21 ms·

Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

• algirau 10y ago
  Lithium recycling technology. Electrochemical storage may be a renewable technology to store energy but the raw materials are not infinite.
• tyingq 10y ago
  The old shared hosting market is still pretty large. But it is stuck with ancient stuff like cpanel and mostly dominated by stagnant players like EIG, GoDaddy, and the like. Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.
  • qhoc 10y ago
    I use shared hosting too and I got into cPanel like 3 times a year for 2 min each. Sure, it needs to be there but regardless it fills the needs already.
    • tyingq 10y ago
      The licensing for the ISPs is atrocious. It's often 1/2 or more of what they are able to charge the customer, total, for the entire hosting package.
  • itomato 10y ago
    Yeah, I've thought about this. I've even run some numbers. You'd need to combine an ISP and MSP with an add-on like analytics and integrations. Trouble is, then you're competing with AWS and GCE. You have what amounts to bare metal through AWS, available by the hour. You can have that today, plus the ability to scale across geographies at the click of a button. Few colos can offer that.
  • joering2 10y ago
    How about online storage that you will charge me only when I pull data? I have 20TB of data that I would like to access about 1MB statistically per year (!!) only I don't know which of that 20TB its located. Sure there is AWS and then Glaciar but with my limited knowledge with AWS you need to spin a computer and then set the rules how those files are accessible and it already goes into tens or hundreds of bucks per month. Amazon Glaciar is too expensive to pull data out. Perhaps I didn't do enough research. If you know company who allows me to cheaply store XX TB in cloud and charge me only per access to it, let me know please.
    • arjie 10y ago
      Do the economics of the task make sense? Is cold storage actually cheaper?
      • Sophistifunk 10y ago
        Therein lies the game; the colder your storage, the more redundant copies you need of every block if you want good odds of retrieval. The only way to know a block is still good is to load it and hash it.
    • ValentineC 10y ago
      > only I don't know which of that 20TB its located What do you mean by this?
  • gremlinsinc 10y ago
    I'm trying to get into this area...I used to work for EIG and frankly they SUCK. I'm wanting to start an employee co-owned hosting firm that values employee/customer relationships. I think honestly it's not so much the systems/software that matter most for hosting - it's the customer service. When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - Then he moved chats to India. Then he closed down tickets completely. Chats may eventually be on the chopping block. Then he moved sales to Tempe and promised everyone in Orem that their job wasn't going anywhere. Two months later he announced -- hey sorry I lied, we're all moving to Tempe. You can come w/ us if you move yourself, but here have 1 month pay for severance. I'm pretty sure I just heard that if you work for EIG and don't live in Houston, or Tempe you can count on your Brand closing and moving to one of those two places - they really want to consolidate everything in a bad way. i envision a company -- where Each employee has a book of business, each employee is also an affiliate and can refer business 24/7 and get commissions for life off anyone they refer. Each employee acts more like an acct rep than actual CSR agent grinding out phone calls left and right. Customer's have a dedicated person they can reach out to with any concerns. There would be very generous ESOP plan, it would be setup a bit like maybe Winco Foods, etc... and other bonuses. Exec pay would be capped at 65x avg salaries. Surpluses left over go into bonus pools and activities for employees, etc..
    • lwhalen 10y ago
      howdy fellow EIG alum! I worked there from '07 to '09 in their Ops department.
    • monodeldiablo 10y ago
      What you're describing sounds awfully like a worker co-op. Why not just do a worker co-op, instead of designing something that would be trivially easy for your board to steal from the employees the moment it gets traction?
  • ClassyJacket 10y ago
    I just tried to set something up on DigitalOcean. It's a small website with some PHP (already written), but I'd like the possibility of expanding it with Node later. So I rented a VPS, but setting everything up is such a pain, with all that SSHing and process management and Linux permissions and everything. Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common shared web host, but also allowed me to do Node with sane permissions etc., would be great. However, it occurs to me this probably exists, and I just don't know about it. Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them?
    • kelvinquee 10y ago
      Have you tried nearlyfreespeech? http://nearlyfreespeech.net http://nearlyfreespeech.net
      • ClassyJacket 10y ago
        This is actually great, thankyou! edit: Nope, they don't let you setup a proxy (for Node) and PHP on the same server :( it's one or the other
      • ClassyJacket 10y ago
        Yeah, so I've just spent about four hours trying it, and unfortunately it doesn't seem possible. They don't let you set more than one proxy setting for a site, which makes it impossible.
    • yen223 10y ago
      > Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them? I think Google has that cornered
    • vittore 10y ago
      Maybe something like heroku with multipack will be just what you need.
  • ohashi 10y ago
    I think it's actually being slowly eroded away from different angles. It's niche providers. WordPress being a huge niche, I've been watching it grow from everyone being in the ~$20-30/month range to full on enterprise grade hosting (http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/09/14/500month-enterprise-wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2016/ http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/09/14/500month-enterprise-...). But there's at least a couple dozen providers now who have built WP specific infrastructure at all sorts of price tiers for consumers. You've also got your SquareSpace/Wix/etc. Shopify. Traditional shared hosting is becoming less necessary in my mind for a lot of use cases because companies are specializing in areas where you would normally say 'just get a shared hosting plan.' The biggest problem though to completely get rid of the shared hosting space is price. Digital Ocean works because the lack of customer service. Shared hosting needs to have a lot more customer service (or you get EIG). But at the $5/month price point, the economics of it are terrible. The way to get around it is specializing, reducing complexity and issues, which is exactly what I see happening.
    • tyingq 10y ago
      Growth is slowing, but that market is still growing. I would think there's room for some middle ground, like DO, but with more sophisticated self service tools to deploy popular software, install OS patches, and so on. Tools that work for non technical people.
      • doubleplusgood 10y ago
        Like a simplified Heroku?
        • tyingq 10y ago
          Yes, at a higher level, dumbed down installers with reasonable default settings. Deploying whatever applications are popular at shared hosts, like Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, BBS software, and so forth. And providing some equivalent to Cpanel for things like OS patches, domain management, SSL certificate management, automated backups, web analytics, file manager, etc. Cpanel's license costs are pretty high...they charge per customer / per month, and so it sets a minimum bar for what you can charge. If you incorporated additional functionality, you could capture more of the market. What wix.com does, for example.
  • nicolaslem 10y ago
    And you are talking about mostly hosting PHP application. For some stacks these stagnant players do not even exist. The user experience of deploying a Python/Django code to production is so bad in my opinion that I started a shared hosting service focused only on that: https://prodmatic.com https://prodmatic.com
    • nkkollaw 10y ago
      You need to change the hero image, IMO, it looks very templatey.
    • amiraliakbari 10y ago
      Just clicking on "Keep me informed" without entering any email succeeds!
  • wolfgang42 10y ago
    I'm currently running http://bitmash.io http://bitmash.io, which is a shared hosting service for PHP apps (currently WordPress and Piwik) that handles updates and manages the site for you (but also lets you control it if you'd like). I'd love to hear what sorts of features people want in a shared hosting service.
• Gustomaximus 10y ago
  Contract Economy: There is still a significant opportunity for a Freelancer/Upwork group to exist. Something that better vets quality while not pushing for Toptal prices. I suspect you'd need to set up physical presence in the likely countries properly vet and control quality but this could easily be covered by a premium for a know quantity vs going to western rates. Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption here. I suspect a currency that is both trackable and backed by a pool of commodities/currencies could be quite popular. Traceable would make theft risk reduced as money could effectively be returned if it is stolen and being backed/hedged by currencies/commodities would help with confidence. Cargo: I'm surprised we haven't seen electric cargo ships. Even combine solar with sail as winds are favorable. This combined with auto-navigation (at least between ports) seems more easily achievable than cars yet technology is further behind. Dockable Phone to PC (physical or even better if wireless dock): Surprised no-one has done this well yet. I can image whoever does this with really take ownership of the OS space. I always felt this could be the best route for Microsoft to re-enter the mobile space with force.
  • nradov 10y ago
    Cargo ships don't have enough free surface area to mount the number of solar panels that would be needed for propulsion. Sails are already being used on a few ships but they only save a small percentage of fuel.
    • loeber 10y ago
      I'd like to add that cargo ships, while being very efficient in terms of how much they can transport over a unit distance given unit energy, require enormous amounts of energy. See some resources: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation#Ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport... - https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_consumption_containerships.html https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_c...
    • Gustomaximus 10y ago
      I wouldn't write it off. There could be could add battery storage to be used during the journey. They could include wind turbines to add further power generation. Also ships can go slower. In my limited knowledge of boats every extra knot takes significantly extra fuel. If we were bringing multiple power sources 'slow' cargo may be viable. And the has to be other ways to increase this function. And there is always hybrid. Not all power has to be renewable sources. A solution could start with supplementing diesel driven thrust with some lower cost green power. Given diesel is 70% of shipping operating cost that seems a potential option.
• ilaksh 10y ago
  Doesn't seem like that many groups have really both studied the existing AGI research _and_ are seriously trying to apply the latest NN developments like GANs to (virtually) embodied AGI.
  • nharada 10y ago
    This isn't really a startup idea, this is more of a basic research idea, and one that's years away at that.
  • ginger_beer_m 10y ago
    No group studies AI because it's an unproductive use of research time, and also it's hard to write proposals to raise funding when the goal is ambiguously defined.
• deegles 10y ago
  I'm hoping it will be voice application development. I think it will take off once the 3rd platform announces. It will be Siri or Cortana.
• lwhalen 10y ago
  Outsourced testing. I can think of a few sites that would pay a pretty penny to have unit, spec, and acceptance-tests written for their pre-existing code.
  • ernestipark 10y ago
    See https://www.rainforestqa.com/ https://www.rainforestqa.com/, a YC company. They do some of this.
    • nanch 10y ago
      Was definitely interested, clicked through a bunch and wanted to see pricing and sign up. Unfortunately it's a "contact us for more info" situation, which is really a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. Thanks for the recommendation though.
      • going_to_800 10y ago
        It's not that big problem for you then.
      • hkmurakami 10y ago
        The opaque pricing is a sign that they've moved up the market to target enterprise. When a company reaches that stage, it's basically telling you, "if this turns you off, then you won't move the needle for us so we don't want to talk to you."
        • daveguy 10y ago
          > "if this turns you off, then you won't move the needle for us so we don't want to talk to you." Yes. Like Amazon and Google, with their contact us for pricing.
      • morgante 10y ago
        Realistically speaking, it's unlikely that something which provides as much value as essentially replacing QA would be priced transparently.
• cheetos 10y ago
  Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive (since you chose them) and setting your own prices.
  • navalsaini 10y ago
    would be cool
  • iambateman 10y ago
    Buysellads is very close to this, and has been around for a long time. I ran beaconads, their subsidiary, for a short time and the biggest issue is that most ad buys are coming from a handful of massive companies. Old Navy doesn't want to deal individually with a site that doesn't have 10,000,000 visits/month. So we end up needing an intermediary at the same scale as the big advertisers. Not saying this can't work at some level, just that there are some big economic forces fighting against scaling a product like this.
  • arikrak 10y ago
    One can do that with affiliate advertising to some extent. I don't think it would be easy to use other pricing models since advertisers wouldn't trust small website's metrics. (And large websites already manage their own ads through many different methods.)
  • aapusaam 10y ago
    Wasn't this how independent websites use to work before ad networks such as Google ads took over the internet? Problem with managing your own ads is that it would be very hard to get quality relevant ads if you have a small website, not to forget the overhead involved in maintaining ad space without a dedicated ad server.
    • RangerScience 10y ago
• kul 10y ago
  Mostly posting this because I want to see it, but drones to automate residential property inspections. I'm actually thinking about miniature drones that can do internal and external residential inspections. My startup is in property management and a lot of the work a human does could be done by a drone + healthy amount of machine learning on the images captured.
  • giarc 10y ago
    I think the biggest problem will be that drones can't open doors or cabinets. You'll still need someone there to look under the sink, go into the basement.
  • mccolin 10y ago
    The human element of home inspection is invaluable. That interaction between homeowner (or prospective) and a knowledgeable professional is critical. But drones as tools for that professional could be great.
    • ehnto 10y ago
      I think he may have been referring to rental inspections, of the quarterly kind. A pretty standard checklist. "Is there mess, is there mould, is there damage, are there pets and is that allowed?"
      • ap46 10y ago
        For that we need CHAPPIE like humanoids. Which are either packed up on the roof w/ solar charging or in janitor closet.
      • dx034 10y ago
        And then you let a drone fly through a flat every quarter? I think the odds of destroying something in the process are higher than the saved costs. On another note: Are quarterly rental inspections a thing in the US? Never heard of that, why should my landlord care if I tidy up my apartment?
• dilemma 10y ago
  Establishing nationwide retail distribution networks and ignoring e-commerce.
  • yeukhon 10y ago
    Isn't that what Walmart, BJ, Macys' or any chain retail store doing?
    • ganesharul 10y ago
      May be we should ask what is missing in that Walmart, BT or Macys. Than, already doing
  • patwalls 10y ago
    More specifically what do you mean? This is something I'm really interested in.
