Food. So much waste in transport, spoilage, excess out of season consumption, etc. Also a very effective means of direct charity. We are trying a new approach at http://8-food.com/
Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#352I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for Paleo. I'm also on a 'light' version of it for the past 2 years and can confirm the effects.
Paleo is a fad diet, it can be healthy, yes, and many people with unhealthy diets try it, make a success and then the circle of anecdotal evidence reinforces the fad. The easiest diet is a diet filled with starchy vegetables and fruits. It fills you up insanely, it's low on calories, and is extremely hard to overconsume. Try eating a cup of beans, try eating two cups of beans. Practically impossible to do at one sitt…
The paleo label might be a fad but I'd argue the diet itself isn't. Avoiding highly processed foods and limitng grain intake simply forces you to eat higher quality/healthier food and is a great way to clean up your diet to lose weight and improve general health.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#354A global VOIP service that is based on open standards. Or an open social network, also based on open standards. Both should be extensible.
diasporafoundation.org and elgg.org are open social networks that can be tweaked to once specific requirements and can be hosted on a digitalOcean droplet for example.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#355Earlier 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…
I was fascinated to see how much bacon 4000 calories really is. A quick Google suggests about ten rashers, which, I guess, spread over a day wouldn't seem all that bad (in comparison with, say, Michael Phelps' reputed diet - he really put the "eating" into "competing"...). Still, that's a pretty epic diet, and could be very popular in developer circles. You should maybe consider patenting it.
I would think it would be closer to 100 rashers a day. Ten seems very low. Maybe your results were per 100g?
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#356The 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.
And you are talking about mostly hosting PHP application. For some stacks these stagnant players do not even exist. 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
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Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#357A 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…
I'm the co-founder of Fliffr. We're building a marketplace for services where you can charge by the minute. We have everything from experts in SEO, chefs, personal trainers, Esport professionals. We also have a couple of developers, for example you can contact me for advice on #go #javascript or #ionic. Our goal is to build a service to quickly get in contact with an expert and only paying for the advice you need.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the cameras are above the screen, and the subject is far enough, the eye's angle doesn't matter much.
Why do you say that? It's quite easy to see that the person on the other end isn't making eye contact, even when they think they are, looking straight in your eyes. To me, it seems like they are looking at my tits or something. It matters quite a lot. Also, FPS and resolution. There's a long, long way to go before video conferencing feels more like an actual face-to-face conversation, and it hasn't really changed muc…
I say that because: depending on those factors (and some others like lense type, focus etc) the difference between the angle eye/screen and eye/camera is insignificant...
You just have to draw a schema to understand.
3 to 5 meters is a good distance for a video conference.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#359The biggest untapped opportunity for startups is hiring skilled workers without any consideration to location or a single geography.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
#360My opinions without any real insight into how practical/viable/useful they are:
- 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.