I like this article, but am I the only one for whom gmail is still seemingly as fast as ever? I don't doubt that it is painfully slow for PG, would be interesting to see the distribution of performance and what impacts it.
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
251–260 of 437 posts
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm basically doing that, actually. Fohr has ridiculous technology, and I'm parting it out (feels like chopping a car) as you describe. I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets cheaper and my own net worth goes up. 18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is on my side.
Pixar did it for 16 years (1979-1995) before they released a movie.
1986-1995 is a bit closer, I think; from 1979-1986 they were in effect an R&D division of Lucasfilm, and it wasn't their job to even think about making films. They were supposed to develop new tech and do special-effects in films, which they did do for quite a few prominent films.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#253Man 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.
What moved from A to B was coal, ore, wheat, manufactures, but mostly by rivers. You can see this on a good map of northeast U.S. -- ask yourself why Pennsylvania is essentially rural in its center, with large cities at both ends, or why New York State is essentially rural 50 miles from the Hudson. Inland water transport was so important that the major capital projects of the early 19th century were canals.
The initial advantage of railroads over barges wasn't reach but speed. By moving goods faster, merchants were able to sell and receive payment faster, no small thing when credit was scarce, uncertain and expensive. I expect the initial rail lines served the same markets as the canals (that's where the business was), then began to extend their reach with spur lines.
There was probably some rail demand creation as the roads extended into the West -- farmland near a railroad was no different than that 20 miles away in anything but railroad proximity. But that was later, after the technology's dynamics were well understood and the players well capitalized.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#254I 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…
There is a fundamental difference between a scientific study and data-mining. Science is based on probability theory. Until we discover the "grand theory of everything", out other theories will be only approximate, and out experimental results not 100% predictable. Therefore, scientists consider a prediction as correct if the chance of predicting something at random is less than some probability, usually 10%, 5% or 1…
It's also fairly easy to, even unwittingly, begin tuning some of your procedures to the data set (i.e. overfitting), even if you're employing the usual precautions, like cross-validation. As an extreme example, if we had one gigantic fixed data set and gave researchers 10 years to work on it, by the end of that 10 years there would be entire techniques at least partially specialized to that specific dataset, with poor generalization outside of it.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#255Earlier 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…
It seems like a lot of people disagree with you, but I agree with this viewpoint. That the Luddite fallacy will be a fallacy forever is a fallacy in itself. I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity n…
I've heard it described as the post-employment era. Scary consequences if you let your imagination run with the possibilities.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.wfs.org/content/postemployment-economy
http://www.impactlab.net/2011/10/11/post-employment-era-huma...
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#256The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access…
We're surely working all the time to make search "more sophisticated"; many special case queries are already smart (from "2+2" to geo, stocks etc., you don't need to go to special sites like calculator, maps and finance). And we surely have plans to go way beyond, but generally, this is Hard Stuff(TM). For things like journal articles, the information is often behind paywalls like ACM, and even when it's not, specialized engins like citeseer are hard to beat because the info has very special organization needs like collecting and measuring citations. On your most advanced requirements, I think only an Asimov's positronic robot would be that smart ;) unless there's a specific effort to curate this data... which requires tons of human labor, so ads served to the very small amount of people who needs this service will not make it viable. It's the same problem we have with patents (see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/opinion-the-...).
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#257Earlier 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…
Eventually, far out into the future, the trends might actually reverse. Fundamentally, robots are made out of expensive stuff, metal, earth minerals. It can be recycled, but it's expensive, and not 100%. Humans, on the other hand, a pretty cheap, we run on carbon, oxygen and water. In the future, it might make sense for robots to do stuff they're best suited for (e.g. very hard, dangerous work in human-unfriendly con…
Who knows what robots will be made of far out in the future, and remember that humans have to be fed for at least a decade before they can do much of anything. Also, earth isn't losing any material as far as I know but I admittedly know very little about physics and chemistry. Can metals degrade into a lower kind of unrecoverable state like energy can?
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem with emails is not the spam or the sorting, it's that they're not actionable. Tasks in a to-do list are almost directly actionable, and that's what most emails aim for.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#259E-mail isn't perfect, however as a transport system is is not meant to solve the problem you described in "Replace e-mail".
If someone wants to have a meeting with me, they might send me an .ics attachment[1] that will work with almost ANY software that I have my computer. Since most meetings are in fact in-person and something that we have been doing as a civilization for some time, the semantics are well defined and easy to model.
A task list will always be harder to model, but not impossible and there is certainly a lot of ideas on the topic. As long as it is an open standard this sounds great, but I wouldn't like to see my tasks locked into either a proprietary format or the cloud[2].
If you are going to replace something that is standards based, it should be with a new standard of some sort. Not code, that's an implementation detail, but standard.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar
2. I'm too old for this shit, and not everyone lives in the cloud.
Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity. Tell that to the Dodo, the Quagga, the Javan Tiger and the Thylacine. And many others besides.
Weak and winning is "underdog", weak and losing is "loser".
By that definition, every loser that hasn't yet lost is a winner. There is no way to tell the difference except hindsight. I bet the dinosaurs told themselves that they were totally different than all those other weak-ass species that had joined the annals of history 76 Myr ago...