Startup idea list • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup idea list

#31

Post by rms » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:43 AM UTC

mpc wrote: post #21

rms wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sit your grandfather (or person of similar age) in front of OSX by himself after only an hour of instructions and see what happens. It's intuitive to those of us who grew up with computing. To everyone else, it isn't.

There is a learning curve no matter what. Otherwise you have a tutorial and not an OS.

By focusing on simple yet powerful tasks, like photos, news, and email and making the entire GUI these tasks in blindingly large fonts, you can make the experience obvious to uninitiated users.

Re: Startup idea list

#32

Post by cellis » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:43 AM UTC

mdemare wrote: post #28

Location based gaming: playing games while moving around in your town with an iphone-like device (and having your location matter in-game.) You could port any kind of game to this concept: counterstrike, racing, even monopoly. Or pac-man, chasing your friends around the block. Or Sokoban, pushing giant boulders through Fifth Avenue. I had this idea six years ago. I'm appalled that it still hasn't happened. Of course,…

very intensive operations, not sure if you could get enough subscribers to justify the costs?

Re: Startup idea list

#33

Post by mdemare » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:48 AM UTC

A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.

Re: Startup idea list

#34

Post by nfriedly » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:49 AM UTC

nextmoveone wrote: post #26

id like to see an extension to expensr.com's app, to text message my expenses in!

check out http://buxfer.com I think they let you text in expenses.

Re: Startup idea list

#35

Post by falsestprophet » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:49 AM UTC

rms wrote: post #30

randallsquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked out pretty well for my father, who's 80. It probably ruins the experiment that he had been using (well, failing to use) Windows for years previously, however.

How does he do with the mouse? From my experience, people over a certain age just never quite get the mouse. Touch screens are the ideal solution, touch pads would be fine except the ones on laptops are too small, and trackballs are a whole lot better than mice because they let you seperate the action of clicking and moving... too often I see older computer users accidentally moving the pointer when they want to clic…

I agree. I built my grandparents a computer from scraps and it ran swimmingly, but they never could manage the mouse and the home country just doesn't look the same on a cathode ray tube. They were politely disinterested.

Re: Startup idea list

#36

Post by nextmoveone » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:54 AM UTC

nfriedly wrote: post #34

nextmoveone wrote: post #26

id like to see an extension to expensr.com's app, to text message my expenses in!

check out http://buxfer.com I think they let you text in expenses.

thanks...thinking about signing up for it.

Re: Startup idea list

#37

Post by rms » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:55 AM UTC

mdemare wrote: post #33

A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.

I think there is a YC funded company doing this already, I'm sure someone here will remember the name.

My fashion idea involves you being presented with a bunch of different outfits and picking which ones you like to train a recommendation engine. Then, the site recommends complete in-season outfits (with affiliate links)

Re: Startup idea list

#38

Post by ericb » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:57 AM UTC

mdemare wrote: post #33

A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.

I'm working on this now... Feel free to take a look.

http:/www.ziptuck.com

Re: Startup idea list

#39

Post by alaskamiller » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 2:59 AM UTC

rms wrote: post #37

mdemare wrote: post #33

A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.

I think there is a YC funded company doing this already, I'm sure someone here will remember the name. My fashion idea involves you being presented with a bunch of different outfits and picking which ones you like to train a recommendation engine. Then, the site recommends complete in-season outfits (with affiliate links)

shoutfit

Re: Startup idea list

#40

Post by adsyoung » Tue, Sep 18, 2007, 3:02 AM UTC

Macro news. I get the news in my RSS feeds and its damn near useless.

These events tell me almost nothing about the world. The signal to noise ratio is not good. I don't want to know that another 6 people in iraq have been killed in some incident, I want to know whether the situation there is getting better or worse, is it happening in a new area than before, does it involve a new group of people...big picture stuff.

This is the kind of info you typically get from reading feature length editorials but I don't have the time.

I want big picture news and global trends, complete with graphs and visualisations to give me perspective on an issue, delivered to me in an RSS feed.

Also I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to different issues that I wish to follow from start to end.

Already exist?