    • dilemma 10y ago
      A retail store allows for differentiation in experience, service, and brand. It is the most important competitive advantage you can have in a commoditized, high-margin business. See Apple and OPPO and Vivo.
• vinitagr 10y ago
  ChatBots: One big opportunity that i can see is the rise of chatbots on popular messaging platforms. It is going to bring the tech advances to a lot more people in a much easier way.
  • pyromine 10y ago
    Question: I've seen a large amount of hype around chat bots, but is there any evidence that "normal" people really use these for anything more than novelty, excluding the realm of Amazon echo et al.
    • lacampbell 10y ago
      Completely anecdotal - a non-programmer at my work used a chat bot provided by their ISP to help them with some internet connectivity problems. I was surprised too. I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.
    • sah2ed 10y ago
      Chat bots would make new and prospective customers FAQs/enquiries easier for lots of small businesses, especially in emerging markets where a large swath of people are coming online for the first time via their mobile phones. Many of these users are not that familiar with the WWW aspect of the Internet; Facebook and Whatsapps is really the Internet for them.
    • TulliusCicero 10y ago
      I'm not sure if this would pass a security review, but occasionally I've had some issue with a bank or credit card account, I've then used the chat-based technical support, and the conversation was very straightforward. I could definitely see chatbots becoming advanced enough to handle "I'm locked out of my account and need some part of it reset" type questions within the next 3 - 5 years. I could even see it being superior to the current experience (right now there are significant delays after each thing I say to the customer service person, presumably because they're handling multiple chat windows simultaneously).
• eastindex 10y ago
  Mechanical Turk for Programming tasks would be great to see.
  • sogen 10y ago
    codegophers
  • asenna 10y ago
    Me and a friend of mine built something similar (think Upwork + StackOverflow) as a side project a while back - https://www.ladr.io/ https://www.ladr.io/ Unfortunately we couldn't put in as much time back then. But I am thinking of picking up the project again. Any feedback would be appreciated.
• jandrewrogers 10y ago
  Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in: - Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem domain and tooling requirements. - IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using open source backends. - Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant tech gaps here. - Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data. - Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data. - AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
  • yeukhon 10y ago
    A lot of that is really really specific for what you do. I think people are generally trying to solve ONE problem rather than creating a solution for the general problem, because usually, a general solution breaks down very very quickly and thus low retention rate.
  • shortoncash 10y ago
    Could you be more specific about the IoT DB issue? What would a credible solution do? Thanks in advance.
    • jandrewrogers 10y ago
      An IoT database requires the intersection of three software capabilities in a single platform, which have varying degrees of accessibility (the technology exists in principle) and none are available in open source currently. - An exabyte-scale storage engine. Nothing too exotic here technically and a few companies have built them, but the design needs to address continuous data corruption, continuous hardware failure, geo-federation, etc. - A real-time database kernel that supports very high throughput for mixed workloads. A production kernel of this type doesn't currently exist though several people working in closed source databases understand the necessary computer science in principle; the academic literature is far behind the state-of-the-art. The ability to gracefully shift load and transients between servers under full load with many millions of writes per second is not trivial. - Native discrete topology operators. Necessary for geospatial analytics, sensor coverages, etc. If you can do it natively in the database kernel, it makes the second requirement easier to achieve since you don't need secondary indexing generally. Any solution even halfway toward the general solution would be viable. The value possible if you have such a system is hard to overestimate. Companies have paid half a million dollars for the output of a single analytic query on tens of trillions of IoT records; the differentiator was that it was possible to execute such a query at all. It is extremely high-end and polymathic computer science, but serious valuable if you can make a credible dent in it. And unlike some advanced topics in computer science, there are no epic unsolved theoretical problems you have to solve, though some relevant computer science may be unpublished.
• skynode 10y ago
  We need to simplify the whole lifecycle of data management. It is still considerably complex. We'll see an accelerated revolution in other areas such as machine learning when this simplification is complete.
  • yeukhon 10y ago
    I am not sure what kind of data and what kind of data management you are referring to. But from my own perspective, data management is not always a technology problem. Data management should be addressed top-down, with business owning the data quality. Technology should be used to help identify and correct data issues.
    • skynode 10y ago
      'Top-down' is actually why data management is still the way it is. Our handling of the primitives (think bottom-up approach) that build up to how things are structured at the higher level is still subpar at best, resulting in the massive inconsistencies, scaling issues and data integrity problems we face daily. Neurons (near-atomic components), from the biological sciences are still being compared analogously with more complex data structures in computing, raw grapes and wine style. Per being a technology problem, the question was about area/market segment requiring a breath of fresh air, not particularly what technology needs to be deployed.
      • yeukhon 10y ago
        Top-down means the top is responsible for data quality's failure. Engineering can only build what the business anticipated to get, but in the end, human needs to be the one driving the mandate. When you are looking at enterprise data management, with many data format and global business, with many legacy systems in place, data management is not possible without a full commitment from the top. Heads of each business division has to be responsible for the shit their department produced. Whenever engineering shouts "data management" the business will just leave that to the engineering folks to build automated system, but who is actually looking after the data? Machines doesn't know what they are doing - someone is coding the expectation, that's all. But data management is dynamic. You can't just have an engineer shouts "this stinks". The business needs to own the shout and the mandate.
• zump 10y ago
  Sleep. How can we make better use of that wasted time.
  • lessclue 10y ago
    Sleep isn't "wasted" time. Without sleep, we'd be dysfunctional, and soon thereafter, dead.
    • corysama 10y ago
      It serves a purpose. But, in practice it means 1/3 of my life is spent doing nothing but checking the clock to see "Am I not dysfunctional yet? Nope. Dammit."
    • zump 10y ago
      - Why can some people get by with less sleep than others and thus be more productive? - How can I determine the best time to sleep? - What food to eat before sleep? - How can I be productive all the way until I fall asleep? - Why no sleep drug without harsh side effects? Just a few things I'd like to see research into...
      • cel1ne 10y ago
        For decades there haven been a lot of research on sleep if you bother to look up medical and neurological papers. Also you're mixing up many different aspects. Feeling sleepy doesn't mean you're sleepy. Motivation is a different thing altogether.
        • zump 10y ago
          > Feeling sleepy doesn't mean you're sleepy So power through?
          • cel1ne 10y ago
            If your body had enough sleep that night (6 hours, uninterrupted) and you aren't sick or otherwise stressed, then yes, power through. Getting sleepy is your brain telling you to preserve energy. Only sometimes it does that because something about the work itself bores, infuriates, disgusts, or otherwise upsets you. That means getting "procrastination-sleepy" is your brain trying to prevent spending energy on the miniature emotional turmoil "breaking procrastination".
• lj3 10y ago
  Better marketplace discovery systems. Apple's App Store, the Google Play store and Steam all suffer from the same problem: it's very hard for the people who would enjoy your app to find your app. This probably also applies to streaming video and music.
  • _coldfire 10y ago
    I'd say that applied to music/videos long before streaming was even a word. Things are much better today.
  • renken 10y ago
    Isn't that basically what Product Hunt does? I notice when I look for an app that I need, I now search Product Hunt first before checking the App Store.
  • overcast 10y ago
    I'm saying it now, apps are on their way out, web only is the future. Everyone is completely sick of installing a stupid app for everything the want to use. Compound that with a billion notifications for all of those apps. With that said Steam does a pretty good. The discovery queues have led me to some great finds, as well as all of the curator lists.
    • sotojuan 10y ago
      The web has a long time to catch up in terms of technology (iOS has poor support for APIs that would make web apps compete with native) and culture (most businesses don't care that their app is slow and bloated and defer resources to the app).
      • overcast 10y ago
        What do the majority of web apps need, to compete with native apps? 99% of them definitely DO NOT need to be native.
        • 10y ago
• kevin2r 10y ago
  Person to person IT support. A service where I could get help with my computer, but not from a company that tries to sell me junk software. I let a person with IT skills connect to my pc while interacting by chat or microphone, I pay them by time spent helping me.
  • yeukhon 10y ago
    There's MouseSquad or local IT. A lot of computer problems tend to be more hardware or require reboot or physically attaching disks/usb to the machine for troubleshooting.
    • kevin2r 10y ago
      Mousesquad has shutdown, that's the first google result. I don't see results for localit related to computer. About your comment, imagine that the app can know my location, and pair me with a local expert, if the expert has to go to the other person home to fix their computer the price increases.
      • yeukhon 10y ago
        I meant geek squad at best buy. I still remember the old mouse squad learning program (but not entirely dead it's just launched with a different initiative). Thanks for correcting.
        • kevin2r 10y ago
          Do you see the name "Best buy", how can I work for geeksquad? I mean something more like Uber, where everybody that knows how to drive can become a taxi driver in an hour.
          • csydas 10y ago
            I understand your focus here, but I'm not sure how you'd establish consumer confidence. Driving at least comes with a state issued certificate that you are capable of driving the car, and it's a bare minimum requirement. Obviously other factors will come into what makes a good taxi driver, but the bare essentials can be quickly verified. I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide the same baseline of consumer trust; peek on craigslist and you'll find dozens of computer service postings for even a small town, and in large cities it gets even bigger. I agree that it's probably an area that could benefit from a loosely centralized provider, but adoption seems like it will be very difficult.
• bikamonki 10y ago
  Here's my wishlist, not sure if there is a market for it: - Twitter w/out fake accounts. - a marketplace that uses Facebook as a vehicle for engagement/promotion but which operates independently. - Secure SMS for 2FA tokens - Android w/out Play Services - Schema-based email - Stripe for the rest of the World
  • fizerkhan 10y ago
    For me, I desperately need "Stripe for the rest of the World".
    • janklimo 10y ago
      Is Stripe Atlas not an option where you are based?
      • pmtarantino 10y ago
        Sometimes you need Stripe for a side project or stuff like that. Atlas is focused in large corporations and, besides, you have to pay to be incorporated.
    • momentmaker 10y ago
      There is bitcoin.
      • dx034 10y ago
        The high volatility and past problems with exchanges make it basically unusable for anyone without deeper knowledge in the field. Also, it'll take a few seconds to pay via credit card, whereas converting the money on your account to bitcoins in the sellers account can easily take several hours.
    • aoner 10y ago
      What about https://www.mollie.com/en/ https://www.mollie.com/en/ ?
  • 10y ago
• sputknick 10y ago
  ML in CRUD apps. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be sophisticated. I think you could do a lot to make basic business tasks more efficient with some basic decision trees.
  • karangoeluw 10y ago
    Tensorflow?
  • parasitid 10y ago
    madlib
• rl3 10y ago
  Many of the same things as five years ago. While it's easy to say IoT, cryptocurrency, or whatever the latest buzzwords happen to be—there's ideas that have been floating around for years which are still viable, it's just that they're hard and require exceptional execution. In that sense, they are almost timeless until implemented correctly. For example, another comment suggested marketplace/content discovery. That's been an unsolved problem for almost a decade now. Ads are another great example: they've been dishing out human misery for about the same length of time. People hate them, so they use ad blockers, and everyone loses. These aren't new problems or opportunities.
  • abraae 10y ago
    It may be in areas that don't even look unsolved. Pretty sure that a few years ago many people would have declared messaging to be a solved problem. Now it's the white hot center of multi billion dollar tech warfare.
• kul_ 10y ago
  QM/MM for fighting antibiotic resistant bacteria. http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-antibiotics-resistance-bacteria-54254/ http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-antib...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• bitwize 10y ago
  Asphalt.
  • cel1ne 10y ago
    What do you mean?
    • dredmorbius 10y ago
      It's a concrete example, where the rubber hits the road, that facilitates commerce and exchange, used the world over. Genius!
• cperciva 10y ago
  Figure out a way to reduce the not-in-San-Francisco penalty for startups. There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including "lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive (due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the current presidency) being the first two which come to mind. If you can find some way to give non-San-Francisco startups the same advantages that San Francisco startups have -- better tools for remote workers, for example, so that companies can easily hire from anywhere rather than needing to be where the largest number of potential employees are found; or something to make VCs interested in investing in companies which aren't within a narrow radius of Sand Hill (since I've never dealt with VCs, I have no idea what such a solution would look like) -- then you'll create a huge amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to transfer some of that value into your pockets.
  • skynode 10y ago
    >then you'll create a huge amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to transfer some of that value into your pockets. Corollary: It's probably time for a much wider adoption of bitcoin in tech. To transfer that value from halfway around the world to personal pockets capitalism style, we need crypto to become a primitive member of apps, markets and tech deals, and no longer a big deal.
  • nugget 10y ago
    Part of the San Francisco premium seems to be the concentration of M&A dollars from local incumbents who constantly acquire more local talent. I'm an investor in half a dozen startups that would have already been acquired if they were in the Bay Area, but instead struggle to build viable standalone businesses since they are located elsewhere. Perhaps this is part of the reason YC focuses most of its time, money, and effort on local teams. Besides the concentration of resources for those fortunate few who become rocketships, the downside protection on the rest of the portfolio seems much better (in human, not just dollar terms).
