Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by tbrooks » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

systemtrigger wrote: post #593

tbrooks wrote: post #565

I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent. This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry. The main problem is this: You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company…

There are marketplaces for speakers: espeakers.com, orate.me, bigspeak.com, kepplerspeakers.com, speakermatch.com, eaglestalent.com, celebrityspeakersbureau.com, among others. The speaker profiles include prices, areas of expertise, and a way to inquire and book. What they don't show, that you're asking for, is speaker availability and popularity. The problems I see with disclosing the schedules of speakers: 1) celeb…

No, none of the sites you mentioned solve the problem I posed.

Bigspeak, Keppler, Eagles Talent, and Celebrity are bureaus and function in a traditional way. Espeakers and SpeakerMatch are essentially speaker directories -- they make money from speaker's paying them a monthly fee or in a lead gen style.

Orate.me is new to me, I haven't seen it before. In a cursory look at their site, it looks like their speaker list is just NSA members.

Also the calendaring problem is easy to solve...

There's enough public data to develop a sentiment algorithm and solve the popularity problem.

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

#602

Post by fasterthanlime » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #358

fasterthanlime wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, amos here, main developer of wharf/butler, here's a quick technical summary so you don't have to do the digging yourself: - File formats are streams of protobuf messages - efficient serialization, easy to parse from a bunch of programming languages. Most files (patches, signatures) are composed of an uncompressed header, and a brotli-compressed stream (in the reference implementation, compression format are plug…

That's quite incredibly thorough. How familiar are you with Blizzard's NGDP protocol / CASC file format?

Not at all, but after a cursory look it seems to solve a slightly different (and easier, imho) problem. I might be mistaken!

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

#603

Post by ksdale » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #514

ksdale wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. To your second paragraph, I would add that it's hard for customers (and lawyers) to figure out what is "good-enough" in the legal setting. I'm a lawyer and there's a lot of stuff you can find on the internet that I personally think is good enough (I would use it in my personal affairs because the risk of the missing edge cases being an actual problem is slim) but I wouldn't be comfortable recommen…

Is there a place for a law consulting company that just consults you on how to save money or how to find what's "good enoudg" ?

I think it could be done, especially if you could gather enough information to show people the likelihood of certain problems happening given their circumstances. The biggest problem is that without software to do the heavy lifting, you're spending so much time talking to the client that you might as well be their lawyer. And then even if you save them money, their "real" attorney might argue against your advice or retrace all your steps at an hourly rate.

I'm sure that there are lots of legal consulting companies that do this for people and entities that consume lots of legal services but the real trick is providing it profitably to "unsophisticated" people doing a one time thing.

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

#604

Post by treehau5 » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

vinay427 wrote: post #598

treehau5 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe dream. It may seem inevitable. Until you have an entire generation of the work force put out of work. Then the only thing that will be inevitable will be civil war. We always need to have work for people to do. It's fundamental to our nature. It's the modern expression of hunter/gathering.

But there's no real precedent for an entire society needing few workers, so I'm not sure that either of us could guess with any certainty what would happen. I'm not saying things will work out, but it's never been tried to the best of my knowledge.

Yeah, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but that's probably one of the worst rationales for trying something, at least for something important as this.

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

#605

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:39 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #587

ThomPete wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just as wrong as anything can be and you have nothing to back it up. Furthermore you seem to have missed why they are asked. The problems in many industries er hidden problems which can only be understood by those in the industry, but the solutions are often made by people outside the industries in partnership with insighters. So they are imensly useful and many time more relevant than most other discussions abo…

I probably shit on the idea more than I needed to, simply because it's entirely possible that you could be looking to form a team and rally around a serious problem, and that team could be composed of people who deeply understand the problem in addition to fresh faces with a different approach. And I would fully support that approach. Lately I've been approached by a lot of "startups" who have made it inadvertently a…

I think this is were you are missing the bigger picture though.

