We don't need to replace email. Just add an NLP engine and the ability for 3rd party apps on it.
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
211–220 of 437 posts
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#212Man 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…
Before the rail roads, people didn't do all that much travelling from A to B, unless they were very wealthy or had some external pressure like the need to find work or religious persecution, they mostly stayed at A. Which makes the invention of rail roads even more impressive in my eyes, it created demand rather than addressing it.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#213In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious" startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness, they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.) > Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire…
Sand Hill Road is just one source of money and money is the most fungible representation of wealth, so if they won't help you, go to somebody for whom 32 million is chump change or who are used to pay way more for a movie. Hollywood way be more receptive to your ideas (making a block buster isn't cheap and there is always a risk, so they should be used to taking them).
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…
An idea I've been musing on: is there a fundamental set of problems of humanity from which all economic activity is derived? For example: "Shrink the world": couriers, seafarers, caravans, riders, roadbuilders, railroads, telegraphs, automobiles, steamships, dockworkers, truck drivers, aviation, telephones, email, social networking, videoconferencing. "Organize labor": lords, finance, education, recruiting, HR, manag…
The "sex & war" category seems to be a great catalyst for innovation. These days, "sex" of course means "Internet porn".
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts. Yes, and newer protocols often carry emulation layers for older protocols, so we have things like POTS running on top of TCP/IP, when just several years ago most of us still had TCP/IP running on top of POTS via dialup modems. The other day I needed my insurance company to send a fax to my bank (banking regulations mandate th…
Some would argue Email is little more than USPS over IP. I think the most interesting aspect of modern communications - accidentally in the 90s, deliberately in the post-twitter-era - is the simple addressability of people. There was a tradition of letter writing for centuries (visit the British Library), but it required some level of introduction to connect. The academic roots of email broke some communication bound…
Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide.
Being able to self-create a platform of value that you can offer to people you wish to network with is crucial (I created a magazine to accomplish this objective).
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#216I 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…
Interestingly I have a friend (a hematologist) that says that they actually try not to overscan for fear of finding something. There are plenty of cases where a scan reveals something that may not manifest itself into a noticeable issue in the lifetime of the patient but they then need to treat. Unfortunately often the treatments themselves are invasive (sometimes far more so that the issue itself might have been).
I guess that problem will diminish as advancements in medical diagnosis and treatment progress.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#217There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of d…
Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? OK, so you really just want to target hackers first and then move into the consumer space once you have some traction. But consumers are starting to move away from laptops and toward things like smartphones and tablets. Apple is moving in…
> Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system?
I don't know if it's a large number yet, but it's growing and you can see the cracks sprouting. Most of the hardware outside of Apple's really sucks, and Apple's software ecosystem and the way they run things turns a lot of people off. If there was something viable to switch to, I think it could get some traction quickly,
> Better to figure out what is going to come after smartphones and tablets, and get there before Apple does. I don't see any particular reason to retrace Apple's steps and start by building a laptop.
This is intriguing. A Post PC device that hackers can use to create software. Definitely something that hasn't been fully explored.
There are a few challenges, however. Hackers need significant hardware to get anything done. Also, most of our tools that have stood the test of time (Emacs, Vi, C, etc) require traditional keyboards as input.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, but "cleaning" is yet another word for artificial intelligence. I think you underestimate the power of economics. Can you imagine how many people are busy cleaning things? I find it amazing that the difference between tasks like washing cloths and cleaning toilets is so small for humans and so huge for machines. We've had washing machines forever, but we're still cleaning our toilets manually. And cleaning is jus…
Please. Stop. Bringing that old saw back while claiming that 'this time it is for real'. Humans can do wonderful things when the alternative is to starve or lose their habitat. It is not different this time, it will not be different the next time, nor any time after that. Won't happen until we have a perfect AI which can do all jobs. Then, and only then, will humanity take a permanent vacation.
I'm not talking permanent. What is different this time is this:
a) The transition will happen more quickly because the kind of intelligence you need to clean a room is very broadly applicable. It affects almost all manual tasks at the same time.
b) Contrary to earlier transitions, there will not be many tasks left that untrained people can perform and that are similar enough to the old ones. A farmer can go work in a factory. Most cleaners will not become artists and entertainers within their lifetime.
I don't think humanity will ever take a permanent vacation. There will always be something that humans want from other humans and there will always be something to exchange as payment.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some would argue Email is little more than USPS over IP. I think the most interesting aspect of modern communications - accidentally in the 90s, deliberately in the post-twitter-era - is the simple addressability of people. There was a tradition of letter writing for centuries (visit the British Library), but it required some level of introduction to connect. The academic roots of email broke some communication bound…
Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide. Being able to self-create a platform of value that you can offer to people you wish to network with is crucial (I created a magazine to accomplish this objective).
> Yes, but this addressability of people also means that the sender must have some value to provide.
If only that were the whole of it. The sender must have some value to provide in the eyes of the recipient. But the recipient will actually have to look at the message in order to determine if this is the case or not. That decision alone makes many messages that were sent with value '0' a net negative to the recipient.
Hence all the spam. If the 'providing of value' would be a thing we could determine in advance then the low barrier would not be an issue.
Effectively a spam filter determines that the value of a message is '0' to the intended recipient to avoid them becoming negatives.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#220We're a YC company (www.post.fm) working on one of those ideas - email. We've encountered lots of headwinds as PG mentions, and we've managed to stay strong to our beliefs by keeping the team small and focused, and using our product ourselves to constantly remind us that what we're working on is better than Gmail. It's not been easy admittedly, we didn't come up with some small idea that could grow into an email repl…
You talk so abstractly. Can you give some concrete examples of how you would be better than gmail? In what ways will your service be faster than gmail? How much time will I save?
Unfortunately there's isn't much I can say until we launch, but here goes: we've created a social network where email is the mode of communication, and everything is organized around people and organizations.
There isn't a single inbox as such, there are people, and groups of people, with correspondence between them. Like in Facebook or a CRM system.
What Gmail query do you have to do to see the correspondence between you and PG, assuming PG has 3 different email addresses? How do you find that email from some company you don't remember the name of?
These are just some examples of things that are truly intuitive on our system. I don't mean to sound snobbish, but it's a bit like trying to explain the first iphone - its like a PDA without a stylus. But we all know the iphone is ultimately so much more. So you really have to try it for yourself.
I understand that claiming to be better than Gmail leads to lots of scepticism, and I have a huge amount of it myself every time I see a new email app. Luckily, noone has quite done what we're doing just yet, but its only a matter of time.
All I can promise is - its better for me and all my friends that have tried it. But that doesn't mean it will be better for you, or for some insanely heavy email user like PG, but I sure hope so.
Oh and in terms of speed, yeah its faster. In fact we've just had to rewrite everything from scratch to make it blazing, moving almost all the logic to javascript and caching everything client-side. And did I mention its awesomely beautiful compared to Gmail? :) But really thats the low hanging fruit - Gmail looks awful, more so every year it seems. Sure some people don't care about that, but I'm a horrible perfectionist which is why we're probably the oldest startup still in stealth.