  • dirtyaura 10y ago
    I wonder if this is really solvable by technology and tools? In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper. Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :) I feel that it is something else, culture issue, that still makes teams that are physically in the same location, to perform more effectively. Fixing work culture to support remote work better is likely the key instead of tech and tools. And money will follow: when VCs believe that remote teams and remote networking are as effective, they will invest everywhere.
• dtjohnnymonkey 10y ago
  I just read this article today and thought a great idea would be to develop a platform for simplifying the process for starting up community credit unions. Kind of like Stripe Atlas but for credit unions. It could benefit a lot of small communities. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-organizing-credit-union https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-organ...
  • dgrealy 10y ago
    Very interesting idea. Pricing seems like the biggest challenge that comes to mind, but maybe there is a good solution.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• NurAzhar 10y ago
  The maritime industry specifically bunker fuel Use blockchain
• skynode 10y ago
  While we seek out new areas that are ripe for disruption, I'm particularly excited about what MapD is doing using GPUs in analytics. Disclaimer: I don't work for MapD.
• sAbakumoff 10y ago
  I can't resist "By wearing this standard ear-bud headphone, modified with a small piezoelectric sensor, the user can control their phone solely with their neural impulses. Point, click, drag, even type...all using only brainwaves.Think it...and it happens."
  • sidcool 10y ago
    I would contest if it's untapped.
  • mosuk 10y ago
    Silicon Valley?
    • sAbakumoff 10y ago
      Sure :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE
• jkaljundi 10y ago
  Wonder what could change in the areas of online recruitment and candidate sourcing? It's a nice business because the business demand is always there - just provide the candidates. Still after Indeed/Simplyhired and Glassdoor, no major innovation besides some niche engineer scraping/sourcing tech. WHat could be done there?
  • yoshyosh 10y ago
    I think there are some pretty cool things that can be done here. A lot of organizations follow similar structures. Engineer -> Lead Engineer -> Director of Engineering -> Senior Director, etc. Since they follow similar patterns / needs, humans also follow patterns as well, engineers looking to move up into management or deeper into engineering as 1-2 years pass. Matching these two up can be done by scraping / ML. At the end of the day recruiting is all about matching the right candidate with the right job. Right candidate = one who has the skills and motivation (wanting to move up, work for specific types of companies). Right job = organization that is heading into that phase / requesting it.
  • mgav 10y ago
    I'm not a recruiter, but I have a startup for matching candidates and jobs on criteria other than what appears on resumes and LinkedIn, but it's hard to get much candidate volume. Even if (a huge "if") I'm right, and this is a much better way to match, it doesn't mean the world will change form what's "working" (or at least familiar) and adapt a new approach. Internal recruiters are often extremely busy and lots of new startups do a nice job of streamlining their work.
    • yoshyosh 10y ago
      Sounds like the classic 10x problem. Switching costs are so high that your solution needs to be 10x and/or you find an underserved piece of the market to start
• imd23 10y ago
  Simplify worldwide taxing, company creation, money routing?
  • _98fj 10y ago
    That is not a technology problem. Every tried to get a law passed?
    • Sunset 10y ago
      What about a unified interface which takes into account each sub-jurisdiction's arcane rules and gives you advice how to handle things? Of course you would be paying to keep the product up to date with local laws.
      • _98fj 10y ago
        That sounds like a good idea, but don't underestimate just how complex law and tax is in each country. You need hundreds of lawyers to sift through this. There are so many law and accounting consultants for a reason. I once met an SAP-contractor who was paid 5 digit amounts for implementing 1000 loc modules that was required because a tiny paragraph of some pension-law in a single country was updated.
• deepnotderp 10y ago
  A method for semiconductor startups, especially in analog to tape out on the leading nodes. Things that could expedite this: Better affordable EDA tools (maybe even open source? startups that succeed and become self-sufficient would pay big bucks for customization and support). Especially for analog! Some sort of business model which pays for masks, such as perhaps taking a percentage of the money in exchange for a MLM mask. This could be something that a mask work company does. Another related but orthogonal startup idea(albeit much harder than an app like snapchat)would be to develop a maskless lithography technique for cutting edge nodes, such as electron beam lithography.
• pizza 10y ago
  Multiplying the value of bitcoin.
• bra-ket 10y ago
  Build cheaper houses
  • jgome 10y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+printed+houses https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+printed+hous...
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    The main reason 'housing' is getting more expensive is zoning regulations + limited supply of land in desirable areas. You can still find cheap houses in places that not many people want to live in.
  • whitepoplar 10y ago
    Yes! From first principles, one look at materials cost to build a home leaves one with the feeling that prices could potentially be cut by an order of magnitude.
  • itchyouch 10y ago
    The value of homes is mostly in the land. 600k house? the land is 350k, construction materials and labor comes in at 150-200, 50-100k left over is margin for the developer.
  • pgroves 10y ago
    Yeah. Does anybody know why walls for houses aren't built in factories (with electrical, plumbing, insulation, etc already inside)?
  • afarrell 10y ago
    Someone tried to do this in Boston by hiring Maine residents to build the components and then shipping the components down to be put in place. The permit was rejected in part because it was taking away local jobs and in part because it would change the character of the neighborhood.
• vatotemking 10y ago
  Decentralized sharing. Person 1 and 2 turns on wifi on their phones. Person 1 sends a file to person 2. Person 2 receives a notification and accepts. File is now on his phone. This works without cel coverage and without internet. Just the wifi of 2 phones turned on.
  • jasonlingx 10y ago
    Like AirDrop?
    • Sophistifunk 10y ago
      only, actually reliable.
  • luos 10y ago
    You mean like bluetooth? :)
    • vatotemking 10y ago
      Im aware of all the tongue in cheek comments about bluetooth. but no. Bluetooth is clunky. Wifi is ubiquitous and has a bigger range. Use case? Let say person 1 wants to share with person 3, but person 3 is out of range. Fortunately, person 2 is in between and is in range of both, so the "app" just finds its way hopping between nodes. Networks can be created on demand. Thats what I mean by "decentralized sharing".
  • huehehue 10y ago
    This sounds like Bluetooth
  • olivierduval 10y ago
    Wasn't it one of the firsts basic use case for Bluetooth? For me, it's already working.
    • vatotemking 10y ago
• jbhatab 10y ago
  A light field projector so we can get sharp images projected on any surface in any lighting. That would be huge for all types of applications that hinge on projectors. Imagine smart boards but in any area projected from all types of objects.
• Animats 10y ago
  Figure out some way to reliably get an IP connection between two any devices without help from a central server or service. Kill Skype, etc.
  • mypalmike 10y ago
    It is impossible to set up a peer-to-peer connection between two devices on symmetric NAT, often used by mobile carriers (or at least it was last time I looked into doing so a few years ago). A STUN server can be used to initiate between other forms of NAT, and TURN can act as a passive full-time intermediary, but there's no way to avoid some sort of central server in many cases.
    • zurn 10y ago
      Since then mobile carriers have started doing IPv6 in a big way.
      • Animats 10y ago
        I understand that T-Mobile supports handset to handset IPv6 connections. So that's a place to start.
• aabajian 10y ago
  The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates. 3. Carbohydrates activate addictive dopaminergic pathways (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nihms36189.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nih...) People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term, immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc. can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?
  • LoSboccacc 10y ago
    time to test the market for gravy flavored e-cigarettes!
    • socket0 10y ago
      Make mine deep-fried potato products, and I'm in. Although something nausiating to kill any appetite might be more productive.
  • eggie 10y ago
    And yet control of the food supply is dominated by a tiny number of slow-moving, conservative companies who appear to spend most of their efforts engineering crops to behave like biological instantiations of intellectual property. Yield is the primary objective, not nutritional quality. Farmers integrated in this system have given up a huge amount of their autonomy and also influence over the breeds of crops and animals that they raise. Crop and livestock genetic diversity has plummeted, and we have removed the local experts from the breeding process. I am shocked by the amount of effort going into fixing health problems post-hoc relative to efforts aimed at improving the foods we eat. In fact, we seem to be going backwards. The intellectual vanguard is pushing organic + non-GMO produce, heirloom foodstuffs, artisan food practices, and other regressive (if high-quality) patterns that won't encourage nutritional improvement for the majority of people. We should be applying ourselves to improving food. It's completely overlooked because it's seen as a solved problem. I can completely understand why, but I think it's pretty clear, given the health problems in the west, that there is more to be done.
• Lxr 10y ago
  A good native LaTeX editor, with quality on par with modern IDEs (deep understanding of syntax and semantics, intellisense, etc).
  • Sophistifunk 10y ago
    What do you think is the intersection of "needs to do a lot of LaTeX" and "pays for software" groups? Honest question.
    • Lxr 10y ago
      Why do you think there is a small overlap? The first group is very large (almost all academics in CS/math/physics departments around the world) and is generally affiliated with universities that pay for software.
      • Sophistifunk 10y ago
        I didn't really know who the main users would be, that's why I asked :)
  • milani 10y ago
    Have you seen overleaf.com?
    • Lxr 10y ago
      I haven't tried it, but it's not native and that is quite important to me. Maybe if their JavaScript was absolutely on point it would be bearable but I have a bad feeling. Imagine writing C++ or Python for 8 hours a day with nothing but an online IDE.
• JamesBarney 10y ago
  A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour). I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions while they were still coming up to speed. The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the most important architectural decisions. And these mistakes could be avoided with questions like "What issues will we run into?" "What patterns should we follow?" "What are good resources to get started?" For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time. Obviously the biggest problem is ensuring quality without having to hike rates too much.
  • colinmegill 10y ago
    https://hourlynerd.com/ https://hourlynerd.com/ is an interesting model, if a different industry
  • dharma1 10y ago
    For tech it could be a nice add-on to Stack Overflow, since they have a reasonable amount of data of people's knowledge/quality and a reputation system
  • mxstbr 10y ago
    I've started offering a service like this[0] for React apps. The response so far has been really good, people love it! It's exactly how you say it is, by spending some time identifying the biggest issues and then spending an hour with the team I can get them to rally around some easy fixes that'll be valuable for the business long-term. Developers love it as their bosses finally understand the value of refactoring, and managers love it because they get actionable tips that'll help the business. Making this a general platform would require a lot of good curation, but nothing impossible. Now you got me thinking… [0]: https://mxstbr.com/audits/ https://mxstbr.com/audits/
• ommunist 10y ago
  Providing basic income irrespectible to nationality or citizenship in exchange for confirmed real time spent online irrespective of activity.
  • unusximmortalis 10y ago
    In exchange for what?...
• WA 10y ago
  Contraception. Almost everybody needs it. The current solution of flooding the body with hormones works, but causes side effects. The pill for men won't make it. My prediction is that we'll have some other non-hormonal contraception within the next 20-30 years, probably invented by a startup that wants to disrupt this billion dollar market.
  • nailer 10y ago
    This pill won't because depression and inability to maintain an erection are side effects. But one in future may.
    • WA 10y ago
      I don't believe daily medication for something stupid like contraception is the solution. I mean, take a good and hard look at the mechanical aspects of human reproduction. Those tubes for semen are a bottleneck, a single point of failure. They're ripe for disruption in an entirely mechanical way ;) No need to mess with the entire hormone system.
      • yosamino 10y ago
        I don't know the current status of this system and if it's viable at all, but check out https://www.bimek.com/ https://www.bimek.com/
    • Cthulhu_ 10y ago
      > implying the pill for women doesn't have equally bad side-effects. But they're more likely to take them, because they're the ones that end up pregnant.
      • nailer 10y ago
        > implying the pill for women doesn't have equally bad side-effects. - I actually wasn't talking about the women's pill at all - you can tell this by reading the post you're replying to. - But yes, inability to have sex is not a common side effect of the female pill. Which I suspect you also already know. Have you considered reading the HN guidelines?
• burgalon 10y ago
  Here are my thoughts 1) Free p2p money transfers / gateway to bitcoin or other crypto-currency so that it's more widely adopted 2) Better open bank accounts - allowing open transparent accounting for organizations and companies 3) Solve democracy - better analytical tools for mass discussion, arguments and decision making which will encourage use of facts and science, and discourage politics 4) Human-Machine interfaces - memory augmentation 5) Solve the common cold and influenza 6) Robotics - better batteries, finer motors and sensors - possibly through the usage of biological systems 7) Public access to satellites - realtime security monitoring, crops analytics and forecasting 8) Solve weather or create private air-conditioned jackets ;)
  • sunshinejoy 10y ago
    For 3) Solve democracy, a friend showed me pol.is (neat demo of it: https://pol.is/demo/2demo https://pol.is/demo/2demo). Anyway, it's description is..."pol.is brings AI & machine learning to participatory democracy. Scale up outreach in online consultation & get powerful insights that can shape and legitimize policy." It would be amazing if U.S. politics could be grounded in legitimate understanding of each other.
    • cel1ne 10y ago
      The problem is not making the tools, it's getting everybody to learn and use them.
