Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#171

Post by angryasian » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:46 AM UTC

rquantz wrote: post #81

Donald wrote: post #27

"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. ... And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to." If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted with Google circa a few years ago: http://imgur.com/LDBLk .

Will it stop replacing my technical terms with non technical synonyms, and randomly leaving out my search terms? Cause whatever they've done to the UI, it pales is comparison to those two things.

maybe its because of my search history, but I find google gives the best technical results.. and actually its when I do a search for something that has non technical meaning the technical results come to the top.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#172

Post by bambax » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:48 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #83

diego wrote: post #22

"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

Number of business email users? Tens of millions certainly. "Would I pay for this?" is a great question for founders to ask, because it combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas: solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that the…

Would it be possible for you to elaborate on what your email needs are and how they're not met?

Would your problems be solved by hiring a personal assistant (a real person)? Then the solution is AI and it's hard.

Or do you believe it's impossible for anyone but you to sort through your mail?

If that's the case, what we need is to make sorting email "fun" (more enjoyable than TV).

We may be looking for the Angry Birds of email.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#173

Post by ericd » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:50 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #164

ericd wrote: post #161

I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the same time, perhaps you could automatically…

Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) proposed this a few years ago as a way to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Being able to "tivo rewind real life" would be pretty amazing -- watch a bunch of things passively, record data, notice a spike in mortality, then find the common factors and stop the new plague (or the kids who found a Cobalt-60 source, or the pump infected with Cholera).

I think it would bring about enough breakthroughs for a lot more than one Nobel :-) But yeah, I'm definitely not the first one to fantasize about being able to correlate behaviors or even just basic bio signs across a big chunk of the population with the medical results.

I even think it'd be feasible to pull it together as a company, since there are lots of immediate potential benefits to using the things that would collect this data. A much better replacement for Life Alert, which works even if you're unconscious and can't press the button. Dieting aids, sleep aids, exercise aids, passive diabetes monitoring. It's a lot to bite off, especially as a startup, but I think a team that knew how to execute on this kind of product could roll out products serially and pull together that dataset. That dataset would enhance each other product in the way that each of Google's views on the internet (DNS traffic, browser feedback, analytics) help its core product. A hell of a defensible advantage. Not sure how one could convince that company to give up its crown jewels for the sake of medical research, though :-)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#174

Post by angryasian » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:50 AM UTC

harryh wrote: post #11

rmassie wrote: post #9

The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business communication. My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I g…

> for many people it's just a receipt box There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable cat…

there were sites like this , swipely and blippy.. both failed as I don't think people in general are ok with giving out their purchases information... I'm really against giving permission to anyone for my email.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#175

Post by angryasian » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:52 AM UTC

lunarscape wrote: post #46

"2. Replace Email" Google tried this with Wave and they failed. I wish they had succeeded. I think they should have spun it was "Email 2.0" and made the transition easier.

I actually loved wave, I think they would of succeeded had it been tied in to your email account. I had to remind people to send me messages @wave.google.com or whatever it is. If all my gmail messages automatically went to wave and vice versa, I think it would of succeeded.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#176

Post by dsrguru » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:55 AM UTC

rblion wrote: post #85

jballanc wrote: post #76

Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Eng…

Yes. The conscious revolution is just beginning, our species is very young, and the stars are still far away.

Yeah but until we invest as much time, money, and effort into defense against weapons and customized microorganisms as we do into their creation, we're running the risk of this young species (and maybe a lot of the other ones) disappearing very, very soon.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#177

Post by wolframarnold » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:56 AM UTC

This all assumes conditions as usual. Which I think is a painfully mistaken notion. In an era of depleting fossil fuels, inferior ore quality of iron, copper and all the rare earth metals required to make modern electronics, water shortages and overpopulation, I doubt people will be worried about email overload in even 20 years. What's missing from this list are the real big issues of our time, such as quitting our reliance on fossil fuels, building a sustainable economy for the planet's resources, and creating a currency not solely based on debt expansion. In an economy with less energy surplus our problems will be more primitive than worrying about heart disease or faster computation or better search. Solving the shrinking energy surplus..., now that would be a really scary big startup of planet-wide implication.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#178

Post by dsrguru » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 9:59 AM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #157

tobiasSoftware wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it more as a way to shortcut sites. For example, if I want to Wikipedia "pi" instead of typing www.wikipedia.org, in the address bar, then typing in "pi" in the site's search bar, I enter it in Google and find the link. Firefox's awesome bar is gradually taking over as I can favorite things and "search" for them using that just by typing in a couple letters, but I still use Google for anything I haven't favorit…

I like Firefox's Keyword Search bookmarks. The Awesome Bar becomes a "web command line". Some example search bookmarks I've configured: * "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles * "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions * "am pi" to search Amazon products * "map pie" to search Google Maps locations * "g pi" to search Google and many others. :)

I'm honestly surprised not every hacker does this. The vast majority of popular browsers supports keyword searching either out of the box or via a plugin.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#179

Post by brianmac » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 10:02 AM UTC

In regards to email, google wave took a stab at attempting to change the dynamic of communications but that project has now been shelved.

The difficulty in a new "email" replacement is overcoming the hurdles of engrained habits - see http://zenhabits.net/ for more on that psychology or even www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com (people see the inbox as a to do, that they grind through in mechanical fashion).

Think to tackle the problem of email is to put a new UI layer that wraps messaging into context while piggybacking off the traditional email protocol. For example, with my own work email we tag are subjects with TASK, FYI, MEETING, FOLLOWUP, FEEDBACK, etc. indicating what action we need done, helps with searching and labels now in gmail, however take that "context" element and combine with say www.trello.com UI concept of boards/cards in a visual dashboard type of style would be stellar.

I just imagine something like this on an ipad i am just swipping/slidding through my different buckets of communication (sort of like flipboard). KILL THE INBOX :)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#180

Post by yurylifshits » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 10:31 AM UTC

Let's add one more

    8. Replace prisons

Prisons do not make criminals back into normal people. Prisons are expensive. Prisons are a big market. Prisons stay the same for the last few centuries. What is a better way to punish and a better way to bring criminals back to civil life?