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Random Startup Generator
- hydrazine 16y agoStumbleUpon for startup ideas. Awesomely amusing!
- maxdemarzi 16y agoWhat do they call that style of illustration that looks like it was done with a fish-eye lens effect. (City with guy playing golf picture). Is there a stock image site that has a collection? Edit: Found it here, but no mention of what the "style" is called. http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-10284891-beautiful-world.php http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-10284891-beaut...
- xelfer 16y agoA polar panorama? http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-panorama-planets/ http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-panor...
- nhangen 16y agoI'll admit to spending 5 minutes flipping through - well done :)
- fedd 16y ago"this is where xxxx comes in" wrote the phrase down to my english idioms book. all investors are mine!
- shadowpwner 16y agoI wish I could meet an investor now, just to say to him "This is where the jousting monkeys come in".
- cema 16y agoThis is where investors come in...
- callmeed 16y agoFunny, a few of the startups I generated are actually available domains (and kinda catchy): bridgeini.com swiftmolsh.com crunchmob.com <-- considering buying this one molshoola.com dateoola.com jotperfect.com inpoke.com Good design, btw.
- tectonic 16y agoinpoke.com is good too
- ghshephard 16y agoGood Grief - never announce in a public forum, even one as trusted as HN that you are interested in a domain. Nefarious individuals (Domain Squatters) will grab it - then good luck ransoming it away from them. I've grabbed it via 1&1 - if you're going to do something useful with either of them - let me know so I can transfer it to you gratis - just create something interesting. :-)
- cstuder 16y agoWe could DOS domain squatters: Generate and post as many cool domain names as possible, until they run out of money for registering them.
- mryan 16y agoI think domain tasting [1] would unfortunately reduce the possibility of this working. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting
- aw3c2 16y agoThat reminds me of Network Solutions registering domains that people searched for as "nice service". That was a fun day.
- ultrasaurus 16y ago
- fedd 16y agois it a parody on the startup bubble? how funny it would be if some sophomore really implements one of these mock ideas and become a blnaire
- gersh 16y agoI propose the ycombinator turing test. Can you generate an application which will get accepted by ycombinator? This may require generating additional content to establish team credibility including twitter posts, blog posts, etc.
- dschobel 16y agoStranger things have happened: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#examples http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#examples
- btipling 16y agoWhile the idea proposed is important, I believe pg cares more about the the team, which I think is reflected in the application. So you could very well generate a random idea and be accepted as long as you have an awesome group of people.
- stcredzero 16y agoThat's a slightly harder Turing test. pg will insist on them moving to Silicon Valley, so we'll have to use tech like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EveR-2#EveR-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EveR-2#EveR-2
- pg 16y agoSince the main thing we care about is the people, you'd either have to lie or be genuinely good.
- gersh 16y agoHow do you know who the people are? Presumably, the app would create blogs, facebook pages, linkedin, twitter, etc. Passing a phone interview would be harder, though not impossible. You might need really good voice recognition. Speech generation probably wouldn't be insurmountable. In person, this might be trickier. This might require a robot mannequin. Alternatively, you could hire an actor with wireless ear plugs. Presumably, the computer would tell the actor what to do.
- OoTheNigerian 16y agoHehe. Nice one. it is a good way of scanning through a bunch of crowd sourced ideas though. Back to scanning through.
- giu 16y agoI love the text it proposes to share on Twitter: "OMG ShopMob is the next Quora!! #omgnextquora"
- dschobel 16y agoGreat execution but needs more "$X is a dead simple way to $Y" so as to properly channel TC/Arrington.
- catshirt 16y agoor the popular "$x is the $y of $z"
- antirez 16y agofacebook meets napster, but for dogs. One of my preferred ones.
- Sukotto 16y agoOr, as the Simpson's put it... "Anything that's the 'something' of the 'something' isn't really the anything of anything" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc5vN2XReWs&subject=Simpsons-something-of-something http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc5vN2XReWs&subject=Simps...
- techiferous 16y agoThis is the first context where the dollar sign sigil made complete sense to me. :)
- armandososa 16y agoGreat! This is how you make a generator. The Malcom Gladwell one was dumb and totally not funny. This one make me laugh. The names were very catchy too.
- gojomo 16y agoYuri Milner is investing $150K in each reload of this page. But seriously: sometimes randomness breaks assumptions and generates great ideas. See also: http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/ http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/ Added: Sites with working online decks: http://www.joshharrison.net/oblique-strategies/ http://www.joshharrison.net/oblique-strategies/ http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique...
- math 16y agoA friend of mine swears by a strategy he calls "smashing ideas" to generate ideas for research: Take two fundamental ideas from the literature (the more fundamental the better) and try to smash them together into a new idea. Says a remarkable amount of research (and successful papers) can be viewed in this light. The strategy is obviously a great creative tool, generally. Though, for business I still reckon the best primary mindset to have is identifying real world problems and thinking of solutions to these problems (perhaps smashing comes in at this point). In research and art, creativity pays off more because real world benefit as voted by paying customers is not as important.
- paulitex 16y ago"Pure Javascript, HTML and CSS. No server side at all. Simple and easy." Surprisingly surprising - the average framework X programmer would automatically use framework X. What a great example of using the right tools for the right job.
- zv 16y agoNo need to overengineer. Server side scripts are not needed in their case.
- hendrik-xdest 16y ago"CloudPerfect is a creative new way of getting you upvoted on Quora. Between trolling /b/ and marriage, people believe they can't learn how to paint. This is where CloudPerfect comes in, with lots of coffee and an army of monkeys, CloudPerfect will revolutionize your social experience." Sounds reasonable.
- dkersten 16y agoOh sweet, I've always wanted to learn to paint, but I'm much too busy getting married and trolling /b/...
- giladvdn 16y agoThanks for the love guys :)
- lurchpop 16y agohahah i always suspected my NoSQL database was missing A SOCIAL TWIST!
- Dramatize 16y agoClick on their about page: http://www.joinfireplace.com/#topics/d1e41f00330b11e0a86e27bb48e450e5 http://www.joinfireplace.com/#topics/d1e41f00330b11e0a86e27b... Then click on their logo. Love the instant load.
- localhost3000 16y agoCan you make it so we can submit silly/lousy ideas we've had or heard from others? Or maybe ideas that were rejected from YC? That would be a fun collection to look at.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- wheaties 16y agoGreat website. Can't be viewed in landscape mode on android. The socks and twitter link obscure the text. At first I thought that was part of the joke. Whatever. Gave me a laugh this morning and that is worth its weight in gold.
- middlegeek 16y agoNot quite complete, nowhere does the description say the team is "passionate" about technology and/or design.
- brown9-2 16y agoI had an idea for a similar joke website a few months ago, but their algorithm is much smarter than mine. Looking at their code, it looks like they are essentially randomly combining sentence fragments together in order: var A = ["A new and improved", "A better, faster", "An awesome", "A vibrant", "An innovative", "A faster", "A rapid", "A quick and dirty"]; var y = ["Searchable", "Virtualized", "Cloud-based", "Mobile", "Application-aware", "Viral", "Friendlier", "Online", "Web-based", "Streamlined", "Performance-oriented", "Next-gen", "Revenue-shared", "Professional"]; I attempted to mine Crunchbase profiles and then build "descriptions" of a startup based on a markov chain, but I found that there was too much noise in most of the Crunchbase descriptions to produce text that sounded at all plausible. Their method is a lot smarter (and easier).
- herval 16y agogeez, I almost entered my email on the "notify me" first time I opened this!