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.
Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
221–230 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#222The 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…
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly. Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not ho…
However, if you eat 1000 calories or less, it's impossible not to lose weight. Unless you know someone who can synthesize energy to live and move out of thin air......
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#223Mechanical Turk for Programming tasks would be great to see.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#224Here 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…
> 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. Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?
[1] R. J. Solomonoff. A formal theory of inductive inference: Parts 1 and 2. Information and Control, 7:1--22 and 224--254, 1964.
[2] R. J. Solomonoff. Complexity-based induction systems: Comparisons and convergence theorems. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-24:422-432, 1978.
[3] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#225The 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…
This has been solved and it's not so much a technology thing as a built environment thing. By 2030, the Netherlands will have an obesity rate of 8.5% DOWN from 10% http://www.ukhealthforum.org.uk/who-we-are/our-work/ukhf-wha... The problem is very much political with a move away from highways design focusing on strategic mobility, the movement of people and goods over long distances, to sustainable mobility, the move…
The key problem however always comes down to the perception that the roads are too dangerous and this is a political in nature usually requiring the re-allocation of road space from parking.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#226The 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…
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly. Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not ho…
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly. Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not ho…
Energy in, energy out sounds pretty basic to me. I would be interested to know where you think your energy intake comes from, unless it is from food? Or is it just the caloric measurement you think is irrelevant for human energy intake? While obviously imperfect, I'm skeptical it could be an order of magnitude off for example.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#228Simplify worldwide taxing, company creation, money routing?
That is not a technology problem. Every tried to get a law passed?
Of course you would be paying to keep the product up to date with local laws.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#229A 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#230The 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.
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…
I think Google has that cornered