A really good quality standard CSS layout. I don't mean the stylesheets - no, those come later - no, I mean a really good, one size genuinely does fit all, semantic HTML layout. Does blogs, does galleries, does comments, does discussions, in a single well thought out semantic HTML format. Then you have a library of CSS templates that people can use. And people can upload new templates. And each template gets checked,…
Startup idea list
91–100 of 174 posts
Re: Startup idea list
#92A social music site / including music client and music store for classical music. Both last.fm and iTunes suck for classical music, which has a completely different set of concepts from pop music. Composers, conductors, orchestras, choirs, movements, etc. It's a smaller market, and the people are less technically inclined, but they're richer and less likely to pirate music.
Oh, why a social music site? Because discovering new (to you) music is a harder problem than playing, organizing or buying music.
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#93A 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.
By the way, why I think this would work is that many people care about clothes, people love organising/collecting/classifying, and extremely targeted ads would be almost trivial.
Re: Startup idea list
#94I'm writing a practice app, which was my second idea but I think I have a better chance of getting a version 1 done quickly. (Not planning on applying to YC this round. I may be ready by next summer though) Basically, it's something about MMORPGs that's never been done quite right. I'm sick of trying to explain how it should work, and want to show people instead.
Well, I'm curious. Want to try explaining anyway? :)
'Tradeskill' engines don't really reward creativity. With some minor exceptions here and there, they all follow the model of:
(combine X Y Z) -> ItemXYZ, where X, Y, and Z are constants and ItemXYZ is an element in a (relatively small) finite set of predetermined items.
Instead of adventuring to obtain ItemXYZ, you adventure to obtain X, Y, and Z component pieces that you combine to get ItemXYZ, assuming you have enough skill. It feels sort of silly that way. The actual artisan, the guy who combines X, Y, and Z to get ItemXYZ, is not really creative. All he's doing is following a predetermined recipe and applying the skill he got by doing hundreds of mindless combines.
Blizzard's answer to this problem was to shift the focus from item creation to collecting ingredients. They made sure it was fun to gather X, Y, and Z, without just making X, Y, and Z exclusively monster loot. Compared to some other games, WoW's engine was also simpler. Blizzard's solution worked, but only because they sidestepped the core problem.
Tradeskilling appeals to people because it's a creative activity. Players want to be able to feel pride in the stuff they can make. The result is disappointing. Imagination picks up the slack, the novelty wears off after a few hundred clicks, and unless you're addicted to gaining the next level; you aren't going to bother. The way it works now, it winds up only really appealing to people who enjoy organizing things.
From what I've read, Second Life is the opposite. Gamers don't like Second Life, because there's no consistent, professionally-crafted fantasy world to give meaning to anything. It's completely open-ended, allowing for lots of creativity, but what's the point? Obviously plenty of people find a point to SL, I'm just saying this what the typical WoW or EQ or FFXI or DAoC player thinks when they see second life.
I've only heard of two other games with interesting tradeskill engines. I wasn't able to play either of them, so I don't know how similar they are to what I'm going for. One was Horizons, which tanked almost immediately; the other was Star Wars Galaxies, which suffered from being inappropriate for the mainstream Star Wars audience. I say 'suffered' because even though the game was actually doing quite well, it never came near its potential given the franchise name. But whatever the reason, the game was overhauled and the original SWG is no longer available.
Re: Startup idea list
#95Macro 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.…
For big picture news I find nothing beats The Economist. No more kidnapped babies or small plane crashes! I've stopped reading (online) newspapers, and I don't miss them at all. For subscribing to different issues - interesting! I'd like that too. In theory, you could subscribe to the RSS of the history page of wikinews/wikipedia. You'd get all the updates, but I'm not sure how useful or reader-friendly that is in pr…
One of the best thing about the Economist is that they create podcasts for certain articles you can put on your mp3 player. Works great for downtime you never have.
Re: Startup idea list
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I read somewhere that in China doctors's salaries are, or used to be, linked to the healthy days per year of their 'customers'.
Measuring performance doesn't work, Joel says: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/oldnews/pages/July2002.html
I think it's both Joe Krause and Max Levin that both quote the HP founder that, "You make what you measure"
The problem is that sometimes it's not obvious what you measure, since what you might be interested is something vague like "effectiveness" or "progress". And, like all pattern classification problems, if you pick features that don't give a good signal to noise ratio, your assessment could be way off.
Even worse when that being measured knows what's being measured. A feedback loop, if you will. And thus, the fact that you observed something changes it, which sways the results from if you didn't measure it. Sounds a little bit like photons in physics, but I'm guessing photons work off of different principles.
Joel is merely saying that you should be careful of what you measure, because some metrics (lines of code, hours work) aren't indicative of what you're really trying to figure out (progress, effectiveness).
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#97I would love to see someone creating a RPL programming language, like HP calculators.
I love that language.
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#98Location based creations/addons to social and dating sites.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137254-c,webservices/artic...
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#99A temporary phone forwarding service where you can give a number out freely but say "It will only work for seven days." Same idea as the onetime email address but for phones.
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#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called OSX. What could be better than a powerful unix machine with a beautiful and intuitive GUI? And also "just works" out of the box.
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.
My grandfather can't understand how his DVD player has more than one disc. He just doesn't have any the technical ability nor does he really care about anything but how to get email. I've tried multiple operating systems and instructed him on computer use. He's just from another generation (he's really old), even though he has an engineering degree from Notre Dame.
It would be nice if there was some OS that would boot up and nicely display like 4 or 5 choices to do; flickr, email, internet, news aggregation, and storage. Have the system handle everything else and they could actually enjoy it.