Over the past 2 years myself and a colleague have built an online statistical an

Question

Over the past 2 years myself and a colleague have built an online statistical analysis application using a mixture of silverlight, wcf and R. I (a c# programmer) wrote all the silverlight and wcf stuff whilst my colleague (a statistician) came up with the stats algorithms and wrote the R code. Now we think that this app is fairly unique - a rich gui online statistics application that is much more intuitive than all the other online stat apps that I've seen. But despite this we don't really know where to go with the project, mainly for the following reasons:

1) Its fairly complicated stuff - without the mix of programming and stats skills it would be difficult for anyone to "get into" the project and contribute.

2) We are stalled by a lack of a proper place to host the site. Currently it sits on the family windows 7 media centre, not exactly the best place to host it as it could interfere with the missus trying to watch Corrie/Friends/Oprah etc.

Soo, anyone got any ideas on how to move forward with this? I guess that my strength is programming not marketing so despite working hard at this for the past couple of years I feel that I've reached a dead end!

Also, does anyone know of any free windows hosting for open source projects? If I could find a proper place to put the app I might feel re-energised about the whole thing.

The source code is on codeplex at: silverstats.codeplex.com, whilst the app is currently hosted at silverstats.co.uk

Edit: to answer some of the points raised: I don't have any documentation so that is a valid point and something that I need to look at. However, I do believe that it is easy to use - try it yourself! It is drag and drop based and fairly intuitive (as long you have some stats knowledge). One point though: Its not aimed at statistians! Its aimed at people who need to do stats to do their job (which is why it is easy to use). Personally on an ease of use basis it beats the like of Rcmdr hands down! You are quite right that the R and stats geeks will continue to tap away at R and SAS and produce their scripts. So, to answer another question: Is it scriptable - of course not because that would defeat the ease of use concept, you might as well fire up R and tap away... Does it produce graphics: yep - output is nice and clean in html with some expalantory text for the people scared by stats. Is it validated, yes and no...the project is a spin off from our closed source (but free!) stats package called InVivoStat (google it) which was built with the same aim: to make statistics easy for non-statisticians, in this case scientists working in the life sciences. The R scripts that InVivoStat uses are fully GxP validated with evidence hosted on the InVivoStat website. This project (SilveR) uses the same scripts, so you could argue that a bit of revalidation is required as the interface has changed, but I am fully confident that the R scripts are correct.

Explanation / Answer

To answer JBRWilkinson : yes, there is crossvalidated.com, a stackexchange site for statistics and well past beta. So that's a first channel to find both programmers and customers.

I agree with Lenny222 : you have to present a very clear case why your application is to be preferred, by showing :

it is easy to use
it is complete, i.e. all necessary statistical techniques are implemented.
it is correct, meaning that the results can be trusted
it is readible, meaning the output actually means something
it is able to produce custom graphics that explain the analysis in a straightforward way
it allows for scripting an analysis, so any analysis can be reproduced exactly
The latter point is extremely important, as you have to be able to repeat any published analysis on demand. I know it's not done like this for every publication, but at our university a statistical package will never be used if you can't script the analysis.

I hope I don't disappoint you too much, but you have to be realistic in this. R adepts are unlikely to jump on it as they like coding more and there are some very fine GUIs using R already on the "market" like JGR and Rcmdr. Statisticians using other programs (SAS, SPSS, Statistica, Stata, SPlus, ...) will probably keep on coding in the scripting language they like, and all the rest will just use the program they've been taught at university, or the one available on the servers of the college / company.

Maybe your best shot is showing the R community that your application can beat the other ones mentioned here and forms the bridge towards R coding for the students we have. If your application can do that, I'll be the first one to promote it here in statistical education. But you'll have to show it first, and I can tell you the competition is rather strong...

EDIT :

Given your further comments (and my look at the application), your best shot will be to provide an analysis guide, not only explaining the program but also explaining how to analyse different kinds of data with it, which statistics to use when, how to interprete results,... The application looks neat to me and can indeed be an extra value, but as the customers you aim for are no statisticians whatsoever, they need a lot more guidance. Make the guide visible on Google, and the rest will follow hopefully.

You could attempt a publication in a journal related to the field of research you're aiming at (as a letter to the editor or so maybe), but that's not going to be easy...

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