The solutions to the problem in your industry might not be based on the skills or insights of your industry.

It might be that someone recognizes the similarity from another industry where the problem was solved in a specific way or that the insight just so happens to be solvable based on the knowledge of some specific technology.

And it's NOT about ideas it's about recognizing the real problem that hides underneath and which requires experience to understand.

Here is the essay I ended writing https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4... this might give you a better perspective on how this is useful no matter what constellation.

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

#606

Post by tbrooks » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

whysonot wrote: post #578

tbrooks wrote: post #565

I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent. This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry. The main problem is this: You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company…

tbrooks I'd love to learn more about this -- could I get in touch?

sure. my email is my username at google's mail service.

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

#607

Post by terrib1e » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

lucaspiller wrote: post #450

Achshar wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's disgusting. I feel filthy. I replaced a system in my first client school that also used excel attachments for tracking student data, exams results, attendance, assignments, etc. I could physically feel better once I saw my own implementation replacing email attachment system. Since then email-excel has been a sensitive topic for me.

I've recently found a department for the company I'm working for needs help as they have literally reached the limits of Excel. They have a sheet with around 30 rows and 150 columns, and they have 100 of these sheets (in a single Excel file). Some parts use formulas, but usually when somebody needs to change something they need to go through every single sheet. The issue is now when they try to add new data Excel won…

I work in the healthcare industry. Basically we ARE the industry nowadays, and we use excel and word to keep everything "organized". There are some half-ass designed software,websites, and databases that are used as well, but it's amazing how a multi-billion dollar company can rely on this level of technology. I think they get these bids to run state government programs, and have absolutely no plan in place. And for some reason instead of just automating or updating things, the company just throws bodies at the problems and makes everything "production" based. I'm sure a lot of places are similar, but this is a white collar factory on such a massive scale, it literally sickens me. There are so many channels that approval for changes has to go through, that by the time some small minor change is implemented its already way too late, too distorted by having so many hands touch the problem, and too outdated.

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

#608

Post by grogenaut » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 6:57 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #470

flylib wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opendoor is already doing agentless open houses with access codes (smart locks) and cameras throughout the house where people can visit whenever they want without calling ahead, not that difficult

That seems to me to be fraught with all manner of peril. Suppose a burglar poses as a buyer under an assumed identity, and then robs the house while wearing a mask. What is the recourse?

The house unlocks to a tracked verified identity from a smart phone, Not to random people in masks, would be my guess. Also empty houses are hard to steal only vandalize

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

#609

Post by tmail21 » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

kolbe wrote: post #460

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tech system to manage and track work This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.

not when 90% of your work is done through email....

Consider TMail21 (https://tmail21.com) which (amongst other things) combines mail with revision control.

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

#610

Post by pastullo » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 7:14 PM UTC

terrib1e wrote: post #589

NPMaxwell wrote: post #561

As specific organs reduce functioning, some seniors living at home need to revise their recipes to avoid complex collections of foods just as TIAs and other problems reduce their ability to deal with the challenges. To-go food does not work. For some families, hospital-style food may mimic the diet they are accustomed to, but for immigrants, traditional hospital food may be horrific. Older people tend to rely on a ve…

I completely agree. I think that one of the big problems, aside from someone cooking a family recipe while also modifying it slightly so its diet appropriate, is somehow going beyond just making and delivering this food. My grandfather is 89, his wife is 17 years younger than him so she still cooks for him and makes sure hes eating. On the flipside, once my grandfather died on the other side of the family, my grandmo…

Same exact story on my grandparents. Once the healty one is gone, the other one sees a drastic reduction in quality of life as well as life expectancy.

The cost incourred for at-home help with a dedicated easter european colf were huge. Might still be a couple of decades away but i can totally see a model where you rent a house robot that takes care of cooking, personal cleaning and limited interaction (no need to have super intelligent AI when chatting to a 80 years old man with Alzheimer)