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

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

#771

Post by hamtr »

ungzd wrote: post #715

Creative tools. Everyone is so obsessed with content consumption tools and making TV out of internet, with deprecating desktop in favor of handhelds where you tap ads and take selfies with dog faces. For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991. For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but V…

There's a lot of cool things happening in the creative tools space. Along with the tools mentioned above, Figma is a good take on how design teams can work together (plus, it's web-based, which is just cool).

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

#772

Post by jklinger410 »

rvdm wrote: post #640
jklinger410 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the Director of Online Marketing for KingFit Preventive Health & Wellness and I would be remiss if I didn't at least drop a line in on this thread. We're currently developing a mobile app + clinician dashboard combo working towards a preventive health solution. Our main focus is diabetes right now but cardiovascular disease, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes are all in our sights here early on. Many of the apps fu…

Curious, do you have a solution to automating food intake logging? Props for using Shopify!

First we're trying to master the food suggestion part of that equation. We want to encourage people to eat the healthiest thing they have available. This means our tool doesn't try and punish you if you aren't shopping perfectly. By using an "SOS" button, we are going to work with what our users have access to and make suggestions for certain plates at restaurants near the user.

There are some emerging IOT products (like smart cups) that we plan on interfacing with that may aid in this process.

In short my answer is not yet. But interfacing with IOT health tracking products is a huge part of our platform.

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

#773

Post by nradov »

freehunter wrote: post #725
nradov wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are bigger problems with nuclear powered cargo ships than just waste disposal. They would need larger crews of highly trained (more expensive) experts to operate the reactor. Look at how much the US Navy spends to train competent technicians and engineers. Every nuclear powered ship becomes a prime terrorist target, either to hijack it or destroy it in place and cause a radiological incident. So you also need c…

On the subject of highly trained nuclear operators from the Navy, what's the job market look like for those guys after they leave the service? Where else are you going to find a nuclear-powered ship where you can put your experience to work? Seems like a natural fit. For almost everything in the military, IMO there should be some market in the private space that could use those skills.

Some of them stay 30 years in the service and then retire. Others go to work for civilian nuclear power plants, or the vendors which service and supply them. And there aren't very many trained operators to begin with. The US Navy has <90 nuclear powered vessels (plus a few separate reactors for training and research).

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

#774

Post by monodeldiablo »

BjoernKW wrote: post #372
mslot wrote: post #352

I 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 fo…

How would you suggest going about overcoming these differences? I live in the EU. I've thought about this for some time and I can't really think of a scalable approach. One aspect of the problem is taxes and regulations, which for the most part has to be addressed politically. The different jurisdictions are a cause for friction, too. The even more significant barrier however is the linguistic and cultural one. It's…

I've been living in the EU (Croatia) now for three years and I'm honestly baffled that people here think that these are legitimately barriers to trade. As another commenter noted: We're all using GMail and AirBnB and Etsy, despite our "cultural differences".

I think that, in the quest for a cheaper laptop, people won't care much that the product description isn't a grammatically perfect rendering of their local Norwegian subdialect. In fact, I bet a site that mandated English (I know, shudder all you want, but it's true) as the language for sellers would mop up here. Everybody 40 and younger (AKA "your target market") speaks/reads English flawlessly.

Taxes and regulations? Big problem. Totally agree with you. This is probably what's kept Amazon such a bit player in Europe.

Cultural and linguistic differences? Not a major issue.

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

#775

Post by petra »

d_burfoot wrote: post #746
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…

Noise cancelling headphones work much better and are much easier to do than room level noise-cancellation.

Why? Well, the whole point of noise-cancellation is to create an interference pattern in your ear, that is as similar as possible to the noise in your ear.

The farther you get from your ear that becomes harder, because of the room's acoustics, because of latency, because of the fact your head is moving, etc. And we see that in the results of room level noise cancellation attempts in the past.

