I like the concept and can see what your envisioning.
With respect to the news articles, are you looking for a "seeking alpha" type setup with paid professional writers or more like a trollbox where everyone just screams "buy or cry" or "pump and dump"
If your familiar with 'Seeking Alpha" you would realize it's a fairly simply app with less complexity than your product plans, yet almost every stock trader utilizes it for portfolio updates and news articles.
I think ease of usability is key for this to be a successful product.
Also, (I may have missed this) I noticed TrackR is geared towards mobile users but is there plans for a desktop client version?
I look forward to the crowd fund. I may have missed this information too, but is there a minimum amount for the project to move forward?
I'm not actually familiar with Seeking Alpha, however the intent is not a trollbox but more a managed news list with vetted sources (think important crypto news articles being linked that may be applicable to users). As far as a desktop client goes, that's already in our roadmap and should be quite straightforward (and a lot easier for us to do as we're experienced in both frontend and backend development).
As far as minimum fund targets go, our current intention is to mature the app as we go along. The hurdles we're facing in the long term are:
A) Server Costs, this will be by far the majority. Currently we transfer almost 2 GB a day of data, this amount is minuscule right now and it's only compromised of a few things. Once we start factoring in a lot of exchanges, additional workers on the backend to compute a lot of various things, access to volatility alerts, buy walls / sell walls alerts, (meaning subscribe to websockets and such to receive live-time orders) it all adds up quickly. We'll also need to bump our servers up to crunch the data, ad-hoc servers for infrequent compute, caching clusters, etc.
Just to give you a number, we're currently processing roughly 12 000 writes an hour and we're expecting this number to rise up easily towards 300-400K entries/writes to our DB once fully matured. That's a lot of time-series data, though we've already anticipated this growth and have adapted from the start to ensure our database queries are as performant as possible (0.2s for very old data and 50-100 ms for recent data~) .
B) Team expansion, while all of the roadmap is quite feasible for us to do it still eats a lot of our raw time each day leaving little for real-life commitments. Expanding the team allows us to alleviate some of the tasks and get experienced workforce in our team.
C) Marketing/Advertising, we really want to promote our app. We're already restrained to some degree but we're planning on advertising in a few days on various platforms (CoinmarketCap, Reddit, FB, Google, press release websites) to promote the ICO. Unfortunately the crypto platforms for advertisement are very costly ranging up to a few $1000 for a day or two. Reddit/FB/Google on the other hand are OK.
D) R&D and Product Development - Currently for the Alpha we haven't touched many external tools, however some of the leading financial tools/charting software and such are under a licence. We'll also need to be spending money on the team in terms of salaries and such. We're already devoting the vast majority of our token sale to the crowdsale, the bounty allocation is the same as the team allocation (5%).
Taking into account all of the above points, if for example our fundraising came to a total of 50 ETH then that would most likely mean that we can't really exercise anything at all and would severely impact the development time, functionality and such. In our minds for it to be successful we'll need 500 ETH at the bare minimum, the rest allows us to scale a lot faster (servers, team, advertisement, exchanges, prediction models, user simulations, etc).
In the end, no matter the outcome, we'll still be developing Trackr as long as it's sustainable. We may need to revisit our strategy if things turn south however in terms of our model.