      • burgalon 10y ago
        I'm wondering if some kind of mind-map/graph mashed-up with a wikipedia model and "likes" on each node, can help drive decisions or is it just too naive/simplistic and low adoption
        • cel1ne 10y ago
          It starts with the issue that most people don't especially like to use computers and will avoid them if they can.
• jokoon 10y ago
  A binary, pre-parsed version of HTML with its smartphone browser. Maybe with python scripting? Anyway something that would make the web on phones great.
  • sah2ed 10y ago
    On a philosophical level, what you are asking for is what Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was designed to solve except that this will leave us with a web much broken than how we started.
    • jokoon 10y ago
      Broken, why?
      • sah2ed 10y ago
        Previous discussions on HN: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722590
• aaron695 10y ago
  Find something that works ok in the US and export it to another country where it doesn't exist yet. > market segment - Non English speaking
• schappim 10y ago
  Function as a service (like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions) for Ruby. None of these natively support Ruby ^1 ^2. It's mind boggling that this is the case, especially considering how many Rails/Sinatra apps there are! ^1 Sure there is hacks for getting Ruby running on them, but no native support ^2 Yes I know about Ironworker, from iron.io, but they're going a dockerized and up market and don't even display pricing any more. :(
  • gingerbread-man 10y ago
    Ewwwwwwwwwwww.
    • dang 10y ago
      Please don't do this here.
• cel1ne 10y ago
  Design refugee-camps. Many of them gonna be needed in 25 years.
  • daveguy 10y ago
    Like pop-up city/shelters?
    • cel1ne 10y ago
      I thought about "temporary" cities that are actually gonna stay. How to do efficiently provide medical services. How to lay it out so that violence won't spread etc.
• Torkel 10y ago
  iPhone was released 10 years ago. We have insanely more capable screens, cpu:s, gpu:s, sensors. Find what's next and you will make a dent in the universe.
  • brangalina4eva 10y ago
    Only if it's VR or brain interfacing or some other 10x improvement.
• vayarajesh 10y ago
  I think the field of 'Agriculture' is untapped and can be / should be more advanced
• sytelus 10y ago
  Hackers rarely think of politics as playing field for startups, so in my mind this one of the biggest untapped opportunity right now. People from both sides are going nuts over Trump politics. That means tons of eyeballs and attention that would be available for the right startups for next 4 years. Things like BuzzFeed and DailyXYZ are going to make a massive killing in terms of ad revenue. At this stage still the real disruptive startup are few and far between. Nice thing is that you might actually end up doing something good and impactful. If Zuck runs for president, may be even big exit ;). I can think of few ideas right away: - website that gives stories from other side - activist website that uses better tactic than "getting signatures" - know how your congressman votes on each of the vote - automatic ratings generator for congressman - news article that only comes from international press - software for politicians: campaign management, voter management, political ad management etc
  • nevdka 10y ago
    You could also think of a new political party as a startup. Run your own candidates for congress, and run for president yourself.
  • mattsouth 10y ago
    This is the sort of thing mysociety.org does pretty well in the uk
  • panic 10y ago
    - know how your congressman votes on each of the vote If anyone from Facebook is reading, this would be a great feature for the site. Imagine following your representatives and getting their votes automatically in your newsfeed.
    • gingerbread-man 10y ago
      It would make a great plugin for national news sites, though their internal software teams could build this feature pretty quickly themselves.
    • jsymolon 10y ago
• csbartus 10y ago
  Devices as designers Sooner or later (IoT, AR, VR) we will have to let devices (AI) to assembly the final user interface. I imagine something like this: we designers / developers / UI architects are creating plenty of interconnectable components describing our idea of a product covering all scenarios and use cases. Then the device will asemmbly the final UI based on the individual user, and the device capability. For example a watch will display something different than a large digital billboard on a skyscraper. And everyone of us will see a different design each time we look at a display, based on our individual digital history (Data mining). The point is predetermined design must be advanced to on-demand, context based, liquid design. We let the big picture be assembled by third party, we focus only to smaller components. Something like http://metamn.io/beat/tomorrowww/ http://metamn.io/beat/tomorrowww/
• Findeton 10y ago
  I'm going to say the obvious: VR. Really, there will be an explosion in VR sells and when it happens it will be too late to be there. I don't think it's going to be a fluff this time, we just need the right killer application and I know what's going to be.
  • kozak 10y ago
    The big question is where is money in VR (except for entertainment).
    • michael_bluth 10y ago
      Training
• lngnmn 10y ago
  I think this is a wrong question, or at least oversimplified view. The real recipe is to be highly qualified on whatever you do and ready to catch an opportunity and ride on an emerging trend. Today the buzzwords are about security, a few years ago it was about services for selfies of teens. On a larger scale there is already biotech bubble and emerging AI bubble, etc. Basically, the strategy should be to follow the money (the demand) and to love what you do (be above average). This, it seems, the most probable way to get noticed, to get funding (for abilities) and to succeed. The markets are stochastic. For example, if you ask yourself, how come that such piles of Java crap as Hadoop came to be so popular, the answer would be that the biotech industry has almost unlimited hot money that time and huge demand for big data processing tools, so even such poorly designed and implemented by amateurs crap would be a good-enough tool. Suppose, I would like to make a similar tool, order of magnitude less wasteful, based on ideas from Plan9, Erlang, based on ZFS, etc, in other works, do it the right way, would I get any funding? No, because there is no real demand for quality solution when a crappy one is OK. There are exceptions, of course, how, for example, nginx became a well-crafted improvement over apache, but this is indeed an exception. So, go to the valley and keep looking. There, it seems, no other way. The principle is that there must be a strong demand backed by big money (Wall Street investors), so even a half-backed result could be easily sold and re-used to return investments and even make some profit.
• caretStick 10y ago
  Getting off of HN? Bahaha. Basically the real world. And startups... There are two classes of problems, ones where intermediate steps to solutions are not viable or marketable, meaning government and big corporate or just socialized progress will eventually open the door. The 2nd class is where every solution with a component along the solution path results in something marketable and you can spend your career doing startup BS instead of corporate, academic, or government BS. Also study some goddamned math, logic, and science. I say this because I don't want to choke any more superstitious co-founders. Closet is going to burst. They always think they can grease you into believing their stupid plan and that that somehow makes it real, right up to the point that you stab their stupid eye socket and they see the truth, but it's too late.
• CM30 10y ago
  I think media and content monetisation is a massive opportunity here. Or in other words, finding a way for people to get money from their written content without ads or subscriptions. This is because the advertising industry is in a bit of a decline at the moment, and it's likely than in a few years things like AdBlock will make many ad funded businesses (like media outlets) completely unsustainable. So if anyone finds a good alternative, it will probably make them rich. Just... good luck finding said solution, given that we've tried ads, donations, subscriptions and microtransactions and found that all four have major problems as far as getting people to actually use them goes. Still, the opportunity is there for whatever miracle worker figures out a way to make content profitable again.
  • yoshyosh 10y ago
    I wish this was automatic, factored into your browser + existing internet bill. This way the sites you consume the most content on / get the most from naturally get some form of compensation automatically
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• jhylau 10y ago
  international markets.
• Grue3 10y ago
  A truly customizable browser for power users. Kind of like Firefox is currently, but not about to render most of its useful add-ons obsolete.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• fgpwd 10y ago
  Anything related to lucid dreams? Think of the ability to utilize the 8 hours of sleep for something productive or recreational. It will take atleast a decade before VR catches up with the level of detail you get in lucid dreams. Something that makes them more accessible for people, so that everyone could get this "me time" every night would be amazing. If you want to try, just keep on asking yourself if you are awake throughout the day. Try reading something, it's difficult to read something on dreams. Or try using electricity switches, they normally don't work in a dream. Sooner or later you would find while doing this that you are in a dream. From there, sky is literally the limit. Imagine whatever you want, fly across mountains, travel in spaceships, etc. till the time you wake up.
  • bbayer 10y ago
    Lucid dreaming is not part of normal sleep cycle. It reduces deep sleep time and most people report that after long time with lucid dreams they feel exhausted and they feel like they haven't slept at all. So, in the longterm it is harmful.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• RantyDave 10y ago
  TV's that work. I have the most god awful rats nest of cables in the corner of my living room - someone needs to make the iMac of TV's.
• mrschwabe 10y ago
  The stock market (ready for disruption). There is a new generation of investors who are not interested in the 'old stock market' but who are instead looking for equity investment that can offer the efficiency, integrity and anonymity that cryptocurrency provides.
  • gingerbread-man 10y ago
    The lawyers may take issue with that one. Anonymous equity seems rather far-fetched.
  • dx034 10y ago
    A good example for anonymous investments are bearer bonds. They're illegal in most countries (in their purest form) because they're a prime tool for money laundering. It won't be different for any other anonymous investment. Also, stock markets are by far more efficient than bitcoin, especially when it comes to larger investments. A reason why algo traders are so widespread is because it's extremely cheap to buy/sell stocks if you're an institutional.
• LouisSayers 10y ago
  This is a bit broad, but essentially there are issues that we have in society that end up costing tax payers, and individuals a lot of money, or are simply really inefficient. Education is one such thing, but you could also branch out into other issues such as theft, health care, environmental issues. You can see that there are certain companies that are helping to tackle these issues in various roundabout ways, but I believe that there is big opportunity here, and it's kind of easy to quantify these issues, which makes it easy to sell solutions. Sorry if this sounds very broad and generic, but I promise if you sit on this idea, and take just a single societal issue, once you start to dig a bit deeper you'll see opportunities jump out.
  • pjc50 10y ago
    > Education [...] health care, environmental issues. All of those are public goods/tragedy of the commons issues operating in highly political regulated environments. Very difficult for a startup to make a difference there in a way that can make a return. Theft on the other hand is gradually being diminished by technology: the same omnisurveillance of always-on IoT devices makes it easier to remote-brick them or find their location if they're stolen. The problem shifts to hacking and ransomware.
    • LouisSayers 10y ago
      The barriers in place are reasons why they're good areas to innovate. It may be difficult, but that's all part of the game. Also on theft - not everything is an iPhone, and I don't believe tracking is very prevalent just yet. There's plenty of opportunity here that's currently left untouched. I'm less thinking about petty crime and more about burglaries / theft of high value goods (boats, cars etc).
• therealmarv 10y ago
  Note taking done right. Android, iOS, Desktop, Markdown & HTML, easy flat file format, Web clipper, offline and do this all without wasting whitespace (no doc editor like Evernote) and good sync and instant search results. <- NO ONE is doing this! Closest is maybe Google Keep (seriously it's good at some points I'm mentioning).
  • Tepix 10y ago
    Checkout "Notebooks 8" for iOS. It is the ultimate note taking app.
    • reitanqild 10y ago
      >> Note taking done right. Android, iOS, Desktop > Checkout "Notebooks 8" for iOS. Might be good but misses several requirements :-)
  • kozikow 10y ago
    I use emacs org mode and it's superb (not applicable to general populace, I know). Mobile is not that great, but I always carry ultrabook with me.
  • vlad_p 10y ago
    > do this all without wasting whitespace (no doc editor like Evernote) What do you mean by this? Do you just mean a raw HTML/markdown editor and a rendered view?
    • therealmarv 10y ago
      I mean that notes (at least for me) tend to be short. What I don't like is that many note taking systems think that a note needs to be edited like e.g. an Email or Word document (the Evernote approach). So when I see e.g. 10 notes I want to see the most of the content of the 10 notes very good and when I go into one note I don't want to see a whole big word processor with one blank sheet. Google Keep is doing a good job there, also not bad is e.g. Tiddlywiki.
    • 10y ago
• SQL2219 10y ago
  Imagine if you had a nuclear powered aircraft carrier with a desalination plant on it. You could sail from country to country and fill 'em up with fresh water.
  • mgav 10y ago
    It may not be able to produce more water than a single city requires: Charleston, SC uses 50 million gallons of water per day* For reference, that's about 75 Olympic size pools (at 660,000 gallons per). * source: https://sc.water.usgs.gov/infodata/wateruse.html https://sc.water.usgs.gov/infodata/wateruse.html
    • SQL2219 10y ago
      Well I wasn't thinking about pulling up to a US city, more like Chad, Somalia, etc. They'd be thrilled with 1 gallon per head per day.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
        How is an aircraft carrier going to get to Chad?
        • SQL2219 10y ago
          parachute?
• miguelrochefort 10y ago
  1. Capsule-style rooms for <$200/month 2. Ketogenic diet cafeterias 3. Semantic programming + smart contracts + automated UI design 4. Social score (trust, reliability, predictability) 5. Mechanical Turk / AI powered object recognition
  • pards 10y ago
    There was a Black Mirror episode called Nosedive that partially covered the topic of Social Score. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
  • zupreme 10y ago
    Out of curiosity how would your "Social Score" suggestion differ from Klout?
• listentojohan 10y ago
  Dispersion of research. I find that research and knowledge derived from it, could be shared much more effectively with industry / the public.
• vasilakisfil 10y ago
  A global VOIP service that is based on open standards. Or an open social network, also based on open standards. Both should be extensible.
