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.
Users can contact our experts through chat and video/voice calls.
Do sign up for Fliffr and try it out, we're on both iOS and Android stores, or visit https://www.fliffr.com . And if you have any feedback I'd love to hear 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…
The trouble here is that the guru or consultant who comes in needs to understand the context of the problem, which can't be done in 30 mins.
we have a lot of architecture consultant companies which provide these services already.
That's something I've seen getting much worse over the past decade with the proliferation of frameworks. What you call "getting up to speed" is tempting to call "playing with". People work with tools that they have no knowledge of. Learning on the job is good, but I think one should have at least an idea of how the tools are supposed to be used and how they are implemented before doing anything else than throwaways.
I don't know how to fix it really, it more of a cultural thing than a technical. Knowledge must somehow be cool and respected again. Or maybe I'm just getting old and this is really a faster way of building things. I just can't think of any other area where professionals jump to the next tool without even learning the one they use.
Problems like this tend to be consequence of team that does not tolerate dissent. E.g. either clique that stamps out dissenters as obviously stupid or dominant individual eager to bully anybody who does not conform to his favorite cool aid. Someone would say that "maybe we are going too far" otherwise.
Consultant wont be able to solve that one in 30 minutes.
We specialize in AWS and Google Cloud, and can help with simple LAMP/MEAN stacks all the way to complex multi-region microservice architectures using Terraform, containerization, Kubernetes and beyond.
I teach CS (programming, web development, distributed systems) on a local university, but have been thinking if there would be people interested in having 1:1 access to someone with development and teaching experience, for 30 minutes or 1h..
http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/02/16/google-h...
they shut it down.
Real consulting at market (or even above-market) prices exist for a reason. The kind of people who will spend hours setting up a consult, to only officially charge for 30 minutes, are exactly the kind of people you don't want working for you, for any period of time. You get what you pay for.
I can't for the life of me imagine what an apparently legitimate "micro-consulting" gig would look like, where the talent being hired isn't being asked to overperform for the amount of billing time being requested.
- 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.
I know it's fashionable to hate on deep learning, but algorithm induction is literally what deep learning does.
Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?
Such a question usually gets answers mostly comprised of work that is extremely boring at first glance. For example, create a system than halves the work to complete documentation for some sort of compliance with regulations.
Every one of these ideas just sounds incredibly interesting to work on. The type that gets a lot of really bright people together on a team (that I'd really want to be on too), yet they might not deliver a product, and possibly even less likely figure out how to monetize it.
Anyway, I'm not developing a friction-reducing product either, but worry about choosing something because it sounds like a rewarding, intellectual challenge.
I am co-founder of tensorflight.com. We do computer vision analytics of drone imagery. Interesting that you mention it, as I thought it's a somewhat obscure market. When we talk to investors in the valley 75%+ have to be educated about why what we do is a viable business.
Please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you have any ideas!
Thanks in advance.
Making Asimov's Psychohistory from Foundation a reality!
> There are many VCs currently hunting for this product
Implies a difficult problem.
> algorithmic induction tech
Do you mean inference?
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.
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.
The US has a federal "interstate commerce clause" which means that individual states cannot regulate trade with other states. The federal government has all the control, which would be like the European Union having control.
One aspect of the problem is taxes and regulations, which for the most part has to be addressed politically. The different jurisdictions are a cause for friction, too.
The even more significant barrier however is the linguistic and cultural one. It's not sufficient to just translate a say English language website to French in order to start selling in France (and providing proper idiomatic translations for each of the main EU languages is difficult enough). There are cultural differences right down to which website designs are popular in any given EU country at a time. You often can tell where a website is 'located' just by looking at its design.
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.
Creative Suite has evolved leaps and bounds since 1991. It has even evolved leaps and bounds in the last 10 years alone. It's strange to me that someone who really uses Adobe's products would say such a thing. Creative Suite is the only one in the game because it's SO good that there isn't a chance for a competitor to step in. They are also constantly adding new tools to the suite at no additional cost.
As for DAWs, I happen to produce music and have used most of the major DAWs over the last 15 years, though I've settled on Ableton Live. I have zero problems with VSTs crashing, and I often run projects with 50+ VSTs running simultaneously. Stolen VSTs can have stability issues, of course. Hardware dongles are also fairly rare. Only a handful of companies use them, and they aren't really a problem at all as long as you aren't in the habit of stealing software. They typically install in the USB port, not the parallel port. Parallel port dongles were used by Steinberg and were phased out long ago.
I'm curious - what DAWs in particular have you used, and which VSTs are you having problems with?
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.
http://my.smithmicro.com/manga-studio-comic-illustration-sof...
I only know about guitar pedals, but aren't a good portion of these analog through and through?
(If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)
I lived in Taipei for a couple of years. The "third space" is super common there. People would hang out at coffee shops (loads and loads of coffee shops), get "afternoon tea" with friends, or go to a park or even a subway station lobby and socialize.
