291–300 of 401 posts
#3 New News: There has been a tendency to focus on mass audience news. This inevitably leads to incremental improvements on news delivery. Think about the news that matters most to someone running a household--it's inherently local. But newspapers can't scale to deliver this kind of news and aggregators can only aggregate what others can deliver. The real source of local news comes from the people who live there disc…
I'm a bit surprised. Some of the ideas - ok, two of the ideas, dating and "the next craigslist" - don't seem that far off from the proverbial pie-in-the-sky "Facebook killer": the hard part is getting the critical mass, and everyone wants to make one. [edit] #9 and 10, photo/video sharing and auctions, are arguably in this category as well. I also still don't get WebOS. There must be something to it, because a lot of…
If you can become the platform everybody is building their webapp on, you are going to be the new Microsoft.
How about fixing the domain fuckfest we have today? Most of these ideas will end up with stupid names like lulzdatr.com or bizzwarezz.com
2. Simplified browsing. I got nothing on this, since I'm not in the target market. Btw, my pet theory is that smart people will have the best luck inventing commercially successful solutions, if they focus on jobs and activities that hardly any smart people do. Like, bagging groceries, and data entry. I've done both of those, and I had plenty of germinal ideas on how they could be improved or automated. The corollary…
How does this suit you: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=251821
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also http://www.blist.com , similar to dabbledb and pretty cool.
These tools are great and I love DabbleDB. But I think the powerful version of these same concepts is a 'Data Repository and Reporting' service. A service that lets you suck in data from many sources (csv, Web Feeds, Database Queries, Emailed Reports, SMS, mailing lists, etc). It would not be scared to hold all this data for me and keep it secure (and would charge me for usage so that people with lots of data pay the…
Search engine that concentrates on design? What that supposed to mean?
I don't know. I was just saying that if you want to beat Google, that's their weak spot. Or at least a big one. Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.
A good design means I get to the best possible search results with as little extra cruft as possible. Results are key. Google's design gives me just that -- no clutter, no confusion, no extraneous elements.
This is going to have to be a multipart comment, I wrote so much: 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. My idea for this is included in a more robust solution for #17. 17. New payment methods. Here's the $100 billion dollar idea (if it could be pulled together). Make a new credit card (or work with an existing company). Consumers would sign agreements to exclusively use that card (more financial i…
Assuming that "less than listed retail" is a bargain is false. There are lots of things where a huge fraction of the customers already pay less than retail. There are even some where the vast majority do. (Hotels may be one of them - I've never paid anywhere near the rates posted in the rooms.) "Listed retail price" is a fiction - it is manipulated to maximize revenue and need not have anything to do with typical pri…
By "less than listed retail" I mean a price less than whatever they would have otherwise paid at checkout (after coupons, package deals, whatever). I was thinking of "the price listed at the store counter", but "listed retail" is not the best phrase for that. My apologies for the confusion.
I'm well aware that the "listed price" isn't always the typical price paid. That's how I came up with this idea, by observing how much effort sellers put into trying to capitalize on the full range of potential buyers. There's still a lot of untapped potential there, like in purchasing music.
"The fact that someone has high income does not imply that they're willing to spend a lot of money for any specific product/service."
Yes, you are entirely correct. I screwed that up, I did not mean to imply that richer people are inherently willing to pay more. I was only focused on the concern over fraud (of someone getting a cheap buyer to buy something for them- a cheap buyer is not necessarily a poorer person).
What I was trying to get at is that if someone is spending more (especially a lot more), but not earning more, that is possible evidence of fraud. And the "heightened income" was meant to refer to the fact that they might be getting paid to buy stuff for others. Or, it could mean they really did have a lot more money, and weren't behaving in a frugal manner, which is probably tied with a lack of caring about price.
"Spending money on back debt or saving something" would not be a purchase, so it would probably not be relevant to what I'm talking about.
"Rich people aren't going to pay more. If you're building a system that requires that they do, it's dead." It doesn't "require" rich people to do anything. They don't have to sign up for the service. And they would not necessarily pay more for things, if they did- if the AI determined they probably aren't willing to spend much on something, even if they are a multimillionaire it would give them a discount.
"FWIW - I've never seen a decent plan from someone who disliked the domain in which he was working. Such people always think that their policy preferences trump facts."
First off, this is not a government policy I'm proposing, as you seem to imply. Nowhere do I mention the government being involved- this is a private solution, between credit card companies, retailers, and customers. I suspect your other errors may be related to this error.
You may have been confused when I refer at the end to "There is a governmental solution, also, which I will go into later."- the post you replied to is the potential private solution, the other post is the potential governmental solution. I originally wrote all my posts as one single post, and when I had to break it up to fit Y Combinator's text limit, that part got left in an odd place. I can see how it would be confusing, if you did not read carefully enough to see the complete absence of a reference to the government in the rest of the post. I'll take responsibility for that.
By the way, I don't "dislike the domain in which I'm working". Nor have I ever disliked any work I've done in a related field.
But, thanks for everything else. I appreciate you alerting me to those things I did not communicate very clearly. Other than my notes, I've never written these ideas up for a lay audience, and some things haven't translated well from my head to the page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. I was just saying that if you want to beat Google, that's their weak spot. Or at least a big one. Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.
As much as it pains me to say this, I think Google's lack of design sense might be their strong point in search. There's no extra crap to get in the way of search results. (Although I should say that in their other non-search products, it is most certainly a weakness.) There are of course new ways to view results, but with arguable advantage. A new startup I found recently, Viewzi ( http://www.viewzi.com/ ) does a pr…
I wonder, what % of their overall hits are the homepage? It must be low, considering almost every hit there lands on a results page, but there are lots of other ways to get to a results page (Firefox, the input box at the top of a results page, etc.)
This is going to have to be a multipart comment, I wrote so much: 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. My idea for this is included in a more robust solution for #17. 17. New payment methods. Here's the $100 billion dollar idea (if it could be pulled together). Make a new credit card (or work with an existing company). Consumers would sign agreements to exclusively use that card (more financial i…
"If the music companies could make security that actually WORKED" Except they can't, and they won't, and in the end, no one can. As some security expert once said.. "Trying to make something digital non-copyable is like trying to make water that isn't wet." No matter what they come up with, history has shown it'll be cracked in no time and become worthless.