  • vasilakisfil 10y ago
    It's unbelievable that we are moving to 100% Internet area, regular phones are deprecated, yet we are full of Silos. Skype user can't call Google hangouts user, Facebook user can't talk to Twitter user. Imagine what would happen if we had the same issues with our phone lines. The last real open service we created as a humanity is email. At least SMTP still works.
  • ValentineC 10y ago
    > A global VOIP service that is based on open standards. Is SIP [1] not open? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol
    • vasilakisfil 10y ago
      SIP is open, but none uses it :/ That's why I feel pushing for open standards is the key: it will allow you to install any voip app as long as it is compatible (follows the open standards).
  • sureshn 10y ago
    diasporafoundation.org and elgg.org are open social networks that can be tweaked to once specific requirements and can be hosted on a digitalOcean droplet for example.
• logicallee 10y ago
  By far (as in, by a mutiple of approximately 10,000) the biggest untapped opportunity is disrupting the geography of worldwide startups, meaning venture capital and so forth. Startups and ideas wither on the vine and shutter (close) due to lack of access to the startup ecosystem on equal terms: these startups often could produce billions in value in their respective markets and then worldwide. Further, this can be bootstrapped as many startups would agree to pay back to the community (through investment at high valuations) in exchange for investment today. You do not need access to billions today to solve this problem tomorrow. This isn't a billion, ten billion, or one hundred billion dollar problem. If you clock back from 2060 to 2017 using a discounted net present value analysis (if you do it correctly) you will find that this is a 10 trillion dollar (today's dollars) segment or in other words the equivalent of not one, ten, or one hundred Airbnb's: but, one thousand of them. (For comparison or as a sanity check on my number, worldwide economic GDP in 2016 was 75 trillion[1] so the number I quote is 14.2% of a single year's GDP - or the total value the world produces in just over 7 weeks. So these 7 weeks of economic output are what I quote as a discounted value from a total market extending over the next 50 years, worldwide, discounted to today. It is a conservative number.) We live in the dark ages of startup capital investment, and it's as hard to get investment as it was to get an education in the 1400s: you had to be rich, privileged, then go to a center of University learning. Geographically speaking, it is as bad today. Today, you have to go to silicon valley (as in, physically drag your body there) or one of a few other major startup centers (which give much poorer results), then somehow network your way into getting introductions. it is like being a scientist in the fifteenth century. enormous privilege and very difficult to achieve, with no clear path. Disrupting these geographic facts of capital investment and access to the startup and equity culture and markets is massive - when this starts to change, it will completely change the face of the planet in every way, for everyone. If you want to make the most massive disruption you can make in your lifetime, disrupt the geography of startup ecosystems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
• contingencies 10y ago
  Food. So much waste in transport, spoilage, excess out of season consumption, etc. Also a very effective means of direct charity. We are trying a new approach at http://8-food.com/ http://8-food.com/
• mslot 10y ago
  I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth. If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000 miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance. There is a notable lack of an open European marketplace along the lines of Alibaba. There are many challenges in making that model work for the EU, especially ~24 languages and big cultural differences, but the tech industry is in a good position to overcome such boundaries.
  • adventured 10y ago
    To what extent does the EU need to substantially consolidate language further to become more effective? There are two dozen major languages spoken in the EU. Nearly half of the EU can't communicate well with the other half because they share no common language. How do you get the EU to pursue a standardization of language, such that ~95% of people in the EU are fluent in at least one EU-wide common language (whether Spanish, English or other)?
    • narag 10y ago
      That language is already English. Most young people can at least read and write basic English.
      • dx034 10y ago
        But that's a political problem. After the UK quits, only Ireland has English as their native language. While it's easiest to use English across the EU, it's not really desired to have a trade language that is different from all major languages spoken. And in addition to that, even though most young people can communicate well in English doesn't mean they want to shop in an English store. You need to have a very good proficiency (probably C2) to know the English words for all articles you have in your household. But translating a website shouldn't be a big deal anyway.
• jerianasmith 10y ago
  The biggest untapped opportunity for startups is hiring skilled workers without any consideration to location or a single geography.
• abetusk 10y ago
  My opinions without any real insight into how practical/viable/useful they are: - PCB prototyping. Board costs are way down but the 2-week turnound time kills a lot of nimbleness that could be gotten from a cheap in house rapid PCB prototyping machine. This has been tried without too much success (Othermill, LPKF, silver paint methods, etc.) imo. Isolation routing by copper ablation might even be a possibility. - Oligonucleotide synthesis machine. This should be possible at the "hobbyist" level and would start bridging the gap to more accessible DIY bio. - Resin 3D printing. Resin curing is one of the only methods where it's clean enough to not be hazardous, rapid and has the hope of consistent quality of 3D printing. There are some companies out there that are doing this already, of course, but I believe is still very ripe for innovation. - DNA sequencing machines. Illumina still has a monopoly on whole genome sequencing. Even cheap genotyping at the consumer/hobbyist level would be a coup. - Closed loop precision CNC machines. Right now most low-end hobbyist CNC machines are open loop. There's no reason, aside from NRE, that position feedback and other sensors couldn't be added to a host of CNC applications for low-cost CNC machines. I haven't touched on some of the other electronics markets like pick and place machines that might be much more accessible with machine vision and other enabling technologies. With the DIY bio focused areas, a little infrastructure might enable other areas. For example, one step to solving the common cold might be tracking it's progress through a population, sequencing it as it crops up, seeing how it evolves and cataloging effective treatments. There's also microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" technology which seems like it's much more accessible now but it's not something I have a lot of familiarity with. My opinion is that without open standards, free/libre software and free/libre hardware, all of these are almost a no-go from the start but I think that that opinion is in the minority.
• luzia19 10y ago
  such a great qn. what about health intervention for elderly?
• sureshn 10y ago
  I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code , the next tab he should be able to see a CI build kicked off and the following tab a docker container which is ready to host the built new code commit for QA.
  • Wintamute 10y ago
    Does that really add that much more value over and above essentially the same setup except the tabs are implemented by your browser on different web pages?
    • sureshn 10y ago
      It does , because this is one platform with fully inter operable work item, build number, change set id , deployment server integration readily available , if you notice the individual tools, they come from different org's and have different way of working , except that they have a rest API exposed for you to integrate any other tool in a limited way. Its like when a developer makes one line of code change , he or she can use this platform to shepherd the change into production in a fully automated manner and take responsibility for the same.
  • amalag 10y ago
    I totally see the value in this, but the tools that do each individual component are very sophisticated. Either you rebuild all that functionality, or you strip them down, or you just have them work together. We are all in the third phase because the needs around each tool are so complex that people need the complicated software in each piece and they want to mix and match.
  • jshc 10y ago
    Perhaps instead of reinventing each tool that already does well in its own space, one could build a platform that allows users to link all these tools (if API is available) and customize with their own workflow and dashboard. I wonder if there's anything similar already existing yet? I feel in some big corps they may have developed their own proprietary homegrown tools for these.
• adventured 10y ago
  This won't be popular on HN: start aggressively patenting anything and everything you can around CRISPR. It's dirt cheap to work with both Cas9 and Cpf1. Figure out how to use CRISPR to insert or edit genes that we already know help to make some people practically bullet proof when it comes to cholesterol and common cardiovascular problems. Patent everything you can around using CRISPR to fight high cholesterol (the drug market for that is truly massively). Move fast, right now, while most of the pharma giants are asleep at the wheel (most of big pharma is a minimum of five years behind the curve, they always try to buy their way out of it after the fact). Congratulations, you're now a billionaire.
  • GreyGhost 10y ago
    Sure you can do this. You can also set back the development work on these genes by a long time with someone patenting something they know nothing about just to get rich from it.
    • nojvek 10y ago
      Or probably innovation just doesn't happen in the name of fear. Worse because of the patent trolls someone ends up releasing targeted crispr viruses unleashing another black plague
• ninjakeyboard 10y ago
  An economist and a normal person are walking down the street together. The normal person says “Hey, look, there’s a $20 bill on the sidewalk!” The economist replies by saying “That’s impossible- if it were really a $20 bill, it would have been picked up by now.”
  • wslh 10y ago
    Nice joke, not trying to be like [1] but this would apply if there were more chances of finding $ 20 bills. [1] http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm
  • npezolano 10y ago
    An economist from Chicago
    • splintercell 10y ago
      Correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis EDIT: FYI, not all pro-Free Market economists believe in EMH, Austrians for instance, have criticized Chicago school for this ridiculous theory.
  • padseeker 10y ago
    This comment is fantastic. I laughed out loud. The ivory tower exists for conservatives and liberals. And the Chicago comment is on point. I heard someone from U of Chicago School of Economics make the case that Payday lenders should not exist. If you go to U of C you'd know they do exist and they're about 1/4 of a mile off campus if you just left and looked around.
• vegabook 10y ago
  taking on the Bloomberg terminal. They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best described as "arcane" and where there is no semblance whatsoever of a user-discoverable taxonomy of functionality. It's all just sort of "you gotta know where you want to go". Most people use 5% of the terminal's functionality (mainly messaging) but Bloomberg refuses to tier pricing. It's all or nothing. And with finance changing rapidly, the clients are axed to cut costs. Not to mention real suspicions of monopoly because bberg is increasingly competing with its own clients in order to maintain share. This tyrannosaurus will be hard to take down frontally, but the beast is big enough and unwieldy enough that small nibbles here and there in specialized areas can be very attractive businesses. Other tidbits: * Bloomberg is stubbornly Windows only. No web, no Linux, no OSX no anything else except a bit of crippleware on mobile. * Multiple Fortune 500 companies and banks would salivate at taking him on, which means a ready pool of very cash-rich potential buyers for your growing business if you get any traction, and that includes Bloomberg itself. * Michael Bloomberg the man has not endeared himself to the current president so may be vulnerable. Challenges: * quant-style people who know what they're doing are very expensive. 200k USD plus per year. * network-effects powerful in favour of bloomberg. * once you're through the crusty user interface, assuming you found what you want (often with the help of a bloomberg "rep"), the actual functionality is often amazingly good.
  • sah2ed 10y ago
    Surely, Money.Net [0] is a first step? It was founded by a former top executive at Bloomberg: Morgan Downey. [0] https://www.money.net/ https://www.money.net/
    • vegabook 10y ago
      hey I hadn't seen that. I will check them out. However personally am sceptical of the "full frontal" approach (ie multi asset class etc) because you'll just never be as good as bloomberg, or even a fraction as good, on functionality, if you spread yourself that thin. I prefer a beachhead approach. [EDIT] appears very buggy on Linux via JRE on my big 4k monitor
• Tepix 10y ago
  Provide a paid subscription to Android updates for old popular phones. Don't add new features (unless it's easy), just make sure they remain secure. Phones are lasting longer and longer, the main reason to get a new one is no longer that it's too slow, it's the lack of updates. It's very wasteful.
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    The problem here is that the people who are actually aware and concerned about security updates (or lack thereof) are the technologically literate who upgrade to a new phone fairly frequently. The target market that you want to secure is generally either unaware of or apathetic towards security concerns (until they get hit).
    • Tepix 10y ago
      But the people who are knowledgeable also give recommendations to their friends and family who want something that just works. If you can buy a 1-2 year old phone for $100-$200 (without contract) and pay an extra $10 per year to receive security updates, that's a pretty good deal.
      • homakov 10y ago
        My recommendations to use full disk encryption etc go ignored.
  • dustedrob 10y ago
    Wow, i could definitely see this as a viable business model for LineageOS (previously Cyanogen) I wonder if they ever considered it.
• koopuluri 10y ago
  Fresh air. It's tough to breathe in many cities across the world, especially in Asia. I'd pay a lot (probably more than I would for my laptop / car) for a tool that would help me breathe fresh air in the midst of a polluted environment. Of course, a long term solution would involve actually reducing pollution, but there are enough of us suffering from a lack of fresh air, that a short-term solution would be greatly valuable.
  • overcast 10y ago
    You can pay a lot less, and go live in the "country" somewhere. Tons of fresh air out here.
  • pards 10y ago
    Solved by a guy in England that even offers different flavours! http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/man-sells-british-fresh-air-to-wealthy-chinese-elite-for-80-a-jar-a6857461.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/man-sells-bri...
• jdietrich 10y ago
  Older people. We live in a rapidly ageing society. Retirees are a large and wealthy demographic. Despite that, tech companies are absolutely woeful at designing products for older users. We don't empathise with their needs. We don't understand how poor eyesight, arthritis or cognitive difficulties can affect UX. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand and excellent opportunities for future growth.
  • scandox 10y ago
    You're dead on with this. Older users are a potential goldmine but they can be hard customers. Even as I age I see how much harder it is to sell me anything.
  • sideproject 10y ago
    I do agree. But what specific areas do you think would be good to target? You mention their poor eyesight and difficult UX, but that doesn't mean we should start creating Facebook or Twitter clones with bigger fonts and easier UX? (or should we?)