The Taipei metro even embraced it and set up specific places / spaces for shopping or socializing (that were dual purpose rather than simply being a corridor).
I feel like this is missing in the US, and genuinely miss wandering around with my backpack for a Saturday. It was a load of fun to head out for an early lunch, go find some random coffee shop to "work" (aka "surf the web and people watch"), then find a place for a beverage and maybe go see a movie or have dinner. Those days were genuinely the most fulfilling, especially when I'd run into random acquaintances.
Bringing it back, a river runs through downtown Austin with a great hike / bike trial along it. There aren't really many cafes (I can think of one) along about 10 miles of trail that are good "destinations" to wander toward while enjoying the scenery.
May be a bit early yet for this though. Would tend to displace other "hang-out" locations and businesses, so might be best to fit in with what's there (bars?), but offer something new and different (so people have an idea to anchor on rather than going entirely new concept).
Bakeries also fit this description in those neighborhoods.
I believe it's owned by a local bank, but I don't know if it makes money (or if it's intended to). Entry is free normally, sometimes there are non-free ticketed concerts and a cash bar.
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.
I'm on a "Startup break", and started a Service Firm. While working with clients, we realized the need to serve a rather underserved section of projects, which are high enough for individual freelancers or even a small team but too low for established agencies - the $100,000 to $1M projects.
We're experimenting with some of our clients and their connections, to work with our service/marketplace where we manage the project end-to-end to make sure it is done, with other vetted teams of designers and developers. It is not 'cheap' but much more economical than traditional Agencies.
We're Beta Testing it with a small set of clients for now. For those curious, we have a sign-up page at http://www.worksigma.com/
Why do you think this is possible?
That's pretty much exactly what Toptal or other premium shops like Gigster do: vet remote developers to ensure high quality.
The idea that you can get great developers from India for rock-bottom rates is mostly a fallacy.
https://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/atrix-4g-lapdock/
Microsoft has done this already but thanks to their poor marketing and crappy Windows phones, no one even knows about it.
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.
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.
We should be ensuring that our increasingly ageing population is housed, fed, warm, cared for, in touch with friends and relatives, free from pain and depression, has access to medication, and can live with dignity. The elderly should be actively involved in and by their communities.
One day you'll meet your rocking-chair, because that's where we're all heading. It's galling that start-ups and investors seek to service their young selves with apparently little vision regarding the future.
Who's disrupting nursing homes, or dementia care, or care home staffing, or toileting assistance, or end of life depressiom..?
There are certain near-future technologies like self-driving cars and robotic home care that could revolutionise the lives of the old. I think that's a given, but they have a relatively high barrier to entry.
At the other end of the scale there must be pure (or almost pure) software solutions that could help older peoples' lives also.
I've been thinking of Alexa-style AIs that actually perform useful tasks such as pre-screening scam phone calls, alerting the user about important emails, or proactively helping the user perform a bank transaction. This could be useful for everyone, but when an old person can barely read emails, never mind sort important ones from the scams and junk, I think it would be a godsend.
The devil is of course in the detail. As a high-level concept it all sounds great, but how would it actually work? I've been imagining a kind of "meta-OS" that sits on top of the OS and drives it on the user's behalf. Or perhaps it should be more like a netbook, with all the actual content kept in the cloud, and the AI as a thin client dedicated solely to allowing easy access to the data. There are a lot of possible way for this to work, and a huge number of problems to solve...
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
It allows lots of people (thousands now) to obtain a permit. Poland has the lowest quantity of firearms in the whole Europe (and one of the lowest in the world). Taking the current mood around us now (terror attacks, war in Ukraine and possibly -- god I hope not -- other eastern countries) and the obvious coolness of legally owning a firearm i think it's a good initiative. Legal owners tend to be more law abiding and more self sufficient. We need role models like that, IMO.
I encourage more programmers to automate stuff that the state messes up. It's a lot of things!
PS. My NGO only helps lawful, sane adults. No felon, no person with mental illness and no kids can obtain a gun permit in Poland.
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.
Examples;
- CollAction [http://socialcoder.org/9dy]
- Fight Back Wisely [http://socialcoder.org/80s]
- Carpool Vote [http://socialcoder.org/8qv]
https://www.countable.us/ https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes
I believe they open sourced some of their software after the campaign too, although not all the sophisticated ad-targeting. The message seems to be that if you target enough misleading ads at underinformed floating voters, you can shift an election.
> - know how your congressman votes on each of the vote
See theyworkforyou.com for the UK, which I believe they're trying to generalise internationally.
> - news article that only comes from international press
This is an interesting one and potentially useful. You want to see press that's not targeted advertising to you. Actually making any money from it (or any media operation) is still hard though. The best way to make money from media is to sell out as hard as possible, which is bad for reporting.
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.
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.
Successful businesses are built on the backs of relationships. Your product is important, your tech is somewhat important, but THE most important part of a building what many would call a "successful" business is the relationships you create.