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

#776

Post by mthoms »

jsymolon wrote: post #708
panic wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- know how your congressman votes on each of the vote If anyone from Facebook is reading, this would be a great feature for the site. Imagine following your representatives and getting their votes automatically in your newsfeed.

> know how your congressman votes on each of the vote Actually, the opposite may be a better way. Our representatives votes should be secret for the same reason that the people votes is secret: prevents the voter from being intimidated and from selling his/her vote.

Interesting thought.

You know, you could also just make it illegal to "sell" votes in the way the United States currently allows? Most other Western/Democratic countries figured this out a long, long time ago.

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

#777

Post by monodeldiablo »

kbart wrote: post #512
pawadu wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beside the old generation from the former eastern block (who studied Russian instead of English) pretty much everyone speaks enough English to communicate. I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by.

"I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero problems getting by." Only if you travel along established tourist routes. Go to a local marketplace or try to ask for directions in a smaller town and you will find it hard in many EU countries. Yes, in Northern countries even most elders speak English fluently, but in South I have had many situations where finding a single English speaking pers…

I don't believe it. I live in Croatia and everybody under 30 speaks English beautifully. Almost everybody under 40 speaks functional English. Most people under 50 understand commercial English, even if their grammar is shit.

You probably didn't struggle to find an English-speaking person. You struggled to find a person willing to speak English with you. That's a subtle, but important, difference.

Most of my neighbors pretend not to understand English around tourists because it saves them enormous hassle. At first, I was appalled when I realized this. Now, I confess to doing it myself. It gets exhausting answering the same questions from unresourceful tourists over and over again.

Locals don't want to be your tour guide. They just want to enjoy their coffee in peace.

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

#778

Post by jshc »

sureshn wrote: post #364

I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code , the next tab he should be able…

Perhaps instead of reinventing each tool that already does well in its own space, one could build a platform that allows users to link all these tools (if API is available) and customize with their own workflow and dashboard. I wonder if there's anything similar already existing yet? I feel in some big corps they may have developed their own proprietary homegrown tools for these.

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

#779

Post by IAmGraydon »

ungzd wrote: post #715

Creative tools. Everyone is so obsessed with content consumption tools and making TV out of internet, with deprecating desktop in favor of handhelds where you tap ads and take selfies with dog faces. For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991. For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but V…

Your reply is pretty far off base, IMO.

Creative Suite has evolved leaps and bounds since 1991. It has even evolved leaps and bounds in the last 10 years alone. It's strange to me that someone who really uses Adobe's products would say such a thing. Creative Suite is the only one in the game because it's SO good that there isn't a chance for a competitor to step in. They are also constantly adding new tools to the suite at no additional cost.

As for DAWs, I happen to produce music and have used most of the major DAWs over the last 15 years, though I've settled on Ableton Live. I have zero problems with VSTs crashing, and I often run projects with 50+ VSTs running simultaneously. Stolen VSTs can have stability issues, of course. Hardware dongles are also fairly rare. Only a handful of companies use them, and they aren't really a problem at all as long as you aren't in the habit of stealing software. They typically install in the USB port, not the parallel port. Parallel port dongles were used by Steinberg and were phased out long ago.

I'm curious - what DAWs in particular have you used, and which VSTs are you having problems with?

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

#780

Post by IAmGraydon »

Dragonai wrote: post #761
ungzd wrote: post #715

Creative tools. Everyone is so obsessed with content consumption tools and making TV out of internet, with deprecating desktop in favor of handhelds where you tap ads and take selfies with dog faces. For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991. For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but V…

A friend and I are actively working on innovating in the context of DAWs and music production, we're specifically trying to modernize the discovery and accessibility of plugins. Nice to see DAWs mentioned here - there's a lot that could be improved in the field and we're hoping to tackle several outstanding issues in the near future. (If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)

Don't you think it's a bit unethical to collect email addresses with the promise of a download, only to tell the user that the download isn't even available. But hey - thanks for giving us your email!
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