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Products I Wish Existed

blog.eladgil.com

31–40 of 434 posts

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#31
post #12
post #2

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…

The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (an…

I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed.

So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message.

It worked freakishly good, and saved a whole bunch of time trying to find a file in the mess that everyones Google Drive becomes.

The problem they were having was no enterprise wanted to hand over an entire copy of their data for them to index.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#32
> NoCode/LowCode (letting anyone build an app with a spreadsheet as a database representation)

AirTable has made huge inroads here. I'm also building something in this area (https://lightsheets.app/), turning slightly back towards spreadsheets instead of databases but then building enhancements and modern integrations on top. I think there's still lots of potential in this area, despite spreadsheets being 50 years old.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#33

While only a footnote, I like the nod to nuclear energy. I remember in the 1950s, there was a Popular Mechanics cover touting nuclear as a coming technology to power homes and even cars. Imagine the next Tesla-like company offering to install a small nuclear reactor in houses. Like solar, you can sell electricity back to the grid, charge your electric car with it, literally use it to heat your water.... Also might be…

Yes, absolutely.

Today’s modern reactors are night and day compared to Chernobyl/Fukushima era reactors - they’re not even comparable. They’re fail-safe rather than fail-deadly, and are much more compact and efficient, with better controls and containment. The size of the reaction chamber is basically that of a household washing machine.

I’d gladly live next door to a modern plant.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#34
post #20

Correct me if I'm wrong, but No 5 already exists?! I'm from Europe. I have an app on my phone that shows me the pollution in the city I am. I check on it every time I'm in different places. It's called AirVisual. I installed it from google play, I have android.

I think he means a much more granular pollution map than what's available at the city level. Something like being able to get accurate pollution data at sub-kilometer precision, especially in suburb areas where monitoring stations tend to be sparse.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#35
Infer from the most secret corporate software projects problem commonalities and build a huge company devoted to these is not a realistic product proposal.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#36
post #20

Correct me if I'm wrong, but No 5 already exists?! I'm from Europe. I have an app on my phone that shows me the pollution in the city I am. I check on it every time I'm in different places. It's called AirVisual. I installed it from google play, I have android.

Unsure how many sensors they have in other metros, but here in the Salt Lake Valley, the Purple network does a great job of this.

https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#11.37/40....

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#37
post #8

#4 is a no-go in my book. Things like Ring, Nextdoor, and Facebook already exist. Nextdoor and Facebook are riddled with inanity, from political rants to dumb jokes to hoaxes to common scams to law enforcement rants. I don't want more information from my neighbors -- 99% of it is garbage. I want highly-filtered information. Basically, a neighborhood watch but with an aggressive spam filter. Right now I glance at the…

> Of course, all of this may be a dumb corporate-run idea and maybe people should really focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in meatspace and talk to them in person aka HUMINT. But then how do we filter out the political rants, insanity, dumb jokes, hoaxes, and common scams?

Thankfully, people usually do a decent job of filtering themselves in meatspace. At least, they are better at it in person than they are online.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#38
post #8

#4 is a no-go in my book. Things like Ring, Nextdoor, and Facebook already exist. Nextdoor and Facebook are riddled with inanity, from political rants to dumb jokes to hoaxes to common scams to law enforcement rants. I don't want more information from my neighbors -- 99% of it is garbage. I want highly-filtered information. Basically, a neighborhood watch but with an aggressive spam filter. Right now I glance at the…

Everyone wants good editing and content as product feature. You can pay...

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (an…

I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked fr…

Was there no self-hosted option?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#40
For #2, the fediverse is lively and growing every day.

One of the easiest ways to join is through a mastodon[1] instance. Alternatively, there are other[2] clients available.

I know many of these are similar to existing social networks, and thus might not be different enough to fit the criteria of the article. But the federated aspect of it-- seeing small pocket communities form-- adds something to it.

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://fediverse.party/

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