Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.
The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.
There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).
The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.
There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).
So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1 )
We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.
Thanks!