Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#51

Post by dhs » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 10:41 AM UTC

MachineEnglish - a (self-)reflective subset of English which allows computers and robots to describe themselves by explaining their algorithm(s) to their users in natural language. Human-machine dialogue can include, but isn't limited to, the machine answering what, how, and why it's doing what it's doing while it is doing it. If I don't have to spend too much time working for rent and ramen money, the prototype will come online this Christmas.

(Disclaimer: No, I did't solve Artificial General Intelligence, nor did I do something equally "magical". I'm not trying to compete for http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html">Hugh Loebner's gold medal. I'll never be able to simulate a human brain which can explain its own workings. A human brain which could write such a simulation would have to be able to describe itself, which mine can't. A machine's "brain", however, can be much simpler, and the information about how it works usually does exist. The difficult thing is in encoding it so that it can be queried and used in coherent conversation. That's what I'm hacking on.)

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#52

Post by moog » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 11:02 AM UTC

joshwa wrote: post #33

[Site Name Yet to be Determined] helps you organize, track, and follow up on your search for a [job|apartment|house|car|date|employee|vendor|whatever] on the web.

Good luck with it. That would be a Google killer.

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#53

Post by danohuiginn » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 1:10 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #12

A service that allows you to geotag things for your municipal government to fix: pot holes, poison ivy, graffiti, car accidents, dangerous trees, etc. This automatically creates a to-do list online for everyone to see, and lets people with an @town.state.gov email address check items off as they get done. Things like downed power wires would be submitted the same way and then automatically routed to the relevant auth…

something like http://www.fixmystreet.com ?

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#54

Post by slim » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 2:27 PM UTC

bigboote wrote: post #10

[deleted] wrote: post #2

[deleted]

OK, lemme guess... A highlighting pen? A flashlight, so you can read under the covers? Eyeglasses? A dictionary? Maybe you should explain what it is, and how it makes books more useful.

see http://markkit.net - the web highlighter

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#55

Post by slim » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 2:27 PM UTC

http://markkit.net - the web highlighter pen

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#56

Post by nraynaud » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 2:49 PM UTC

Nike+ with more sports, no flash, and discussions everywhere.

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#57

Post by symptic » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 3:25 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #47

http://openphotovr.org - 3D photo albums. I didn't invent this pitch myself - it's how other people tend to describe my project. Strangely, all three words are (strictly speaking) false. There's no 3D, only image interpolation. The project is not limited to photographs. And it has no reified concept of "album". A truthful pitch would sound like "images connected by fluid transitions", pretty boring.

Reminds me a lot of Photosynth

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#58

Post by symptic » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 3:26 PM UTC

"Does your soccer team have problems staying organized? My site fixes that. www.myurl.com."

It's good because anyone who has been on a soccer team knows how shoddy their communication methods typically are and will likely ask some barrier-breaking questions to allow me to explain the site further. Any leads the pitch generates is relevant (no one who doesn't care about soccer will want more information).

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#59

Post by snowbird122 » Sat, Apr 26, 2008, 6:01 PM UTC

We make it easy for customers to provide feedback and ideas to companies, and to make it easy for companies to manage these ideas. http://whisperlabs.com

Re: Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch

#60

Post by wheels » Sun, Apr 27, 2008, 1:29 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #46

jkent wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the pitch but it reads - Backups for Criminals - to me. Isn't it possible to encrypt already and then backup?

Backups for Criminals Is Airbus a company of criminals? They have a perfectly good reason for wanting to keep their data out of the hands of the US government: Every time the US government gets some information about Airbus, Boeing has it the next day. Sadly, industrial espionage is something which many governments are actively involved in; wanting to make sure that your foreign competitors don't have access to your…

Is Airbus a company of criminals?

I think that misses the point though. From a rational perspective, of course, companies don't want the US government grabbing their private data. But from an emotional impact perspective, which seems to be the idea of a pitch, it makes it sound sketchy.

Possibly more emotive, and catering to the (annoying) zeitgeist would be "[...] designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands of hackers and cyber-terrorists [...]"