One Year and $1000

That's my timeframe, and my budget. One year might seem like a long time, but I'm not suggesting that I want to spend a whole year developing MH10. No, I'd like to get all that done and dusted by the end of 2008. No, I want to give the project twelve months to prove itself. I'd like it to become profitable.

One of the many reasons why I'm beginning this project now is as a learning exercise; I've fallen behind when it comes to web development, so I want an excuse to develop something new to give myself a chance to catch up. I don't know how I'll spend $1000, but I'm guessing that hosting, graphic design, advertising and so forth will be required along the way, so I'm willing to give myself some kind of budget. I'd like the online version of MegaHAL10 to be successful enough that I can "monetize" it by showing ads somewhere on the site, and that those ads will, over the course of the twelve months, pay off the initial $1000 investment, continue to pay for the day-to-day running costs of the site (that is, the hosting), and perhaps leave a little left over, which I'll need to decide how to use (donations to charity, funding the next project, paying for the occasional night out at the movies, who knows)?

The first version of MH10 will be online. The only way of chatting with MegaHAL10 will be via its web site. I want to get the user interface and web back-end all sorted out before I make a stand-alone client, or release a development version to allow others to use the MH10 tech in their own applications. But those things will come, and this means that the web back-end will need to be implemented in a way that anticipates their eventual arrival; I can't code everything up in PHP, for example. Right now I'm thinking C++, but I'm also curious about the so-called "cloud", so I'll be looking at Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine over the coming days - I really don't know very much about them at all.

I should list some other requirements for MH10 here, for future reference:

• The world's best ever learning chatterbot.
• Full unicode compliance, allowing it to converse in all languages.
• Archives of all conversations available on the web site, and indexed by search engines.
• Downloadable stand-alone clients for a variety of platforms.
• Support integration into third-party apps.

Now, where to begin?