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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#271

Post by megablast »

tintin wrote: post #162
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…

I think you are right. I don't agree with PG when he is talking about Apple. "None of them are run by product visionaries" is simply not true. Steve Jobs had great respect for companies like Sony because there are product visionary companies. Sony, IBM, Philips, and a lot of others, all companies that gave us great products we now are using every day. But it took years to get there. E-ink for example was created in 1…

Sorry, Sony was a great engineering company, worthy of being respected, until they sold out and became a content creation company. Look at how the hobbled the mini-disc years ago. Sony deserves absolutely no respect these days.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#272

Post by jeffool »

sawyer wrote: post #15

If Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook, I'm not sure that the frightening startup idea here is to replace Google. Don't get me wrong, I've also started to see some cracks in the G edifice; and Facebook has definitely begun to set their agenda, but doesn't that mean search in general is already waning and that the next big thing will be whatever replaces Facebook? Great essay though, lots to think about. I really…

Even barring the inability to create life-like characters without serious investment, there are other problems, like animating them. But I'm reminded of the early days of the Ill Clan and machinima.

You would think a small team could have san animator to produce the needed animations, a few operators to control movement (and maybe voice), and a director. But I really haven't seen much movement in that direction since visual effects and YouTube became so accessible. But that's shop heavily comedy it's... Well, maybe not annoying, but unfortunate.

Anyway, my point was that I can still easily see a future where people download actors and write, choreograph, then compile, feature films in their bedrooms. And for a few programmers, I think it's a perfectly achievable goal.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#273

Post by securitytheater »

cpeterso wrote: post #89
erichocean wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

btw, Fohr looks really cool. However, the pull quote at angel.co/fohr is a little unfortunate: “Our dream of building a Pixar for films that are photographed is just weeks away from being realized.” (Posted 4 months ago)

A good laugh.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#274

Post by paulhauggis »

marvin wrote: post #226
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #155

Earlier 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…

"We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives"

Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you need to work for them until you find a regular job. Otherwise, you get nothing).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#275

Post by nl »

tomwalsham wrote: post #149
nl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's here, but not how you think: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Do you know any hacker who knows about Raspberry Pi and isn't planning on buying one? Radically undercutting existing platforms in price, but with comparable functionality enables totally new uses for general purpose computing devices. That's how to take on the Mac/PC business - not by hitting it head on.

rπ is a great project, but it's hardly out of left field. There have been plugins for years, at seriously affordable prices. You can buy a netbook for $100 these days and run Windows/Linux on it happily. rπ is interesting because of its positioning as a learning platform equivalent to the BBC Micro which nurtured David Braben and many of the other backers. Not because it holds some magical quality over Gumstix, Beagl…

I think that purpose designed hardware at the $25 price point is a radically different proposition than a second hand netbook for 4 times the price (because you sure can't get a new Intel netbook for that price).

It does hold a magical property over all the platforms you've mentioned: price. At $25 it's close to disposable, whereas I'm going to look after a $90 BeagleBoard.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#276

Post by kamaal »

staunch wrote: post #125
run4yourlives wrote: post #104

Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind - building search engines and to-do lists? Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).

Facebook and Google have improved the daily lives of billions of people. Tesla Motors' electric car? Very impressive and a lot of promise, but so far all it's done is increase the self-satisfaction of ~1000 people. Look at Star Trek. Other than the spaceship itself the most impressive things are the technology the people use. The Siri-like computer interface, iPad-like computers, Skype-like communications technology,…

Facebook and Google have improved the daily lives of billions of people. Tesla Motors' electric car? Very impressive and a lot of promise, but so far all it's done is increase the self-satisfaction of ~1000 people.

The same could be told about computer in the 1950's, I am talking about the famous misquote : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquot...

there was a world market for maybe five computers

If fossil fuels aren't going drive cars in the future its going to be something else. Fuel cells or Electricity.

If IBM had thought or if any body else would have thought how difficult it was to create computing power to derive any meaningful value. We wouldn't be having computers today.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#277

Post by nl »

telent wrote: post #240
TheCowboy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're expensive because they're inefficient. To accomplish them efficiently is ambitious and elegant without a doubt. A startup that can chip away at what makes these things so inefficient is going in the right direction. Looking for inefficiencies, such as with present day email, is a good way to find a direction. Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity. Economies, and all economic act…

This is a nit pick, but much economic activity these days is nothing to do with alleviating scarcity and everything to do with introducing artificial scarcity where it didn't previously exist. See e.g. Intellectual property.

Economics != economic activity (at least in the context you are using it).

TheCowboy is right: Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#278

Post by jdietrich »

lars wrote: post #191
samstave wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The breakthrough in your comm analogy will come with the translation of thought to word. We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation, then send that to the recipient. This will be wired-telepathy - the recipient will get a message which they can receive any way they choose; visually (email - they read it) audio playback, or thought-injection.…

> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically imp…

I can key morse code at 40wpm with two muscles. With one hand I can chord at 120wpm. On a stenowriter I can transcribe about as quickly as most people can read - 250wpm.

I've invested an extraordinary amount of effort into improving the speed at which I can interface with a computer; I think the practical limit is about 300 baud, half-duplex.

Of course, we're trying to establish an interface with a bafflingly complex lump of grey meat, but are we really daunted by the idea of outpacing a V.21 modem?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#279

Post by lutorm »

tomp wrote: post #241
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…

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…

No, if 10 predictions each have a 10% chance of a false positive, you will always have on average 1 false positive. Whether you test them on the same data or not doesn't matter (unless 10 predictions test the same thing, of course.)

What you need is a control sample that you know should be negative, so you can actually measure the false positive rate. (But with a sufficiently large base sample, you can look for correlations in small subsamples and use the whole sample as a control.)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#280

Post by ahoyhere »

kamaal wrote: post #267
ahoyhere wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this? "In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF That's 54 jumbo jets a day. I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.

I thought about this too! Disease are a serious case. But its shameful that at this stage in the evolution of human kind we have people dieing of hunger and malnutrition.

It's not a disease which causes children to die of diarrhea, it's inadequate sanitation. That's right: exposure to human waste.
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