    • plopzer 10y ago
      A good example of this kind of thinking is GoGoGrandparent which is a service that lets older people, who might not understand how to use a smartphone app, use Uber by allowing them to call a number instead.
    • jdietrich 10y ago
      > But what specific areas do you think would be good to target? Almost everything. Here's an experiment you can try. Stay up for two nights in a row. Have a few drinks. Put on a pair of ear defenders, a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription and a pair of leather gardening gloves. Try to go about your daily life. You'll very quickly see plenty of industries that are ripe for disruption. The man-made world is overwhelmingly designed by and for the not-yet-disabled. We build overly complex interfaces with too many options and too few affordances. This makes life difficult for everyone, but it can totally exclude people with impairments. Nobody realised how awful smartphones were until the iPhone arrived. I think that most products and services are just as awful as a Windows Mobile phone circa 2005, but we have become inured to their awfulness. We're drowning in unnecessary complexity, in large part because we don't expect anything better.
• xer 10y ago
  I believe there are three good indicators to look at: - Infrastructure, these can also be called enablers. E.g. fiber accelerates Internet usage, AWS drastically accelerates SaaS businesses. Over time this acceleration will also happen in e.g. biotech and such introductions are to look for. If the infrastructure is missing, its likely gonna take some more time. Success stories in this category would be Spotify, Netflix and most apps. - Accumulators is similar to a network effect. Information, money, users and customers are orbiting certain networks and companies. These instances are in their domains black holes and it's mostly a bad idea trying to restrain or compete. The opportunity is to harness the momentum. A success story in this category would be Buzzfeed. - Automation, we are living in the golden age of automation. Essentially it's just to evaluate all repetitive tasks finding those with the highest value to the lowest investment.
  • chatmasta 10y ago
    Adding to this, we often see a pattern of Innovation -> Commoditization -> Aggregation. Cloud computing is currently in the commoditization phase. The next step is aggregation. There will be an opportunity for a company that successfully "abstracts away" the many different cloud providers, creating a single interface to a computing marketplace with supply spanning all providers. There are a few companies trying to do this that I've seen. Can't remember the names offhand, but I know packet.net partners with one of them to sell their excess capacity.
• johnlbevan2 10y ago
  Hundreds of restaurants in the same geographic area will be purchasing ingredients from a variety of different suppliers, based on their need. If they clubbed together with other local businesses to source common ingredients they could benefit from economies of scale; i.e. instead of 100 restaurants each buying 200 onions, there'd be a bulk order for 20,000 onions; meaning 1 lorry to deliver direct from the supplier(s) rather than multiple vans to cover each supplier/buyer combo. i.e. Create a platform that would allow suppliers to list what they're selling, buyers to list their needs, and match these up with one another. - Group similar suppliers or buyers together geographically to help improve the efficiency of individual orders by making them part of a larger collective order. - Add filter options so that when buying people can specify certain criteria (e.g. "I only want potatoes from soil-association approved suppliers"). - Now people don't buy from suppliers, but rather buy from a service/pool. - ...and people don't sell to buyers, but rather sell to the service/pool. - This same model works regardless of supplier or buyer size; i.e. benefits both big and small (though the benefits to smaller companies are more significant as they start to get the benefits of scale that the larger ones have anyway). Though I'd start with restaurants (i.e. to keep the platform focussed / avoid being too broad too soon), this same platform could over time expand for any purchasing interactions.
  • bpicolo 10y ago
    This is the reason distributors already exist. Almost all restaurants buy almost all of their ingredients through food distributors (or on occasion just the local Costco). Not saying that there's not room to grow in this area, but it's definitely not the case that restaurants are buying straight from a bunch of individual suppliers, minus restaurants aiming for hyper-local or small batch ingredients.
    • 14113 10y ago
      And the ones that are buying from individual suppliers are doing so for non-economic reasons, e.g. "buying local", or specialised produce variants.
  • sparkzilla 10y ago
• Roshmos 10y ago
  The utilities industry, industrial IoT, smart grids, and "Industry 4.0"...These will be the next innovation areas in my opinion.
• LeanderK 10y ago
  Easy, personal access to cloud computing. I have a macbook and am pretty satisfied with it. But a problem is, that in order to learn data-science/deep learning i need a beefy GPU/CPU and everything else. I could buy a desktop, but i am a student and not much at home, also in the age of cloud computing this seems silly. Also the upfront investment for a student is not negligible. I want really easy, flexible instances that are super, super simple to activate. Something like click website -> click start GPU with tensorflow preinstalled -> upload & run my python. Ideally per minute-billing and super, super simple to set-up and ssh into.
  • metaphorm 10y ago
    AWS is 90% of the way there already
  • 3chelon 10y ago
    Amazon, Google and IBM are all tackling this quite well. Not really startup territory. However, and I have done some work in this space, perhaps providing simple-to-use services built on top of these and offering them to non-technical folks would be a good business model?
  • Helmet 10y ago
    Doesn't Google Cloud Compute do exactly this? Go to gcc website, log in, click new instance, pick machine/specs, ssh into it.
  • throwaway_374 10y ago
    A while back I looked at a (HN formed?) startup www.paperspace.io which offered something similar. Ended up not using it due to security requirements as I wanted to host a proprietary process on it but I loved the concept.
  • VLM 10y ago
    So you want rollapp to add some kind of python IDE. Could happen. Works well enough with emacs. Price is not too ridiculous. You'd have to work top down and given some sort of python IDE you'd need to install your tensorflow stuff. Going bottom up a lot of people for a very long time (decade+ now) have been using services like linode as a personal server, here's your ubuntu install now now put "whatever" on it and run it remotely.
• johngalt 10y ago
  Legal tech is ripe. E-discovery is what everyone is paying attention to, but no one has got it right so far. Additionally there are many other areas with opportunities that aren't getting as much attention. Basically take on anything LexNex is doing now.
• whitepoplar 10y ago
  Physical space for lounging, socializing, and working. I live in NYC and there's still a striking lack of space that facilitates people getting out of their apartments and doing "whatever." Starbucks popularized the concept of the "third space" (the first two being housing + workplace) and I think there's so much room to improve upon this.
  • amelius 10y ago
    What is a reasonable price to pay for this kind of service, including the coffee if the place requires you to consume it?
    • tootie 10y ago
      There's a cafe near me in Brooklyn that has a nice interior space and free wifi. It's always packed and everyone brings a laptop. Coffee prices are normal if not a bit low for high-end coffee (their coffee is really good). They serve snacks, but not much else. I have no idea how they turn a profit with all the people lounging for hours with a little espresso or cup of tea. There's a morning rush, but it's really small compared to places nearer the subway.
      • whitepoplar 10y ago
        Cool! What's it called?
      • jcsnv 10y ago
        Sounds like The West
      • sotojuan 10y ago
        > It's always packed and everyone brings a laptop. This is the problem with NYC coffee shops. They're place to go talk with a friend for a bit or for a first date. They're not really places to casually hang out all day.
  • whitepoplar 10y ago
    Related: physical space that welcomes the elderly. Loneliness/depression is a huge problem for older people. I think it would really boost wellbeing for these people to participate in something and to see other faces.
• metaphorm 10y ago
  New web browser that is legacy tech compatible (i.e. HTML, JS, CSS) but also natively supports new options for scripting and styling. I feel like JS/CSS in particular are just not what we should settle for. We've grown accustom to working with them but I think there is a lot of possibility for better front-end technology in the future.
• sparkzilla 10y ago
  Interesting that no-one here mentions fake news.
• jdironman 10y ago
  Leased CGI sets / models / scenes. Building full fledged models / generations of popular cities and places and leasing them to film producers. Its cheaper for them to lease than it would be to hire full devs and designers to start from scratch..I know there is some 're-use' in place by these companies such as pixar and disney. Re-use is not what i am talking about though. I am talking about movies like transformers / godzilla / etc which need on point rendering of actual cities and places. Just a thought I had the other day when reading how film companies were struggling with growing movie budgets and diminishing returns.
  • VLM 10y ago
    Look into games. Imagine some GTA-like game set in actual Chicago, or minimally edited Chicago to remove all trademarks anyway.
    • jdironman 10y ago
      Right, I completely forgot about the gaming industry.
• whitepoplar 10y ago
  "Kickstarter" for cities. Housing is unaffordable in desirable cities, but nobody wants to move to less desirable cities, where housing is affordable. Take a city that is desperate for development, like Detroit, and figure out a way for a couple thousand people to "pledge" moving to a dense-ish urban area at a preferential rate.
  • maxsilver 10y ago
    I think you have cause/effect mixed up a bit. Those cities are only "affordable" because people aren't there. If a couple thousand people all simultaneously buy into an "affordable dense-ish urban area", that action would make that area un-affordable, and subsequently create all the same displacement/gentrification/nimby problems that follow. Your Detroit example is a good one, the dense-ish urban area now costs around $300-400k, because people already did what you've suggested. Unless your moving into lower-density mostly-suburban-ish areas in Detroit, your not really saving any money anymore. -- If your going to "Kickstarter" a city, let's make a brand new one. Find a bunch of empty land (greenfield or brownfield), and build a whole new dense city from scratch on it. This is easy/cheap to do compared to actual urban development (it's how all affordable suburban housing already starts), but just skip the suburb part and go straight from land to tall density, so there's no existing population to harm, no existing zoning issues to fight, no existing infrastructure problems to deal with. Go from nothing to 100% modern on day 1. You could buy a bunch of land near say (picking a place at random) Hazelwood, Minnesota. Build your city with dense urban environment to start (enforce your own density rules, straight to 5+ story buildings). Fund an expension of light rail, and your just 30 minutes away from MSP airport by train, with direct flights daily to NYC, SFO, and SEA. And your already on I-35 freeway for freight. There's such a shortage for affordable dense urban housing, that if you could provide affordable density with fast reliable transportation to existing cities (light rail to the closest major airport), your new city would likely fill up quickly, and help make these existing cities more affordable too.
    • kmicklas 10y ago
      This would be the modern version of the suburban development fallacy - building neighborhoods to a finished state with no method for organic expansion.
• cdiamand 10y ago
  If you're looking for oppportunities in different industries, I send out a daily email filled with short interviews. I ask about industry problems, and the software that could solve those problems. You can check it out here: http://www.oppsdaily.com http://www.oppsdaily.com
  • cdiamand 10y ago
    An example of one of the responses: "I work in the microbiology field. One of the things I have to do in the quality control department is to count the number of individual colonies that are streaked on a media. Most of the time the count can go up to the 1000's and the colonies are small and close together. I would like software that can recognize the individual colonies, like a camera would detect faces, and would automatically count the number of colonies available. This would give more accurate readings for tests and cut down on time. I would definitely pay for this software."
  • antfarm 10y ago
    Great idea! Is there a way to see archived interviews?
    • cdiamand 10y ago
      Thanks antfarm :) I'll be setting up a "vault" of sorts in the next few weeks where you can see pretty much all the interviews I have.
• rini17 10y ago
  Handheld (spectrometry?) scanner for food - check for most common cases of mold, toxins, contaminants.
  • roberdam 10y ago
    Check this one https://www.consumerphysics.com/ https://www.consumerphysics.com/, I already have one.
    • richard___ 10y ago
      Does this give an accurate calorie count just by visually scanning food
      • daveguy 10y ago
        No.
• z3t4 10y ago
  Some sort of sonar/x-ray to see what's in the ground before digging. Ever wanted to make a hole and then you hit a big rock ... Or when plowing down fiber, or for calculating the costs for doing so.
  • cr0sh 10y ago
    You must mean something cheap, portable, relatively small, etc - because ground penetrating radar is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar I could see something that could be "attached" to a cell phone (via bluetooth or such), attached to a stick or such (like a metal detector) - would be useful. Sonar would probably be the cheapest way, but the power requirements would be fairly large (at least as much as what's needed for a fish-finder, I would imagine). Hmm - gotta give some thought to this!
• abvdasker 10y ago
  True P2P social networking. No ads since there will be little infra to support. Solves major privacy concerns when data is decentralized and not monetized.
• ccvannorman 10y ago
  Early in my startup career an investor told me, "There's money everywhere. Where you go, how you get there, and how fast, is dependent on your skills, drive, network, and luck. But there's money everywhere. Never forget that." For me, the biggest untapped market potential is educational video games (which is why I work on supermathworld.com). The market literally doesn't exist. There are but a handful of educational products that could rightfully be called "games".
