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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?

#781
post #721
post #546

I think retail can be improved, and even small improvements can have large impacts because of the sheer size of the market: US retail sales are in the $5 trillion range yearly, mostly in brick and mortar. Specific problems: 1. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with e-commerce be fixed? 2. E-commerce doesn't work well on cheap items where shipping cost is prohibitive. Different companie…

> 1. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with e-commerce be fixed? One thing I much prefer B&M shopping for is clothing. Sizing is so wildly variable across brands, and clothing such a tactile thing, that I cannot completely get away from physical storefronts.

That's a good point. I wonder why the big brands have not gotten together to create standardized sizing scheme.

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

#782
Biggest: largest, most ambitious, most lucrative, riskiest, highest impact? I have one that meets all of those criteria. Ditch legacy and redefine one language/OS to rule them all. Give app stores the middle finger. Throw the web browser away. Throw away antiquated build systems. Create a universal, minimal, extensible, and sensible layout and rendering engine. Create an imperative language as fast as c yet portable at the code level. Oh, and expect no one to invest in your madness. :) Be Steve Jobs and throw away the floppy disk and CD ROM before anyone else.

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

#783
post #781
post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with e-commerce be fixed? One thing I much prefer B&M shopping for is clothing. Sizing is so wildly variable across brands, and clothing such a tactile thing, that I cannot completely get away from physical storefronts.

That's a good point. I wonder why the big brands have not gotten together to create standardized sizing scheme.

In what way would they benefit from it? In general, they'd rather encourage ignorance-based brand loyalty. In addition, this way brands can compete on vanity sizing.

"I'm a 12 in Brand X, but an 8 in Brand Y! I'll take Y!"

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

#784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Might be worth checking out realtimeboard.com

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

#786

taking on the Bloomberg terminal. They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best descri…

I also can't emphasize how ossified and inefficient the Bloomberg corporation itself is. I've spent months BEGGING them to take my company's money (we had 3 terminal subscriptions and wanted to increase to 4) with them stalling us because they wanted to upsell us on a direct T1 line (! for like 100MB/day of data, yeah right). The entire company and product is a mess. Unfortunately, last time I tried it, Reuters's competitor terminal app was pretty awful too.

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

#787

Physical space for lounging, socializing, and working. I live in NYC and there's still a striking lack of space that facilitates people getting out of their apartments and doing "whatever." Starbucks popularized the concept of the "third space" (the first two being housing + workplace) and I think there's so much room to improve upon this.

This is exactly what spacious.com in NYC is working on, a network of coffee / meeting lounges across the city, inside really nice restaurant dining rooms that are otherwise closed until dinner service. (big disclaimer: I'm the cofounder).

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

#788

taking on the Bloomberg terminal. They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month. That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is best descri…

You'd probably need to invest substantially in antitrust litigation to get access to the raw data streams Bloomberg relies on.

There are many temporally-exclusive agreements on all sorts of data, some government-supplied (!). "Temporally-exclusive" means that anyone can use the data, but one company gets it 5-600 seconds early.

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

#789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be more specific about the IoT DB issue? What would a credible solution do? Thanks in advance.

An IoT database requires the intersection of three software capabilities in a single platform, which have varying degrees of accessibility (the technology exists in principle) and none are available in open source currently. - An exabyte-scale storage engine. Nothing too exotic here technically and a few companies have built them, but the design needs to address continuous data corruption, continuous hardware failure…

I'd also add, there's a component of streaming analytics that isn't solved either.

One of the points I've tried to make at various companies (we've worked at the same one before) is that streaming solutions and batch solutions need to be fused into a single execution engine.

A streaming system on its own (operating on temporal windows) is not nearly as useful as on that can be joined to a storage engine with data at rest. It also needs to be disk based, so windows can be large, which most people do not want to take on. It also needs to be extremely parallel, and efficient.

Thousands of requests a second per server is not even in the right ball-park (which is lots of current execution engines now). Operating at line rate is generally table stakes IMO. The operations on the stream should be parallelized automatically, up to petabytes a day of input. Humans don't have the necessary context to do the partitioning up front, especially with streams that change.

The issue is (and I've tried to come up with designs to address this, though not in practice), is that co-locating the data at rest, with data that is moving through the system is a tricky problem, especially with complicated joins.

They can be the same engine (and should), but traditional database engines tend to have a problem with streaming queries, since they are just repeatedly executing a query against every new record. They are expressible, just not efficient. There is room to innovate in this space, but most people building these engines either solve the parallelism problem naively, or not at all.

There's also the problem of driving this computation to the edge, which is also something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing, but have not yet met a company willing to take this level of effort on.

All the points you make about the kernel are apt, as are the points about the distribution algorithms. Also, the protocols used aren't nash safe, so at scale most of these systems become an operational juggling act under pressure.

All streaming systems that I know of do not know enough about the underlying data to gracefully rebalance and co-locate, since they all tend to embody the map/reduce paradigm, which is oblivious to underlying data distribution, at least in current practice.

There is available computer science to solve all these issues, I think some of the spatial algorithms out there can also be applied to the streaming space, especially in join evaluation.

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

#790
post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet, but it is something that we are thinking of adding. Would a web interface be useful to you?

If I'm getting consulting for e.g. code, I'd want to be at my laptop coding away, not stuck with my face in a phone screen.

Software/Devs/Code already have a niche platform for this at: https://codementor.io
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