Ask HN: How to keep entire office up to date of metrics?

[gerds2007]

Hi HN,

In an attempt to make our team more aware of our key metrics like user signup, sales, amount sold, etc., we were planning on putting up a monitor on the wall.

Inspired by http://loggly.com/blog/2011/03/woot/, we now want to play a loud sound when a sale is made. Preferably a cash register sound.

Is there some type of cheap mp3-wifi-enabled gadget that can poll a specific url and play a mp3 when a sale is made? Or a similarly effective method of notifying everyone?

Thank you.

[nostrademons]

Your engineers will most likely hate this. A loud sound is going to pull them out of flow and prevent them from getting any work done.

Someone on one of my former teams once rigged up the continuous build to a speaker that played the Star Trek red alert sound every time the build broke. It was a cute idea, but it was taken down after a day or two because it distracted far too many people.