  • jstandard 10y ago
    I'm not so sure about the "literally doesn't exist" part, schools have been buying educational video games for decades. 25 years ago I played educational games that look conceptually identical to the kind on supermathworld and mathbreakers. I built space stations, launched rockets, battled monsters, and even learned geography and critical reasoning skills to catch the elusive Carmen Sandiego. Graphics and gaming capabilities were a bit different on the Apple IIe though :) A friend of mine organizes a conference on educational games which sounds up your alley, check out: http://intentionalplaysummit.com/ http://intentionalplaysummit.com/
• ikeboy 10y ago
  I think retail can be improved, and even small improvements can have large impacts because of the sheer size of the market: US retail sales are in the $5 trillion range yearly, mostly in brick and mortar. Specific problems: 1. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with e-commerce be fixed? 2. E-commerce doesn't work well on cheap items where shipping cost is prohibitive. Different companies have tried to solve this in various ways, with Prime (losing money on cheaper sales in hopes they can reduce logistics cost and drive larger sales) or Jet (directly giving shipping savings for ordering multiple items at once). It will be difficult to compete with Prime, but there has to be an angle that works, Jet found one. 3. Simpler price comparison. I tried to build the feature I thought should exist at https://icanpriceit.com/ https://icanpriceit.com/ as a side project, but didn't spend the time to properly launch it. I hope some startup succeeds in that space, I've been watching https://wikibuy.com/ https://wikibuy.com/ which is quite similar. I think there's plenty of room to build the next Amazon or eBay. The fees they charge third party sellers have been going up over time, if a marketplace was willing to accept lower fees at first it could help early growth.
  • Kalium 10y ago
    > 1. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with e-commerce be fixed? One thing I much prefer B&M shopping for is clothing. Sizing is so wildly variable across brands, and clothing such a tactile thing, that I cannot completely get away from physical storefronts.
    • mthoms 10y ago
      That's a good point. I wonder why the big brands have not gotten together to create standardized sizing scheme.
      • Kalium 10y ago
        In what way would they benefit from it? In general, they'd rather encourage ignorance-based brand loyalty. In addition, this way brands can compete on vanity sizing. "I'm a 12 in Brand X, but an 8 in Brand Y! I'll take Y!"
• psychometry 10y ago
  I don't empathize with their needs because the aging boomer population is responsible for most of modern society's woes, most recently Trump and Brexit.
  • _archon_ 10y ago
    This may or may not be true, but it doesn't matter from a higher-level viewpoint. If you want the olds to have less wealth and influence, why not consider how to make your app serve them so they'll give you their money? Further, let's take a look at the dying generation. They were born into a postwar era of booming suburbia and raygun gothic architecture. Women were allowed in the workplace in a non-secretary or switchboard operator role (which took a total war effort to allow in the first place). Sexism remained, but progress had been made. Racism was the quasilegal norm, but boomers pushed the social revolution that included integration and a number of de jure protections. Now, at the end of their lives, America is less openly racist than it has been at any point in history. It may not seem like it, because of the G.I.F.T. giving jerks a megaphone so they can spout their bile, but we don't commonly move out of a neighborhood because black folks move into it anymore. The young generation doesn't care, the old generation was raised to care but doesn't say it out loud, the dead generation cared and said so. Social change takes time. We have legal abortion now, too. Every generation should put its children into a better world than they had themselves. We confer wealth, build infrastructure, preserve and gain knowledge and tools. We also try to note the sins of our fathers and try not to pass them on. This takes time, and effort, and the dying generation of boomers have run their course. Whether or not they're right about all things, it's fair to note that they're doing a lot better than their parents did, and they gave us the opportunity to do even better. In YC terms, there was clear opportunity for disruption in the social equality sector, and the olds took great strides to work on it. I propose that _inertia_ is responsible for most of society's woes, and that the olds of any generation will show how far their children have come by contrast. Edit: typo.
  • kekimchi 10y ago
    They are also responsible for your freedom and rights ... just saying.
  • dang 10y ago
• nareen4768 10y ago
  I think Agricultural sector in India is largely untapped by startup revolution despite being a major force in IT & Software development. It is very very tough nut to crack and majority of farmers in India are not very educated.
• petra 10y ago
  1. Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive, because only a rare few companies has managed to do the r&d to create great noise cancellation But if there we're affordable headphones that are software programmable and act as an app store for noise cancellation algorithms, that would definetly reduce the price. 2. One of the ideal ways to recieve ecommerce packages is on your car's trunk. It's possible to build a smart lock for your car that enables the delivery guy to drop packages. The hard part is making it cheap, making installation cheap, and designing a rapidly growing business model that grows rapidly. 3. Many restaurant use a combi-ovens to reheat frozen food with great results. Combi ovens are now starting to become cheap($300), most of them for the home. But what about the workplace , where for some places, frozen food may be a good alternative to restaurant ordering(it may be cheaper, for example), but that will require an affordable multi-meal oven, which doesn't exist yet ? 4. Apache Isis is a great, rapid , domain driven framework for business app development. But it's quite complex. There may an opportunity in synmplifying it and introdcuing it to new users. Maybe in a service based form.
  • d_burfoot 10y ago
    > Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive I think a smart signal processing/soundtech/AI hacker could create a software program that uses a computer's audio to destructively interfere with other sounds in a room. Say there is an annoying mechanical whine coming from outside your bedroom. You position the computer's microphone near your bed, then tell the program to start listening. The program learns the audio pattern of the whine, and then begins to emit an antiwhine that cancels it out.
    • petra 10y ago
      Noise cancelling headphones work much better and are much easier to do than room level noise-cancellation. Why? Well, the whole point of noise-cancellation is to create an interference pattern in your ear, that is as similar as possible to the noise in your ear. The farther you get from your ear that becomes harder, because of the room's acoustics, because of latency, because of the fact your head is moving, etc. And we see that in the results of room level noise cancellation attempts in the past.
• pgroves 10y ago
  Health Insurance / Hospital. I'm old enough that I now go to the doctor more frequently than I used to and it's a mess. A health insurance company that could reliably allow a user to change their address on a website would be competitive. Having all of your medical procedures and orders accessible through a simple CRUD app would be a threat to a lot of multi-billion dollar companies. It's still all done through phone calls and faxes and there are lots of mistakes and it's hugely inefficient. I went to the ER last year and got 5 different bills from different departments of the same hospital. The online payment portal doesn't work unless you call them to set it up. That's not the hospital network I usually go to - my usual provider is probably worse.
  • tln 10y ago
    I wonder if this could be address by payment card networks. Level 2 credit card processing adds invoice details to charges, level 3 credit card processing adds line-item details, perhaps a new level for health care information could happen and then signing in at the doctors office would be as simple as swiping a card.
  • pdq 10y ago
    What will improve the medical industry in the US dramatically is transparent pricing. When both consumers and providers have no idea how much the product or service they are using actually costs, there is no way to control costs (ie competition, delaying the service, using an alternative product/service, etc). Thus our prices have spiraled out of control. For example, delivering a baby is an incredibly common procedure, known months in advance, but with opaque pricing paid by third parties, there is no incentive to price shop, nor is that straightforward for a consumer to do. The current average price of a routine delivery is over $8k [1]. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/costs-of-delivering-babies-vary-widely-in-us-california-cities-most-expensive.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/costs-of-delivering-babies-va...
    • jsymolon 10y ago
      > there is no incentive to price shop, Again there is NO single item that will solve the "healthcare" issue. Voodoo Free Market ... You don't price shop. Your OB/GYN has admitting privileges to 1-2 hospitals in the area. You go to the one that your OB/GYN is AT and is closest to you. When the Anaesthesiologist trainee fucks up your epidural, you're going to whip out your phone to call another ? Not fucking likely. You're passed out at that point. Fucking Christ people, you have a relationship with your Doctor. "Come down to Joe's Oil, Tire and Baby Delivery Shop" $19.95 oil changes, $59.95 Baby deliveries. Additional charges may apply. (including emergency room access due to failed deliveries)
• frankydp 10y ago
  Small and Regional government decision making and administration tools. -- Geo-spatial -- Tax analysis -- Real property automation (a dozen different workflows) -- Permit automation and analysis(multiple workflows) -- Licensing automation and analysis
• realworldview 10y ago
  Airbnb for clothes. Uber shoes.
  • mccolin 10y ago
    It's higher fashion, which is perhaps the limiting factor, but Rent the Runway was "Airbnb for clothes" pretty well: https://www.renttherunway.com/ https://www.renttherunway.com/
• palidanx 10y ago
  I think there are a lot of grants start-ups could take advantage of. In particular there is one about promoting farmer's markets (note you basically have to be a non-profit entity to apply) https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/fmpp https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/fmpp And I noticed all of the previous winners were other farmer's markets managers expanded their current market. It would be nice to see some new way of helping the underserved community get food. So examples I've seen are ideas are mini markets at bus stops.
• marcosdumay 10y ago
  I'm not a VC, but I see this huge thing: Popularizing large-scale opportunities. I mean, there is a huge amount of investments that small and medium business all around the world do not do because they don't have enough scale to get a good ROI from them. And they most often lack that scale because there's a labor cost within that investment that doesn't vary with business size. If you reduced the non-elastic labor cost, you'd normally open up a market that grows exponentially with that cost reduction. Now, there are all kinds of ways to go after this. In theory, that's the most obvious huge application of an AI, but there are simpler avenues for that, like standardizing things, mass-selling things that currently require personalization, creating high productivity tools, or just pushing some prices down and hoping for the best (what may be the greatest way to spend VC money).
  • vtange 10y ago
    Going to be devil's advocate here, but if a business has to be large scale to have a good ROI, then it should be reworking its business plan so that it profits at smaller scales. We can't just simply pump capital into all businesses assuming they will actually profit at a higher scale -> That's the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy, and we have plenty of examples of that not working.
    • Aeolun 10y ago
      Amazon
• shaunrussell 10y ago
  Replacing real estate agents and brokers. Most of the value they provide can be replaced by (or already is) technology. The only thing keeping them afloat is regulation.
  • joeax 10y ago
    Disrupting that industry would be tough. Zillow came close, but the industry in general is so protective that anything perceived as a minor threat is blackballed. My bro-in-law RE agent bashes Zillow all the time. I think baby steps are essential. A good first step is a broker-licensed startup with self-serve/AI agents. Why do I need an agent to look at houses when I can just find a house myself? The listing side can remote-unlock a house for me to look at. The buyer then keeps most of the commission.
    • omarchowdhury 10y ago
      Would the unique value proposition for the buyer to use this new service be that they would get a rebate on purchasing this house through this new service?
      • joeax 10y ago
        Perhaps at first, but the eventual goal is to get rid of the expensive commissions altogether.
  • davidlee1435 10y ago
    Opendoor seems promising- company buys houses from sellers to sell to buyers. Guarantee of a sale seems more important than maximizing return, so they've experienced success in quite a few markets in the Southwest
  • mydigitalself 10y ago
    People are trying to do this in the UK with businesses like Purple Bricks. Given the aggregators exist (in the UK, Zoopla & RightMove are our Zillow) that's where all the eyeballs are and how people find properties. You can then list your own property there. Before I started Gitter, I nearly went into exactly this space, but there are a few negatives: 1. People are generally bad at sales 2. People are generally bad at negotiating 3. People are generally afraid of complex paperwork Sure, the system can help with these things and maybe nobody has nailed this yet because there are a few companies trying in this space and nobody seems to be coming out on top.
• ungzd 10y ago
  Creative tools. Everyone is so obsessed with content consumption tools and making TV out of internet, with deprecating desktop in favor of handhelds where you tap ads and take selfies with dog faces. For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991. For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but VST system is stinky and stuck in times of Windows 95. People are buying hardware synths (which are just computers running software) only because software on these embedded computers runs reliably, but VSTs crash, freeze every time and require hardware license keys plugged into parallel port. Also, everything inside is complete black magic and every supplier of software pretends that there are super secret algorithms everywhere. Every oscillator and filter is super-secret and super-unique and there's no articles in the open how to design "decent" oscillator and filter. Medival times everywhere. And these tools should be designed for users, not Entertainment Content Production Corporations.
  • laurentdc 10y ago
    > For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991. As a designer I can tell you Serif is doing great things already. Affinity Designer is a solid Illustrator replacement, most of my printed work for clients comes out of that. People are excited about Affinity Photo and Publisher, which are Photoshop and InDesign replacements. Not to mention UI/UX which is pretty much dominated by Sketch, with very few people using the Adobe equivalent (Xperience Design or whatever it's called). The biggest issue is compatibility though: the vast majority of teams exchange files in .psd, .ai, .indd which are proprietary formats, so there's lots of reluctance to change and difficulties collaborating if someone uses a different thing. It's a bit like Microsoft Office versus all the other formats, open or not.
  • mattmanser 10y ago
    My illustrator friend uses manga studios, he loves it: http://my.smithmicro.com/manga-studio-comic-illustration-software.html http://my.smithmicro.com/manga-studio-comic-illustration-sof...
    • 10y ago
• cdvonstinkpot 10y ago
  Political Science & Democracy Management AFAIK there's little to no innovation in this field aside from the occasional electronic voting machine, whose security may or may not be totally un-hackable. In a day & age where the internet reaches every home, & there's a web browser in nearly everyone's pocket, it shouldn't be that difficult to effectively discern the will of the people. But we're still depending on manual polling, which as the recent US election has shown, is woefully inaccurate. Why are these still done on the phone? Why do people still have to physically go to a neighborhood voting location? Why are elected officials still allowed to make empty promises while campaigning with no follow-through once they're in office? These are solvable problems which I'd imagine technology can indeed address.
