A few more areas (lots of overlap): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
I'm also reminded of Gartner's Hype curve:
http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/hype-cyc...
New Requests for Startups
101–110 of 407 posts
Re: New Requests for Startups
#102> what comes after programming languages Isn't this like asking what comes after spoken language? Arguably the answer is nothing because language is what structured thought is.
Not really. IMHO programming languages should become more and more expressive to the point of being as closed as possible to spoken language, in a distant future.
Re: New Requests for Startups
#103While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed. I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child. Are there YC founders in t…
I had a pregnant wife and a kid at home when I went through YC last January. Another friend of mine had 3 kids and a wife he had to leave home. Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.
You are a single data point. We have hundreds of other YC participants that fit the 20-something and single description.
Re: New Requests for Startups
#104It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly. > Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable. That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United…
I also thought the Financial Services section was rather tame and un-disruptive.
The problem is not that it's hard to find good ways to save and invest, although that is a true statement. The problem, at least for most people in the US, is that besides Social Security, "personal saving and investing" is currently the only available way to secure one's future/retirement. An additional, related problem is that the only personal saving and investing option available to most people is "buy one or more Financial Services products": Savings accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, even pensions which are long gone. They're pretty much all the same scam: Hand your own personal money to someone else, and in 50 years, it may end up bigger or smaller or the same, depending mostly on who you chose to give it to, and other factors totally outside of your control. If it ends up bigger, you chose wisely and/or got lucky, and deserve to retire comfortably. If it ends up a lot bigger, you chose brilliantly and/or got really lucky, and deserve to retire in luxury. If it ends up smaller, you chose stupidly and/or got unlucky and deserve to eat dog food when you're old.
Can we get away from "use your own personal money to buy a risky financial services product" being the sensible way to secure one's financial future? Now that would be a worthwhile problem to solve.
Not to mention the fact that "Saving and Investing" is only available to people who can actually afford to save and invest (which is yet another problem that desperately needs solving).
Re: New Requests for Startups
#105>Specifically, lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is something we’re interested in. Doesn't this already exist, in the form of the bicycle?
Many people with reduced mobility (e.g. my grandmothers) can't ride them, though. There's space for alternatives.
The bicycle is a 80/20 solution, but it's hard to make VC-level money in the business. Plus, a few more decades of high-tech short-distance personal transportation and we'll all look like in Wall-E and the bicycle will become 20/80.
Re: New Requests for Startups
#106Is it just me, or are these RFSes too vague to be inspiring or actionable. It looks like you perhaps had a good list of actual ideas, which you redacted to death ?
Re: New Requests for Startups
#107Awesome, ambitious and inspiring list of the challenges humans need to solve to move forward. One huge issue forgotten though: animals and wild life. They also inhibit our planet and part of our lives, but many quickly disappearing.
Well said, we share our planet. Poor animals and plants dont have their own voice, but certainly need more represntation in our daily thinking.
Would be great to hear from the leader of the startup world. Even if only to bring attention to their cause
What would be some good startup ideas here?
My only idea is a company that manages National/Regional parks and has a monetary incentive like a)Being paid by people who visit their parks. b) Being paid as a service per square foot they manage. What other incentives can we create to make sure the companies are kept honest without involving too much government oversight?
Re: New Requests for Startups
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI? Anything resembling OpenCog or Freebase isn't AI—it's just a database with clever retrieval through traversal hierarchies. The world does need better ways to analyze data sets, but conflating information retrieval with self-directed AI is misapplying the term "intelligence."
In practice, "AI" is used as an umbrella term that definitely includes that kind of stuff. I can't speak for YC, but IMO Semantic Web work should probably fall under the AI umbrella in this case. (Edit: in the interest of full-disclosure, my startup is doing a lot of work with Semantic Web technologies, particularly in terms of applying them to Enterprise knowledge management)
I think there's two viewpoints. There's "outside in" when the media calls things like Siri "AI" then there's the scifi AI perspective where we want talking starships.
Siri++ doesn't get us closer to sarcastic GSVs. If saying a structured connected wisdom of the crowds folksonomy is actually AI helps people get funding/attention/growth, that's what people will do.
There's also "middle out," but that's a talk for another day.
Re: New Requests for Startups
#109While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed. I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child. Are there YC founders in t…
We're absolutely interested in working with these kinds of founders. Shoot me an email at kat at ycombinator. Happy to talk more or introduce you to some of the founders who went through YC with families.
Re: New Requests for Startups
#110> What comes after programming languages? I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided: "We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and…
I'm pretty sure that our assumption that programming languages will look like programming languages in the future is sort of like the assumption that phones will always have buttons on them.
Once Apple and other companies showed what the world looks like when a phone is a giant touch screen + giant battery, phones with buttons become a niche, not the norm.
I don't know what the programming paradigm is that completely changes that, but I do know that I haven't seen it yet and everything we've done so far seems to completely miss the mark.
Someone is going to come along with some other radical assumption about what designing/implementing software really is about.
I know that it is not about static vs dynamic, functional vs. imperative, etc. like we've traditionally thought. Maybe it will be more like using Excel or Gmail. Maybe it will be more like flowcharts, or maybe just like sketching out a structure and the machine knows how to wire it together for you. Maybe humans won't be involved at all.
Speculation is endless, but nobody has had the iPhone unveil of new programming paradigms yet.