I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent. This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry. The main problem is this: You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company…
If you have contacts in the industry, you could use something like sharetribe to see if you can build a marketplace: https://www.sharetribe.com/
It is super easy to get going with their hosted service. (Not an employee, just a satisfied user.)
Of course that turns this from a technical problem to a marketing and sales problem, which may be less appealing.
Tech industry: I want to be able to go to Mars for the weekend... leaving on Friday and coming back early Monday morning. This is still a big problem in tech industry.
If you are willing to experience it using VR, could be a startup idea ;)
I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent. This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry. The main problem is this: You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company…
There are marketplaces for speakers: espeakers.com, orate.me, bigspeak.com, kepplerspeakers.com, speakermatch.com, eaglestalent.com, celebrityspeakersbureau.com, among others. The speaker profiles include prices, areas of expertise, and a way to inquire and book. What they don't show, that you're asking for, is speaker availability and popularity. The problems I see with disclosing the schedules of speakers: 1) celebrities have real privacy concerns, 2) talent does not want their real demand every day of the year exposed to the public because it can hurt the mystery of their appeal, and 3) disparate calendaring methods maintained by each speaker mean that no web site can be in sync with all of its talent thus instant online booking is hard to do. As for the popularity requirement you asked for ("well-regarded") this is difficult to define because assessments are nonstandard; so what you get in all speaker marketplaces is endorsements and accolades the speaker cites themselves in their own profile -- which will always be self-recommending.
I'm expecting to get the MVP done before the end of this year. The MVP is mostly targeted at businesses who have to sign/generate contracts at scale. There's a lot of features for those use cases, and then there's features for users that the parent is talking about (pure contract-drafting). I have not talked to any lawyers yet. I think the worst part is that I don't even know how good the computer-skills of lawyers a…
I think it is awesome that you are working on a project. Most folks don't get started, so congrats on that, but can I say please do talk to some lawyers asap. I know it is super painful but, believe me, it can save you months if not years of going down the wrong direction. Here is a blog post we put together to show how to get in touch with people to interview: https://blog.nugget.one/2016/09/21/case-study-how-i-got-…
A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies. They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own server in a closet running the server versio…
Lots of commenters here have mentioned parts of law practice that involve lawsuits, complex negotiations, and so forth.
Workers Comp, Social Security, Family Law, and elder law in general aren't as glamorous. Clients for those services don't have such deep pockets as the other corners of the law do.
It's likely that a good SaaS-based system with embedded knowledge of jurisdictional rules (in the US, federal and state rules) could be successful.
But the sales cycle for a new product? Getting early adopters? Prepare for some pain.
Word Perfect is the vi of word processors . I still program in vi.
You most likely program in vim or another vi successor. Possibly with a ton of configuration settings and plugins that weren't around in vi. Big difference.
Fair enough. It is vim -- I still refer to it as vi because I'm that old. And yes, I do take advantage of undo and syntax highlighting. I'm sure quite a few of the modalities I use over the years have been added (oh! Tabs, very important). But the point is, relatively old control interfaces can be very effective even after 30 years.
Semi-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…
Here's an observation. HIPAA applies to health care providers, insurance companies, and other entities like that. HIPAA does NOT apply to me when I am in possession of my own personal health records. Not saying such an app should not be secure, but for me to hold my own records is regulatorily simpler than HIPAA.
Certainly, but automation seems inevitable at this point because it actually is beneficial to most of society, in terms of productivity. I don't think becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe dream.
> I don't think becoming less automated to save jobs is any less of a pipe dream. It may seem inevitable. Until you have an entire generation of the work force put out of work. Then the only thing that will be inevitable will be civil war. We always need to have work for people to do. It's fundamental to our nature. It's the modern expression of hunter/gathering.
But there's no real precedent for an entire society needing few workers, so I'm not sure that either of us could guess with any certainty what would happen. I'm not saying things will work out, but it's never been tried to the best of my knowledge.
A monthly subscription service for a fee of $5 - $10 where every month I get a new kind of quirky instrument (shaker, wind, wood block and stick, whistle, triangle, or other noise maker) as a surprise by mail. The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music…
This is a great idea, but the point is to find problems not solutions :)
Antibotnet -- software products and hardware gizmos to detect when IoT gizmos get pwned, recruited into botnets, and then the botnets are activated to attack KrebsOnSecurity or somebody.
This stuff should be priced for home and small office use.
"BEEEP" Why is your laser printer's ethernet port issuing tons of SYN requests? Unplug that printer! Factory reset it!