It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve -- convince people to buy your product, convince people to work for your company, convince VCs to give you money, convince Google to buy you -- all of these things may begin on the premise of merit, price, features, value, but they end up based on the relationships built between the people involved.
Deals are closed over drinks. People work for people they enjoy spending time with. VCs invest money in people they trust. Yes, all things in life have exceptions, but the longer you stay in business, the more you realize that businesses are run by people -- they are not opaque fact-driven entities -- and people are social creatures. The actual reason that people in San Francisco still cling to an age-old culture of doing business together in person instead of over Slack is because humans enjoy spending physical time around other humans. Maybe it's communication bandwidth, maybe it's something else, but until VR replaces physical intimacy, there is no perfect substitute.
If you want to succeed outside of San Francisco, begin building the relationships you need to do so. People can claim that Slack, Hangouts, and the phone match the effectiveness of physical presence, but try switching to a permanent long-distance relationship with your significant other. Good luck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although it is against license, you technically can remote desktop to Bloomberg terminal from Linux machine.
Bloomerg monopoly is more result of data they have rather than the clunky terminal. You can buy just Bloomerg data and use any type of analytics tool you find suitable (e.g. Pandas, matlab). Data is often crippled compared to terminal, but combining multiple tricks (e.g. different Bloomberg data subscriptions) you can get very close to 100%. I used to have access to terminal and data in structured format and I spent 95% time looking at data in Pandas and other data analysis tools rather than terminal.
I'm not affiliated with Bloomberg in any way.
Is this related at all to how some were accused of paying the [SEC?] to get trade info nanoseconds before others and able to front-trade? (or whatever thats called)
Is the SEC the canonical source for trade information that every HF wants to trade on?
EDIT: https://www.quora.com/Where-do-the-Bloomberg-terminals-get-t...
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Anyone know where an historic data-set of say, tick history, could be had to fiddle with? Or is this literally only a purchasable item?
There is a very strong desire to get a working competitor to Bloomberg to reduce costs. And replacements slowly seem to reach a maturity that make this possible.
But this is not work for a start up. You need a lot of capital to develop a product that works for all asset classes, and a huge network to enter the messaging sector.
I'm a little sceptical of first party content sensitive untargeted advertisement, but we'll see. I also think the people who would block ads would block these too.
See responses to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576611 where people say they will block ads anyway. It's not the tracking. It's not the bandwidth. It's just because it's easy to do.
Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...) This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.
If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...
As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.
There are a couple of drawbacks. First, it turns out that there's not much money to be made developing that software. Second, it turns out that running it is a lot of work, to the point that it's not worth it for most people. Third, most ad buyers don't want to juggle dozens of small publishers, they want centralization.
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.
However I don't see why this problem isn't been solved yet! Just ask what the website is about and serve only ads in the same space would be already a big win...
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.
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.
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".
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/
- 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.
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.
Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.
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.
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..
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
See this link: http://www.haitiobserver.com/blog/the-magic-of-haitian-remed...
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 ;)
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.
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).
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.
Been trying to do this on a smaller scale (pooling the needs of restaurants in foodparks), and it is horribly difficult. There are so many factors at play (demand changes day to day, spoilage, etc.) Even with software to automate the process, the delivery logistics would be too time consuming for your average restaurant owner to get into.
I ask about industry problems, and the software that could solve those problems.
You can check it out here:
"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."
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.
From what I understand, "they" have already developed this, and trialed it. It worked great, but for many men it had certain undesirable side-effects, and for a very few the side-effects weren't good at all. But for most, it worked well.
The interesting thing? Almost all of the side-effects that were experienced by the men in the study all sounded exactly like the side-effects women experience when they are on "the pill"!
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the reason we don't have a male hormonal-based contraceptive is actually because men can't handle the changes and problems women have been dealing with for decades.
The legal and regulatory system basically makes it a losing proposition to make a new contraceptive - you could give sugar pills to everyone and someone will have a bad reaction and the lawyers will sue you into bankruptcy.
But honestly since i dont use it anymore i feel better and more relaxed. Relevant stuff i dont forget and irrelevant stuff is irrelevant.
What do you mean by this? Do you just mean a raw HTML/markdown editor and a rendered view?
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
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-organ...
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.
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.
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.
There are definitely members looking on how it would to start a company based on solving cities' problems.
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/ 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/ 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.
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.
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...
http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-antib...
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_(nomi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
Most of the value they provide can be replaced by (or already is) technology. The only thing keeping them afloat is regulation.
- 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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
^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. :(
Disclaimer: I don't work for MapD.
Anyway something that would make the web on phones great.
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).
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.
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.
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.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.
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
"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."
-- Geo-spatial -- Tax analysis -- Real property automation (a dozen different workflows) -- Permit automation and analysis(multiple workflows) -- Licensing automation and analysis
> market segment - Non English speaking
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?
Use blockchain
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/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?
the content is the best in the world. Total game changers. Just have to take the time and read
these guys are amazing