A 30-second audio teaser of Overflow (What Love Is Better) will be coming soon, before the release date. Just thought I’d keep you updated. Whoohooo! :)
Look at the pretty right sidebar for a countdown to my newest song Overflow (What Love Is Better). I’ve probably listened to the danggon thing 100 times now and let me tell you, it sounds cooler every time I listen to it. It’ll be coming out some where around noon… ;)
Your pants will be blown off.
Well… figuratively speaking, of course.
I advise that everybody read this book. It’s my all-time favorite book!
For those of you who didn’t already notice, we’ve had a “site down for maintenance” notice up on Gas Finder for the past couple of days, almost going on a week now. Why? Well, we made a multimillion dollar company mad. Oops. Fear the wrath of the attorneys of a multimillion dollar company!
Our main service provider for gas price data was Motortrend. Motortrend gets their price data from a company called OPIS (Oil Pricing Information Services) which monitors the price of gas by analyzing credit card transactions throughout the entire US. Motortrend has a public RSS feed for gas price data and that’s where we got our data from. Several days ago now, we got a “friendly” call from the head attorney representing OPIS requesting a cease and desist within 48 hours.
What’s funny to me is that the gas price data is publicly available. If you wanted, you could subscribe to the RSS feed and get it right in your Inbox. And yet they call us “pirates.” Hmm? If they really wanted to protect their data, they should hide their feed, or at least encode it. Or something.
So, we got back with the head attorney, requesting information about the licensing. And guess how much it costs…
$1,500-$25,000 a month. Yeah. Major oops.
A note to anybody who wants to start a gas finder service - you can’t. We tried. And we got fried. Unless you can get proper licensing from OPIS, you will eventually be shut down. Learn from our experience. It’s already being done by Mapquest, Motortrend, Automotive, MSN, and more… so unless you got a boatload of cash…
It’s fun to say that I’ve almost been sued by a multimillion dollar company. At least I can say that I did it. Fun.
I get fancy points and karma (on the site of course, I’m not advocating “karma” and mysterious voodoo crap like that) for referrals. I’m trying to reach 10 to get a silver star. So, you should sign up.
Yes, yes! You should. Even if you never log in again.
Find me: http://plurk.com/user/imcq
~imcq
Apple liked our webapp so much that they’ve featured Gas Finder on July 23rd, 2008, on their webapp homepage!
AND they’ve included Gas Finder as a staff pick!
If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, you’ll want to check out the Gas Finder at the following:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/travel/gasfinder.html
Our hope is to integrate Gas Finder with other mobile devices in the future. This is just the start.
Again, tell your friends about Gas Finder so they too can find the lowest gas prices and save money.
Enjoy!
Cheers,
~imcq
Hello all!
This is about my fiftieth listen to my newest song Overflow (What Love Is Better). Well folks, it’s been fully exported and is sitting on my pretty iTunes for more listening pleasure (unfortunately you can’t hear it yet, sorry). The actual song will be released to the public on Sunday, September 7, 2008. Mark your calendars for this date.
~imcq