  • Kalium 10y ago
    You're absolutely right! Democracy is critically important, and discerning the will of the governed shouldn't be this hard. It boggles the mind! Yet, computer security is hard. Like, holy shit, all the problems of physical security combined with all the problems of network security. Decentralized paper balloting limits things to just the relatively-well-understood physical side while limiting the scope for the damage of a breach. It turns out there are distinct advantages to this approach that justify it over something web-based. Elected officials making empty promises is a social problem. Technology can't help us there.
    • cdvonstinkpot 10y ago
      I disagree that empty promises isn't addressable with technology. Thinking of smart contracts as a potential solution here.
      • Kalium 10y ago
        You're right again! Smart contracts are abstractly a perfect fit for ensuring compliance with arbitrary promised behavior. The current state of affairs is such that smart contracts are viable for things readily machine-verified. This does not apply to all things that might be promised by a politician today. This problem could be resolved by voting, but now we've reintroduced all the problems of politics and reinvented the Sierra Club / NRA / etc. Additionally, it only matters if voter opinion is swayed by a failure to comply with the contract. At this moment in time, voters generally reserve the right to change their minds at any time and for any reason. It is possible that convincing voters to hang their votes entirely on a smart contract might prove challenging.
• cdvonstinkpot 10y ago
  Political Science & Democracy Management AFAIK there's little to no innovation in this field aside from the occasional electronic voting machine, whose security may or may not be totally un-hackable. In a day & age where the internet reaches every home, & there's a web browser in nearly everyone's pocket, it shouldn't be that difficult to effectively discern the will of the people. But we're still depending on manual polling, which as the recent US election has shown, is woefully inaccurate. Why are these still done on the phone? Why do people still have to physically go to a neighborhood voting location? Why are elected officials still allowed to make empty promises while campaigning with no follow-through once they're in office? These are solvable problems which I'd imagine technology can indeed address.
• spacetraveler 10y ago
  Some ideas: 1) Post-quantum encryption. 2) Desalination. 3) Storing kynetic energy. 4) Echo/acoustic mapping (inspired in bats) system for blind people. 5) Quantum computer chips operating at room temperature. Thoughts?
  • Lanthanide 10y ago
    Desalination is definitely a big one, innovation here may be needed to head off major ecological/humanitarian catastrophes. Desalination itself isn't hard, keeping it affordable is. Between ill-advised agricultural ventures in the past few decades and clumsy regulation here in the GCC, groundwater deposits are draining frighteningly fast. Desalination is just too expensive as it is since it's directly linked to hydrocarbon prices and deposits.
• alexdgg 10y ago
  https://www.packtpub.com https://www.packtpub.com these guys are amazing
• mayrosedgdotcom 10y ago
  https://www.packtpub.com https://www.packtpub.com the content is the best in the world. Total game changers. Just have to take the time and read
• uptownhr 10y ago
  Stop paying high rent and move out of the city center. This not only saves the business money but every single employee that also doesn't have to pay high rent.
• benologist 10y ago
  Many countries can't participate on iOS, Play, Amazon, Stripe etc. People in many countries jump through hoops just to use e.g. PayPal. Apple recently removed apps from Iranian developers who were circumventing restrictions by pretending to be from another country. Millions of other developers can't participate in online markets we take for granted, unless someone facilitates it for them.
• gwbas1c 10y ago
  A better DVR for cord cutters. The Tivo has a ridiculous monthly fee, and the Tablo is garbage. HDHomerun's DVR software is decent, but in its current form I don't see it as something I'd sell to my grandparents.
  • dnissley 10y ago
    What's the use case? Recording over the air programming?
  • kingnothing 10y ago
    Plex. https://www.plex.tv/features/dvr/ https://www.plex.tv/features/dvr/
• xyzzy4 10y ago
  Closed door office spaces that contract out to open office companies.
• gavanwoolery 10y ago
  Biggest: largest, most ambitious, most lucrative, riskiest, highest impact? I have one that meets all of those criteria. Ditch legacy and redefine one language/OS to rule them all. Give app stores the middle finger. Throw the web browser away. Throw away antiquated build systems. Create a universal, minimal, extensible, and sensible layout and rendering engine. Create an imperative language as fast as c yet portable at the code level. Oh, and expect no one to invest in your madness. :) Be Steve Jobs and throw away the floppy disk and CD ROM before anyone else.
  • edraferi 10y ago
    OK, so say you do that. What advantages do you think you could realize through this ground up rewrite?
    • gavanwoolery 10y ago
      Look at the millions of complaints filed about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. There is huge room for improvement in the way we write native and web applications - the fact that we still make a distinction signals its own problem. We can do better, and there will always be room for more innovation and improvement.
      • vcanales 10y ago
        'From the ground up' doesn't always equate better. In this case, why not just innovate and improve on the tools that are already in use?
        • gavanwoolery 10y ago
          I agree. Similarly, keeping around tech with several decades of built-up cruft can also hurt your cause when you are trying to build an elegant, concise, and predictable system. :) You can keep putting a new coat of paint on 1950 Ferrari, even regularly changing out its parts, but it will never match something designed from the ground up with modern tech. The web browser, by nature of its spontaneous birth, ill-thought-out design, and insistence on backwards compatibility places many bent nails in the foundation. Adding on new layers to an old thing almost inevitably results in leaky abstraction. I have projects that are 10 years old. The code isn't unusable, but I know I can do better. Sometimes adapting the old code just makes it ugly, hard to maintain, and error prone. So when it makes sense, I usually start fresh.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• xchaotic 10y ago
  Aaccurate 3-d scanning of 3d environments - houses, mines you name it. I think the tech is there in your pocket and with good software plus very accurate measurement of location, orientation + panorama/spehrical photo shoots, you could have very high quality recreations of real world areas - which in turn could be explored, modified and enjoyed in VR/AR/MR. For example simulating house refurbishment or furniture purchases, remotely inspecting places to buy/rent/go on holiday. The tech is mostly there, but I'm too lazy to put it altogether as I know that someone with access to more capital will also attack it, sooner or later, not just startup but IKEA, Airbnb, etc...
  • loader 10y ago
    BBC's Italy's Invisible Cities used 3D scanning to showcase areas in three Italian cities (Naples, Venice, and Florence). Seeing things mapped in 3D made a world of a difference trying to understand those spaces. It was a great show. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0881gfb http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0881gfb
  • saurabhn 10y ago
    This is a super interesting topic to work on! There's an academic initiative which does exactly this, it's called the Digital Historical Architectural Research and Material Analysis or DHARMA [0] for short (it's at the University of Notre Dame). Figuro3D [1] is a startup (also out of Notre Dame) which borrows a lot from DHARMA and applies it to 3D printing. [0]: http://architecture.nd.edu/research-publications/dharma/ http://architecture.nd.edu/research-publications/dharma/ [1]: http://www.figuro3d.com/ http://www.figuro3d.com/ Edit: formatting
  • jpm_sd 10y ago
    Plenty of people working on this: [0] https://matterport.com/ https://matterport.com/ [1] https://structure.io/ https://structure.io/ [2] https://www.paracosm.io/ https://www.paracosm.io/
• alexose 10y ago
  Not necessarily a killer app idea, but: I think there's an opportunity to redefine the idea of an employee-owned company. A company with an employee stock pool of 100%-- not 10%-- with no opportunities for dilution, non-voting shares, takeovers, or other financial tricks. Early employees would get more stock, but it would curve gently according with the growth the of the company, so that later employees would also end up with a meaningful share. The company's charter could be codified in plain English, in an easily accessible, version-controlled markdown file. The board would be made up of some combination of elected employees and outside advisers. This company would be at a serious disadvantage to raise money. It would have to be able to survive on slow, steady growth rather than VC cash infusions. On the other hand, I suspect it would have a big hiring advantage. The trick would be to attract employees who highly value equity but don't want to become founders themselves. I bet there's a business model out there that exploits both these facets.
  • daveguy 10y ago
    I think this is a thing. Registered as cooperatives. Even more liberal as customer owned like REI? Of course it could be they are just really good at selling that 10% stake. I do agree that is a potentially exciting organization. I think there are some market analysis companies that have significant employee ownership and most profits are returned as dividends to make for a very cooperative atmosphere.
    • alexose 10y ago
      REI is an interesting example. It's a co-op in name, but the employees don't have much representation at the top. (See: http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/07/11/24328725/rei-workers-call-for-better-pay-and-working-conditions-consider-unionization http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/07/11/24328725/rei-work...). There are lots of great companies that are employee-owned (the Winco chain of grocery stores comes to mind), but I'm not aware of any in the tech startup world. I'd love to know about market research companies with an employee-owned model! If you know of any specifically, let me know. Google doesn't seem to be of much help.
• giardini 10y ago
  Bring certain folk remedies to market. For example, there are some medical trials indicating, and many folkloric claims, that eating a small but increasing amount of poison ivy, oak or sumac leaf each day will fairly quickly make your body cease to respond badly to contact with those plants. A 30-day packet of capsules, with successively increasing dosages of urushiol (the irritant in those plants), would likely build up the body's ability to tolerate urushiol. It would make it much easier and safer for the average person to remedy their condition, since, the suggestion that one gather one's own poison oak and preparing it for ingestion appears fraught with peril and leaves most poison ivy victims aghast. Were such a remedy provided in a safe encapsulated form, their fears would abate. This would be of enormous benefit to homeowners, campers, farmers, gardeners, tree-trimmers, and in short, nearly everyone who goes out into the woods or gardens in the summer. Believe me, this would fly off the shelves once word got around. Poison ivy sucks.
  • jaypaulynice 10y ago
    Agree on this one 100%. I can't believe how many people depend on prescription drugs in America. I remember when I was a kid, my grandparents knew all kind of tea they could make when someone was sick. The problem is that the tea leaves are not readily available in America. See this link: http://www.haitiobserver.com/blog/the-magic-of-haitian-remed-fey-asosi-or-cerasee-or-corailee.html http://www.haitiobserver.com/blog/the-magic-of-haitian-remed...
  • daveguy 10y ago
    Yeah. That's going to be one that needs rigorous safety testing. Where are these medical trials? Are they double blind placebo controlled every possible effect (no matter the severity) reported?
• 9erdelta 10y ago
  Collecting boxes and packing materials. Seriously, I am overflowing with pristine boxes and packing material courtesy of Amazon prime. Certainly there has to be a business surrounding the collection of these materials and selling them back to Amazon et. al.
  • enknamel 10y ago
    Huh you'd think UPS, etc would offer that service.
• ommunist 10y ago
  Automatic real-time discovery of people spending a lot of time in social networks, and offering them better ways to live on a subscription base for self-couching. Like making toxic waters to detox themselves. (RAW thought, but I'll enjoy refining it.)
• Huhty 10y ago
  Traditional blogging. Hence why we're working on improving the blogging experience that hasn't changed and/or improved much in almost 2 decades. Our "manifesto" explains it in full here: http://blogenhancement.com/?to=manifesto http://blogenhancement.com/?to=manifesto
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• aashishkoirala 10y ago
  House service/maintenance/repair. Severe lack of professionalism and customer-service-orientedness there. Serious disruption needed.
• eip 10y ago
  Anti-gravity and permanent batteries.
• chphipps 10y ago
  Transportation. Half of the energy used every day, worldwide, is used on transportation (cars, trains etc.). But is this energy well spent? I have seen first-hand, and so have you, that people spend their mornings unhappily commuting to work, school etc. This needs to be changed, and given how fast technology has been advancing in recent years - change is coming sooner rather than later when it comes to transportation. Great question by the way, have a look through YC's RFC list. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar
• ende 10y ago
  None of these are all that flashy, but one could probably find a nice niche: - Most bars/restaurants still use Aloha for point of sale system. Surely someone can update this concept. - A kitchen inventory system that doesn't rely on manual data entry, but rather barcode readers and electronic weight sensors to maintain an up to date kitchen inventory. - In biotech, the state of off-the-shelf LIMS (laboratory information management systems) is pitiful. Granted, it's a tough problem to generalize, but every solution out there is clunky. - A UI builder platform for non-frontend-devs to create interfaces to REST APIs through drag-and-drop form elements.
• simonebrunozzi 10y ago
  Cities. The way cities are designed, built, operated. I am actually trying to see if I can build a company around this. It's the biggest challenge I can possibly imagine for me, and I don't know why I haven't given up yet :) Cities help people connect (in a physical way), and help companies provide goods and services to them in a more efficient way. However, cities today are maintained, operated, and enlarged based on legacy. I think there are huge inefficiencies, and yet it seems that trying to fix existing ones is a nightmare. What about NEW ones instead? I find this extremely interesting. We'll see.
  • Synroc 10y ago
    This has been one of my passions too. I recently became a member of Strong Towns, in which we have a slack group to discuss cities. There are definitely members looking on how it would to start a company based on solving cities' problems.
• mehdym 10y ago
  Politics. Current technologies allow implementation of direct democracy. people can cast their votes on every matter to their representatives. It can simply start with a voting app for smaller institutions and eventually transform the congress as we know it.
• husamia 10y ago
  help large inefficient organizations reinvent their structure