Is anyone working on something that is not a website?

There are two startup-ish things I do that are not websites, but are largely disseminated via the web:

a) my main job is represented at gmatdaily.wordpress.com. I sell study materials for the GMAT ...I worked in the industry for a few years, discovered a multitude of problems, and am slowly solving them all.

b) i collect, package, analyze, and sell college baseball statistics to major league teams ... my partner and I had a website for this (collegesplits.com) where we gave away a lot of the data for free, but eventually took it down because the maintenance wasn't worth it. My web presence in the field made it easy to line up customers, and I suppose I could set up a members-only site to deliver the data (and thus the business would be a website), but that's not what the clients want.

Now, perhaps one of these days I'll work on something that IS a website :).

So we have all of the pain of developing a web-based application (browser incompatibilities, limitations of the medium, etc.) with all of the negatives of installed applications (high barrier to adoption, lower volume, etc.). But it does give us a business model that everyone can easily understand: Give us money, we give you software, you install it, we support you. Next year, you give us money again and we keep supporting you.

Web applications are the most fun to build, but there's an awful lot of room for technology in non-web spaces. Large retailers a huge users of technology (and their websites are generally not even a blip on the radar, as far as technology expenditures go--I was involved briefly in a $2.7 million content distribution deployment for Lowe's...I'm certain they haven't spent more than a tenth that much on their website).

Lots of areas for high tech to make a huge impact on peoples lives (and thus make a huge impact on your bottom line): Medical records and billing, legal services, banking, accounting, warehouse automation, etc. There are businesses working in all of these spaces already, of course, but there's still plenty of niches left unfilled.

1. Mobile search. No website. If we did it would be a one static page site.

2. Image recognition. Also no interaction with a website. As far as goods, I would stay away from it. Logistics r pain in the butt.

I can only ask what kind of software have you developed, sir?

If web software was harder, you wouldn't see "products" created over a weekend shaping up into companies a week later. And don't get me started on "millions of users on dozen boxes".

The primitiveness of web application development is mainly the reason why so many "ex-taxi drivers" and are rolling out web apps daily.

Two huge reasons why web app development is so trivial are: - You control your hardware. This is really important. - You do not need to develop UI. Web Pages are joke compared to the "real thing".

For starters, try to develop an super-simple desktop application that uploads an arbitrary file to a given FTP address, let 100,000 users (let alone millions) download it to discover: - It won't start - It won't connect - It crashes their computer. - "Where did it go?" question after downloading.

You'll be amazed. You will realize that PCs of most people are just like jungle, populated with adware, multiple software firewalls running simultaneously, paranoid anti-virus packages, missing DLLs and weird security settings. Moreover, users will be brutal: they'll be turning power off in the middle of your disk writes, they will upgrade libraries you linked to without asking you first, they will install your executable on desktop and will be killing files you create, the list goes on.

Over 80% of developing desktop software consists of two things: - Fighting unexpected problems in a hostile environment of user's PC - Dealing with real, LIVE UI that is reflecting real-time changing objects, and is pleasant to use.

On top of that you're trying to do this using minimal amount of libraries, because you can't expect people to download 100MB installer.