We were working on autonomous stuff, but had to move onto simpler things because people weren't buying. http://robots-everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/ (2007)
This reflects your current status I presume? http://robots-everywhere.com/re_site/
Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
31–40 of 177 posts
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#32A super incomplete list: Databases: - PipelineDB - Snowflake (Computing) Internet of Things / Communications: - Helium Robotics: - Pneubotics - Kuka, namely the research department Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.: - Kiva - Anki Computer-Vision / VR based: - Jaunt - Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department) Agriculture: - Blueriver http://www.bluerivert.com (there are many more super-interesting…
I'd say D-wave is at least as dubious as Mill Computing.
I agree but only due to my lack of knowledge in both areas -- and I only have second knowledge by attending a talk of a former D-Wave user and "programmer". That is, and contrasting Mill Computing, D-Wave has implementations in the field.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#33A super incomplete list: Databases: - PipelineDB - Snowflake (Computing) Internet of Things / Communications: - Helium Robotics: - Pneubotics - Kuka, namely the research department Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.: - Kiva - Anki Computer-Vision / VR based: - Jaunt - Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department) Agriculture: - Blueriver http://www.bluerivert.com (there are many more super-interesting…
Is Kuka really a 'startup'? They are very well established among the industrial robotics scene.
That's true.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#34Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#35We're using a combined data pool from multiple companies (i.e., customers) to predict security breaches before they occur, and provide a usable set of notifications rather than the long list of "possible alerts" that so many infosec apps drop on users' laps.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#36Oscar Health in NYC is fixing the health insurance industry by building a tech and data driven insurance company from the ground up. It's an extremely complex, highly regulated industry that is in need of fixing. There are many startups that try to address pieces of the broken health care system, but Oscar is the only startup trying to solve it by doing it all. Engineering talent from Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Spotify, Apple, and more.: https://www.hioscar.com
The USA shouldn't have such a terrible health care system. Let's fix it. They are hiring all sorts of talent: https://www.hioscar.com/jobs
Fully cloud based, heavy aurora/mesos shop, kafka, hbase, redshift, mysql, python, flask, and an abundance of data analytics.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say D-wave is at least as dubious as Mill Computing.
I agree but only due to my lack of knowledge in both areas -- and I only have second knowledge by attending a talk of a former D-Wave user and "programmer". That is, and contrasting Mill Computing, D-Wave has implementations in the field.
I'd put in Rigetti Computing in the same category as D-Wave (I'll let you decide how dubious it is).
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#38nvidia is doing amazing work, and many of their employees are in the bay area. 3072 cores for $999 - http://www.geforce.com/.../geforce-gtx.../specifications The number of companies using this device to solve real problems is growing. Jeremy Howard just started an interesting one - http://www.enlitic.com
Nvidia has done great work with CUDA, but I wonder if AMD/ARM's HSA will make the work of the people using CUDA now much easier in the future - compute with a high-level language that you already know. That's got to be some kind of paradigm change there. I just hope they end up supporting Rust, too.
Compute on the GPU is unlikely to be unified in a meaningful way with the CPU in the near future. The GPU is a massive SIMD machine in contrast to the CPU.
Even if you use the same language for both, the style of code & algorithms are very different.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#39Quobyte. We're building a fault-tolerant scalable distributed storage system for POSIX files, block and object storage. Lots of challenges around distributed systems, architecture and concurrency.
Development is in Berlin, Germany, and we're hiring.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#40I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined: "For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken. I…
Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business?
Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company?
Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to change the world and "do something incredibly important for mankind", despite what the message might have become in later years. They all set out to do things they were interested in, pursuing technology for its own sake, as most people were back in the 1970's.
These days startups seem to need to feel that to justify their existence they need to be "changing the world" or "doing something important for mankind" or "giving back to the community". There's no need to justify the existence of a business. Do it for the cash, do it for fun, do it to scratch your sense of ambition, do it because you think it's a good idea, even if some pompous git stands on a high horse and looks to the sky and proclaims "this business is not changing mankind for the better, I am dismayed at the trivial nature of this endeavour, I deem it of little value".