* Mostly trial and error, surprisingly -- the idea was to keep everything in low power mode as much as possible, and see if solar panels would let us keep charge. Turns out that they can; one of the sats has panels. Another just has batteries and will die down.

* Yes, definitely. One of the sats was even hand soldered.

* You talk to NASA, the cost to launch one commercially would be around $20K. We mostly piggybacked on a rocket that was being tested.

* Because there was no budget for following these things on the ground, honestly :) Plus it gets people involved.

* We were talking about having these things detect circular cloud formations to indicate a possibly forming hurricane, and having a "real" weather sat take a better look on its next pass.

If I paid the $20k commercial price, would I be guaranteed a slot on a rocket? And do paying CubeSat customers bump off those that were given free tickets? Is anyone else offering reliable, commercial CubeSat launches for that price (or less)?

Sadly no.

The phonesats waited in a box for more than a year in order to find room.