should be pocket change. All the users in the same city would be triggered by the same event. The service per user actually gets cheaper with the number of users. In fact nothing in the dead man switch is computationally expensive and all of it is event driven. Its basically just a database of (email, location, last_checked_in). Thousands of users would take up mere kilobytes of storage. You could run the entire thing severless and it would take years before it would even be worth billing you. I would totally pay $1 a year for this. Maybe more but probably not much more. With just a few hundred users, you'd be well into respectable side project money.

brewdad 7y ago

This seems like a recipe for many false positives and negatives. One example: I live on the west coast but ran the Boston Marathon the year of the bombings. People closest to me knew I was there and we were able to get in touch eventually. Would this app know to alert my friends and family who didn't know I was in Boston? Alternatively, we had a 6.something level earthquake near my home at a time I was traveling overseas. My grandparents eventually got in contact but they were needlessly worried since I was thousands of miles away from the event.