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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?

#851

Post by monodeldiablo »

pdq wrote: post #672
pgroves wrote: post #608

Health Insurance / Hospital. I'm old enough that I now go to the doctor more frequently than I used to and it's a mess. A health insurance company that could reliably allow a user to change their address on a website would be competitive. Having all of your medical procedures and orders accessible through a simple CRUD app would be a threat to a lot of multi-billion dollar companies. It's still all done through phone…

What will improve the medical industry in the US dramatically is transparent pricing. When both consumers and providers have no idea how much the product or service they are using actually costs, there is no way to control costs (ie competition, delaying the service, using an alternative product/service, etc). Thus our prices have spiraled out of control. For example, delivering a baby is an incredibly common procedu…

> What will improve the medical industry in the US dramatically is transparent pricing.

No. Heavens no. It's way more complex than this. This isn't even on the Top 10 list of reasons American healthcare is a shambles. And it does nothing to explain why healthcare is so much better in every other Western democracy -- even and especially in places where there's less transparency about pricing than in the US.

What will improve medicine in the US is putting everybody in the same risk pool. Every other solution is a losing bet. Stop foisting the old, the poor, the chronically ill, and veterans onto the government rolls while handing the low-risk middle over to for-profit corporations for milking.

The "free market" is a notoriously bad fit for healthcare, which is why no other country does it.

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

#852

Post by mikelevins »

sideproject wrote: post #479
jdietrich wrote: post #411

Older people. We live in a rapidly ageing society. Retirees are a large and wealthy demographic. Despite that, tech companies are absolutely woeful at designing products for older users. We don't empathise with their needs. We don't understand how poor eyesight, arthritis or cognitive difficulties can affect UX. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand and excellent opportunities for future growth.

I do agree. But what specific areas do you think would be good to target? You mention their poor eyesight and difficult UX, but that doesn't mean we should start creating Facebook or Twitter clones with bigger fonts and easier UX? (or should we?)

One important area is social connections. After you pass 50 years of age the people you're close to begin to die off or become noncommunicative at an ever-growing rate.

Health issues begin to interfere increasingly with opportunities to make new friends--there are increasing numbers of activities that you simply can't do anymore. Isolation increasingly becomes a problem, and isolation is a serious health hazard for older people, affecting mental health and posing a hazard to physical health.

Platforms that make it easier for older people to stay in touch with one another, to meet new people safely, and to develop networks of trust and assistance could make a huge difference in the quality of people's lives.

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

#853

Post by mikelevins »

ColanR wrote: post #67
jandrewrogers wrote: post #20

Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in: - Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem…

> AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach. Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?

Perhaps he means old-fashioned AI techniques like production-rule systems, knowledge representation, and truth maintenance. If so, and if he's right, that would interest me, since I know how to do those things.

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

#854

Post by kozikow »

vegabook wrote: post #381

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…

> Bloomberg is stubbornly Windows only. No web, no Linux, no OSX no anything else except a bit of crippleware on mobile.

Although it is against license, you technically can remote desktop to Bloomberg terminal from Linux machine.

Bloomerg monopoly is more result of data they have rather than the clunky terminal. You can buy just Bloomerg data and use any type of analytics tool you find suitable (e.g. Pandas, matlab). Data is often crippled compared to terminal, but combining multiple tricks (e.g. different Bloomberg data subscriptions) you can get very close to 100%. I used to have access to terminal and data in structured format and I spent 95% time looking at data in Pandas and other data analysis tools rather than terminal.

I'm not affiliated with Bloomberg in any way.

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

#855

Post by monodeldiablo »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #104
tyingq wrote: post #3

The 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.

I'm trying to get into this area...I used to work for EIG and frankly they SUCK. I'm wanting to start an employee co-owned hosting firm that values employee/customer relationships. I think honestly it's not so much the systems/software that matter most for hosting - it's the customer service. When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - T…

What you're describing sounds awfully like a worker co-op. Why not just do a worker co-op, instead of designing something that would be trivially easy for your board to steal from the employees the moment it gets traction?

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

#856

Post by david927 »

cromulent wrote: post #769
david927 wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is not in the EU (and was never in Schengen), so you pay customs along as well as shipping.

The UK is in the EU, so you shouldn't be paying customs.

Aha, the process of the UK leaving the EU is expected be triggered at the end of next month. Apologies.

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

#857

Post by jpm_sd »

xchaotic wrote: post #800

Aaccurate 3-d scanning of 3d environments - houses, mines you name it. I think the tech is there in your pocket and with good software plus very accurate measurement of location, orientation + panorama/spehrical photo shoots, you could have very high quality recreations of real world areas - which in turn could be explored, modified and enjoyed in VR/AR/MR. For example simulating house refurbishment or furniture purc…

Plenty of people working on this: [0] https://matterport.com/ [1] https://structure.io/ [2] https://www.paracosm.io/

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

#858

Post by sytse »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #839
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…

GitLab is doing this. They currently have: - Issue tracking (jira) - Issue kanban (trello) - Git repository - Chat, via bundled Mattermost (gitter/slack) - CI (jenkins) - Docker registry Plus, they're planning on adding even more features. We have a self-hosted instance at work and I use it for pretty much everything other than email and actually writing code.

Thanks, this is exactly what we're doing. The complete scope is detailed on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope

By the way, we see Mattermost as an alternative for Slack but not for Gitter. One is team chat and the other is 'project' chat with different requirements.

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

#859

Post by monodeldiablo »

mthoms wrote: post #781
Kalium wrote: 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 Europe they mostly have, but it's still so variable and subjective. For one thing, people are very different sizes, based on your market. I mean, I'm a "large" here (in Europe) but a "medium" in America, presumably because the average American is considerably fatter than a European of similar height.

And tailoring/fashion add another layer of subjectivity. A pair of size 34 jeans are much tighter in Europe than the US, because that's de moda. And there's considerable variation between brands, depending on how they want you to look when you wear their stuff.

In the end, there's just no getting away from the fact that you'll need to try clothes on if you want a good fit.

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

#860

Post by kozikow »

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).

I use emacs org mode and it's superb (not applicable to general populace, I know). Mobile is not that great, but I always carry ultrabook with me.
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