I am not a lawyer. I encourage you to comply with relevant law--and get professional advice if you are not clear on what the law is. My own understanding is that radar detectors are legal everywhere in the United States except Virginia and the District of Columbia. I understand that some other countries prohibit the use of radar detectors altogether.
Apple needs to approve any hardware peripheral before I can start selling it. I have no way of predicting their approval process. I do notice at least four apps in the app store that are in this space (see FAQs below). These apps seem to have no difficulties with Apple approval.
Yes. Hardware manufacturing is getting cheaper by the day. Manufacturers are willing to make smaller batches. Most of the cost is in the software anyway--I am making the hardware as simple as I can and shift the complexity higher up the stack.
This budget is enough for an initial manufacturing run.
Thank you for your support. Your feedback helps shape this project--the more I know about what people want in HazMap, the more useful I can make it.
I welcome your blog and forum posts blog about HazMap.
I am looking for help in specific areas
No. I want to sell products to customers. If I take VC money, the investor becomes my customer and my company becomes my product. VCs want to sell sexy companies. I want to sell sexy products.
www.trapster.com boasts 9,248,567 users and 3,470,202 trap reports as of December 1, 2010. Users who observe police--or hear their radar detector go off--can manually enter these observations into an app on an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.
"Users submit speed traps, enforcement cameras, and road hazards, that then alert all Trapster users in the area."
www.radaractive.com is an iPhone app and a hardware adapter that connects a Valentine One™ radar detector to your iPhone. The adapter feeds V1's Concealed Display Output Stream (CDOS) into the microphone input of the iPhone.
"What happens when a phone rings? You can answer on Bluetooth headset, speaker, or unplug 3.5mm connector to pick up the call."
www.waze.com is "driver-generated live maps and real-time road information." The insight is that if you compile your users' GPS tracks, you end up with a map of the road network and you don't need to buy data from Google. If you time the routes your users take, you can find fastest routes between points without relying on AI algorithms, etc.
Waze is also a social network that allows you to see fellow "wazers" in your vicinity in case you want to meet them in person. Users can manually report sightings of accidents, traffic jams, road hazards and police.
"www.radarfree.com is a real-time GPS speed camera alert application for iPhone." RadarFree covers 12 countries in Europe: Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden