Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#741

Post by psion »

whitepoplar wrote: post #482

"Kickstarter" for cities. Housing is unaffordable in desirable cities, but nobody wants to move to less desirable cities, where housing is affordable. Take a city that is desperate for development, like Detroit, and figure out a way for a couple thousand people to "pledge" moving to a dense-ish urban area at a preferential rate.

I'm going to use your example of Detroit as my example here. One of the problems with getting people to move into less desirable cities like Detroit is that the less desirable areas are pretty nasty with poor resources, dirty streets and sidewalks, etc. Infrastructure is a joke in many of these neighborhoods, and the city government is still too obsessed with just particular areas for growth because that's where the tax money is. If someone would come up with a way to not just get people to come into the neighborhoods, but to actually clean them up and get city and state government on their side, that would be the real winner.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#742

Post by dceddia »

dharma1 wrote: post #155
dirtyaura wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is really solvable by technology and tools? In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper. Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :) I feel that…

Having worked with mostly remote Devs for the past 5 years as a designer I have some thoughts on this. 1) bandwidth in many parts of the world is still not nearly good enough for high quality video 2) need good inexpensive remote whiteboarding tech. The MS surface TV looks good but too expensive to fit in everyone's remote office 3) initiating remote video should (either for screen sharing or video chat) be immediate…

Remote whiteboarding is definitely a pain.

There are a ton of online whiteboard apps, but it's hard to find a good one (know of any?).

Then there's the problem that drawing with a mouse is difficult. It's hard to quickly express ideas as boxes-and-lines without something like a drawing tablet. Wacom makes some low-end ones that are pretty affordable though (like this one[0] for ~$80). Maybe that'd be a good solution, though it does require some practice to get proficient.

[0] http://a.co/du45rQr

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#743

Post by apsharma »

JamesBarney wrote: post #154

A 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…

"For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time. "

The trouble here is that the guru or consultant who comes in needs to understand the context of the problem, which can't be done in 30 mins.

we have a lot of architecture consultant companies which provide these services already.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#744

Post by reitanqild »

Tepix wrote: post #651
therealmarv wrote: post #294

Note taking done right. Android, iOS, Desktop, Markdown & HTML, easy flat file format, Web clipper, offline and do this all without wasting whitespace (no doc editor like Evernote) and good sync and instant search results. <- NO ONE is doing this! Closest is maybe Google Keep (seriously it's good at some points I'm mentioning).

Checkout "Notebooks 8" for iOS. It is the ultimate note taking app.

>> Note taking done right. Android, iOS, Desktop

> Checkout "Notebooks 8" for iOS.

Might be good but misses several requirements :-)

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#746

Post by d_burfoot »

petra wrote: post #567

1. Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive, because only a rare few companies has managed to do the r&d to create great noise cancellation But if there we're affordable headphones that are software programmable and act as an app store for noise cancellation algorithms, that would definetly reduce the price. 2. One of the ideal ways to recieve ecommerce packages is on your car's trunk. It's possible to bu…

> Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive

I think a smart signal processing/soundtech/AI hacker could create a software program that uses a computer's audio to destructively interfere with other sounds in a room. Say there is an annoying mechanical whine coming from outside your bedroom. You position the computer's microphone near your bed, then tell the program to start listening. The program learns the audio pattern of the whine, and then begins to emit an antiwhine that cancels it out.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#747

Post by benologist »

Many countries can't participate on iOS, Play, Amazon, Stripe etc. People in many countries jump through hoops just to use e.g. PayPal.

Apple recently removed apps from Iranian developers who were circumventing restrictions by pretending to be from another country.

Millions of other developers can't participate in online markets we take for granted, unless someone facilitates it for them.

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#748

Post by skyfires218 »

sytelus wrote: post #207

Hackers rarely think of politics as playing field for startups, so in my mind this one of the biggest untapped opportunity right now. People from both sides are going nuts over Trump politics. That means tons of eyeballs and attention that would be available for the right startups for next 4 years. Things like BuzzFeed and DailyXYZ are going to make a massive killing in terms of ad revenue. At this stage still the re…

http://www.allsides.com/ Doesn't have voting stats, but would be a great addition

Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

#749

Post by davidlee1435 »

cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #680

Political Science & Democracy Management AFAIK there's little to no innovation in this field aside from the occasional electronic voting machine, whose security may or may not be totally un-hackable. In a day & age where the internet reaches every home, & there's a web browser in nearly everyone's pocket, it shouldn't be that difficult to effectively discern the will of the people. But we're still depending on manual…

I wonder if there's something along the lines of a credit score for public servants out there. This score would probably need to be comprised of several stats, but one of the most important would be a score of all commitments and obligations an individual has per office and how many they've actually done. Another stat that comes to mind is NPS- are voters willing to vote again for this candidate?
Post reply on HN