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Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#101

Post by cakefactory »

rayiner wrote: post #6

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or sof…

Full disclosure. I work for Synergy Sky. For a single person our products are way too cumbersome, but if your issue is also on the level of an organisation/company, then your problem is what we solve.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#102

Post by gleenn »

rb808 wrote: post #92

I'm on the board of my condo building's HOA which has a number of things that would be helpful. * We pay $200/mo for a basic website with forum, some billing things, some file storage and other stuff I never use. It looks like it was written 20 years ago. (If someone can recommend something already out there that would be helpful) * Doorman accepts dozens of package deliveries each day which get sent email and tracke…

Rentlytics can answer a couple of those questions about how your costs for energy etc are doing and how they compare to other rental buildings.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#103

Post by moorhosj »

shakkhar wrote: post #99
moorhosj wrote: post #73

Secure internet for people who travel frequently or work from coffee shops. Filter the “free” internet connection through a TOR router and protect your network/browsing.

Anything wrong with just using a VPN?

No, not at all. I view it similar to the classic Dropbox discussion. There were existing alternatives, but Dropbox took off because "it just worked" without having to use FTP and Linux. In this case, you eliminate the VPN step, by linking the router to your devices and using that single device to connect.

Secondly, with VPN, I first have to connect to the open network in order to activate the VPN. I also need to do it for each device I want to connect (phone, computer, tablet).

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#104

Post by AskewEgret »

AutoEngineer wrote: post #96

Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough). We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID. Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language. Right now the terabytes of data have to be loade…

If I am understanding your problem correctly, I did that for a large American automotive electronics supplier back in the 1990s - though back then 30-40 megabytes of data was pretty big. We trained a bunch of American and Japanese engineers on how to do that, but I don't remember any Europeans.

I think I have an email address in my profile; feel free to send me something. I am fairly certain that your needs can be satisfied with existing Unix tools. Then again, the reason I worked on the problem in the 1990s was to free up engineer time so they could do more valuable things. A gui and other tools could be worth paying for if the bosses have that mindset.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#105

Post by abhimir »

raleigh_user wrote: post #41

Some sort of enabler for content. I work in content marketing (not click bait shit but helping b2b companies tell their story without hiring a full design/marketing/dev team). Our process and system is super efficient recording video + sending notifications to team members to edit, add captions, strip audio for your podcast, set up your podcast, set up your alexa flash briefing, etc. But it takes hours to do all of t…

I would love to check out the book. Can you mention it here?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#106

Post by SteveNuts »

snerbles wrote: post #75
SteveNuts wrote: post #3

Open hardware and software for PLCs for manufacturing.

The PLC/robotics/industrial automation space is often ten to twenty years behind in software best practices, with things like source control being completely alien to many vendors. Documentation can also be hard to come by, buried behind layers of paywalls and service agreements. Of course, installations are usually expected to function for ten to twenty years at a minimum...an order of magnitude greater than anythin…

Even just allowing us to patch the servers would do wonders... a lot of this crap is running on 20 year old operating systems.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#107

Post by AutoEngineer »

AskewEgret wrote: post #104
AutoEngineer wrote: post #96

Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough). We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID. Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language. Right now the terabytes of data have to be loade…

If I am understanding your problem correctly, I did that for a large American automotive electronics supplier back in the 1990s - though back then 30-40 megabytes of data was pretty big. We trained a bunch of American and Japanese engineers on how to do that, but I don't remember any Europeans. I think I have an email address in my profile; feel free to send me something. I am fairly certain that your needs can be sa…

Thanks for your answer. Currently engineers can:

a) try to plot their data alone and spend time on hacking the stuff together. This takes time as the guys doing it aren't accustomed doing it daily. This happens accross all kind of divisions.

b) ask another team (with data scientists) for their support. Maybe the engineer has to write a ticket, or the person who should be doing it has other tasks, is in vacation, not willing, not replying to the request etc.

Either way hours are easily spent on solving this seemingly simple task. The amount of time spent is simply staggering.

Unix would also be my personal choice. But getting the right to put a unix machine into the network for a single user is extremely difficult. Windows, Internet Explorer and temporary admin rights are the work environment that almost everyone has to use. That's why I think a web based solutions is the only viable option.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#108

Post by praeconium »

AutoEngineer wrote: post #96

Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough). We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID. Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language. Right now the terabytes of data have to be loade…

Thanks for input, but do You mind being a bit more specific about the following:

- would You actually be interested to buy this service?

- what sort of visualizations do You actually make? Do they need to be interactive? SVG? Size? How do You use them?

- what exactly do You do with data before its plotted except selecting columns? Is there aggregation or any kind of processing?

- how often is this actually used because You say 'sometimes every few months', does it mean its like a quarterly report?

- what other well established tools have You used other than Excel?

- how big is Your largest data? Size, rows, columns

- if it applies with small amount of megabytes, is there a reason beside simplicity why You can't use PivotChart in Excel? Or Excel in general? Or R/Python to generate it?

I am data scientist who regularly plots quite large data sets, and I like speed :) Its totally doable to build a service that You can run locally, load a CSV, read like 1% of data, play with it.. when you get what You want, load rest and wait a bit and get the visualization You want.

But depending on visualization requirements there may be many paths solutions.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#109

Post by nathan_f77 »

kodablah wrote: post #4

I'll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat, Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add users (e.g. like a modern Webmin/cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if I don't want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on…

I've also been searching for this for years, and the closest thing I've found is Convox [1]. Unfortunately they only support AWS for now, but it's a really good PaaS on your own servers. It's open source, too [2]. You can run a convox rack without using their hosted console.

One problem is that it requires a minimum of 3 instances, so it can be more expensive than Heroku to start.

[1] https://convox.com

[2] https://github.com/convox/rack

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#110

Post by wicha »

dyim wrote: post #83

I do B2B sales (specifically, customer support for consumer-facing businesses), and I'd pay ~$1,000/mo for a service that solves this problem: Which warm intros should I ask for? There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal customer profile. I've got ~500 friends who I'd feel comfortable asking for warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After deduplicating, that's ~100,000 second-degree connections, som…

We built intrologic.com to do exactly that. Started like a side project to try to sell our previous product (a sales chatbot) but then took off on its own. Connect your networks and your friends and then you search for warm intros. It's free (we plan to make money only when an intro is made). You can sign-up at https://intrologic.com/start. I am the founder.
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