[deleted]
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
91–100 of 734 posts
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#92As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app. Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineerin…
I suspect much engineering software is ripe for innovation. My wife is a Water Resources Engineer- a specialized form of Civil that focuses on "when it rains, where the hell is all this water going to go?". The software for that kind of modeling is apparently pretty basic, pretty expensive, buggy, etc.
Reminds me of the story that made the podcast rounds not too long ago, about the Mississippi River Basin Model.
I thought it was shut down largely because much better software simulations were made available; are they still kinda crummy?
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#93Not my industry, but a friend of mine in law was discussing how incredible her in-house software is for managing billable hours relative to all her past companies. I poked around, and most law firms, even very deep pocketed ones, use somewhere between a bad tech system and no tech system to manage and track their work. A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law f…
tech system to manage and track work
This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#94These questions pop up every now and then, and while I get the intent, you're not gonna get anything useful out of it. The idea that someone who knows how to code can disrupt an industry that they are not a part of is disingenuous, and the examples that you can find are exceptions, not the rule. It's also extremely naive and presumptuous...what makes you think people in the industry haven't already tried? People who…
I'm sorry, but this is rude, discouraging, and flat out wrong. This sort of stuff happens all the time. I personally work for a company whose founders implanted them in an incredibly calcified industry despite no industry experience, and I can rattle off dozens of successful examples of this. In fact, this very attitude is the exact reason why there have been industries that are primed for "disruption." If only those…
>I'm sorry, but this is rude, discouraging, and flat out wrong.
I'd rather people feel slighted than to have a bunch of kids fresh out of college trying to disrupt, say, the health insurance industry.
This isn't about "fresh eyes". The problem with having no domain knowledge is that you can't identify many of the issues that needs solving within an industry. Every job I've ever had, I see issues that I can solve with my experience.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#95Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.
What is the use case for the models themselves?
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#96Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#97Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.
What is the use case for the models themselves?
Anyone who does work with 3d content: visual effects, video games, vr, ar, etc. Being able to quickly build your scenes from a huge library or accurate models would be amazing and would save businesses lots of money.
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#98Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.
What is the use case for the models themselves?
There are multiple but mine specifically is AR. It's valuable also for VR, 3D space planning for Designers/Architects/Engineers, Assets for Game Dev, Objects for modeling and simulation, Training Deep Vision nets and on and on...
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#99Semi-related... I work in wellness and healthcare. I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where (a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that) (b) the office then requests x, y, and z information (c) a push is sent t…
we're making something similar, currently sitting at ~40k patient users, 200+ health systems adopted -
Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
#100Semi-related... I work in wellness and healthcare. I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where (a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that) (b) the office then requests x, y, and z information (c) a push is sent t…
Insurance card scanning and recognition is available. Costs $999.[1] This has apparently been around for years; there's Windows 98 support. It's been acquired by AcuFill [2]
They also offer identity document verification with facial recognition crosscheck. They want to use this to detect visa overstayers for immediate deportation.[3] That now looks like a market with potential.
[1] http://www.card-reader.com/medical_cards.htm [2] http://www.acuantcorp.com/autofill-software/ [3] http://sandhill.com/article/its-high-time-we-build-border-te...