What do you wish someone else would build for you?
Bored with no ideas for next startup
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#12BTW ... let's say you get the help you want. Do you offer anything in return?
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#13Find a good way to have an asynchronous feed back from a web server to a web client, a true general purpose "push" protocol as an extension of HTTP. Hey you can even call it HTTP2W or HTTP2HTTP. Of course you'll have to come up with not only the protocol definition but also a reference implementation for both the client and the server. Sounds like fun, eh?
Already exists:
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#14What do you wish someone else would build for you?
IN GENERAL this is a great frame of mind to come up with ideas for a non-programming mind; I think, however, that as a developer such a perspective would lead to technically interesting stuff that few people would use / pay for. As time remains constant and life becomes more complicated, I suspect people will become more selective and use more of the kinds of services they would actually bother paying for and limiting their interactions with things that are interesting, but not enough if they actually cost something. That said, most non-programmers usually start the "what would I want built for me" process from the perspective of "that would be so useful that I might even consider paying for it" whereas, from my experience with programmers (trying to recruit for my own startup efforts), most programmers start the "what would I wish someone built" process from the perspective of "that I would respect this guy's technical ability a lot."
Case in point: there are tons of ideas that can become good, useful, practical valuable services based on standard, already existing technology reconfigured in different ways. But most programmers, if they're anything like the ones I've come across, would consider that "below them" and instead favor a startup working on some obscure problem that 6 people on the planet could understand and appreciate.
Google aside, that rarely translates into "great business".
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#15here's one: user generated content is hot. games are fun. turn a game into content creation or content creation into a game.
Bundled startup companies. Offer a Limited company with matching domain name and web-2.0-ey logo/trademark on the holding page. Your customers will get an instant web presence they can start coding into. Perhaps having an operational online payment system in that companies name would be good value for money.
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#16What do you wish someone else would build for you?
Could we have a permanent thread dedicated to this question?
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#17here's one: user generated content is hot. games are fun. turn a game into content creation or content creation into a game.
Bundled startup companies. Offer a Limited company with matching domain name and web-2.0-ey logo/trademark on the holding page. Your customers will get an instant web presence they can start coding into. Perhaps having an operational online payment system in that companies name would be good value for money.
is there an interactive-computer-help system going already? Punters pay per minute of help. They are matched with a nerd somewhere who can view their screen, offer advice (voip) or help using a remote desktop.
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#18It sounds like you're in a mental rut at the moment. To get out of it, you will need to put aside the problem of 'finding your next startup' and focus your attention on other things for a while. Teaching yourself a new technology or working for someone else's startup for a while might give you enough of a different perspective to make more progress on finding a startup idea.
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#19What do you wish someone else would build for you?
Could we have a permanent thread dedicated to this question?
It would be empty. The second somebody with technical ability came up with an idea, they'd think, "Hey, why don't I just build that myself?"
If someone without the ability to develop the idea had a good idea, they'd wonder why they should do the idea-thinking for programmers who'll then dismiss the idea-generation with some VC-inspired platitude about how "it's all about the execution" or something.
So there you go. Progress halted by the best of the human condition: arrogance, greed and suspicion of the "other."
On the other hand I've always thought that if you get people who normally would never talk to each other in everyday society together and got them drunk, tons of good exchanges would occur resulting in who knows how many great new companies.
Sigh ... dreams ...
Re: Bored with no ideas for next startup
#20Find a good way to have an asynchronous feed back from a web server to a web client, a true general purpose "push" protocol as an extension of HTTP. Hey you can even call it HTTP2W or HTTP2HTTP. Of course you'll have to come up with not only the protocol definition but also a reference implementation for both the client and the server. Sounds like fun, eh?
Already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29
Thanks, I'm aware of Comet. Not exactly what I meant, in Comet the connection stays open after being initiated by the client. I'm looking for something where the interaction is first client-to-server, then client registers a "callback" address and port that it will listen to. This would be followed by a server-to-client call where the server will send updates/events to client as they happen, the client then decides what to do with those events. I want to avoid a persistent connection, and either the "heartbeat" client requests or other forms of polling by the client. The interaction that I'm looking for is more akin to a P2P sort of model.