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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 145 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#51
Problem: lots of early stage biotech/medtech ventures have a hard time raising funding, for a variety of structural reasons (http://lifescivc.com/2015/01/venture-backed-biotech-today-re...), despite having already made initial progress using non-dilutive government funding (NIH grants, SBIR, STTR, etc.).

Solution: an equity crowdfunding site for early stage biotech/medtech ventures focused on gaining backing from doctors and other knowledgeable medical professionals. Those same life sciences entrepreneurs who are having a hard time raising $5-10M in VC funding are often in a hospital environment, surrounded by doctors who both deeply understand the problems they're trying to solve and whose pooled capital could easily add up to $5-10M.

Not only would this counteract scams in this industry made possible by information asymmetry (http://pando.com/2015/03/05/backers-claim-nanoplug-hearing-a...), many medical professionals already meet the (pre-JOBS Act) income or wealth requirements to be an accredited investor.

One major concern with this idea is whether the VCs who weren't willing to invest in a series A-stage life sciences ventures would be willing to come in at a later stage. They typically prefer tranched investments (http://lifescivc.com/2013/02/lessons-learned-reflections-on-...) and don't necessarily see later stage ventures as less risky (http://lifescivc.com/2011/11/risky-business-late-stage-vs-ea...). If that turns out to be a problem, another scalable source of follow-on investment will have to be tapped in order to prevent a "series B crunch" for these non-traditionally funded biotech/medtech ventures.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#53
A CMS designed specifically for the solo contractor making a typical brochure-type website for a mom-and-pop organization or company. Every website is a fork of the main repo, so devs have full control and version upgrades are just git merges. Runs on SQLite and comes with in-page editing controls a la Medium. Basically Wordpress for the 21st century, but designed for devs rather than users.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#54
post #7

How about someone besides Apple makes trackpads for laptops which are actually usable?

Absolutely, and it just strikes me how come nobody notices how bad the other trackpads are. I have Dell laptops and a Lenovo, all of them are equally unusable compared to MBPs and just separate Apple trackpads.

One obvious thing is the trackpad surface should be smooth. I don't know, maybe not everyone feels uncomfortable with coarse surfaces, but everyone definitely should feel OK with smooth ones. As simple as that. But there may be something else too that Apple got right, such as sensitivity.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#55

Like Gravatar but for everything, not just avatars. Gravatar is a service, where you save your avatar. Websites such as StackOverflow can connect to Gravatar and retrieve your avatar from there. So when you decide to change your avatar, you do it in one place. On a more abstract level, the problem here is that people and organizations often create some data and basically Ctrl+C Ctrl+V it to different services. Couple…

Sounds great, if you can hurdle the main obstacle every standard faces. https://xkcd.com/927/ :)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#56
post #19

An Uber-like app where people pay for their rides with banked miles earned by giving others rides. This would serve a large market of people that a) travel alot and can give rides in their home city (free rides when they travel) and b) people that only have part-time access to a car but may need rides when they don't have it. It may also be legal in areas where Uber can't legally operate because they charge money for…

we have that already, the layer is called "money" you can give people rides and be compensated in the "money points (usually US dollar). Later you can use this points to recieve rides yourself by others. great thing is that you can use those points for many goods and services and not only for rides.

Accepting money to provide transport to random members of the public is something explicitly covered by laws in many countries: you can only do it when you've been regulated.

It's also explicity forbidden by most insurance policies.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#57

Like Gravatar but for everything, not just avatars. Gravatar is a service, where you save your avatar. Websites such as StackOverflow can connect to Gravatar and retrieve your avatar from there. So when you decide to change your avatar, you do it in one place. On a more abstract level, the problem here is that people and organizations often create some data and basically Ctrl+C Ctrl+V it to different services. Couple…

Ever heard about Microsoft's Hailstorm and the backlash that followed? :)

For the record I think it's a good idea if it can be standardized and federated so you can choose and move between providers

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#58
This type of thread should be monthly, not weekly.

You might want to set up an account just for posting these threads. That helps avoids a bunch of different people starting the threads as Sunday rolls around to their timezone.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#59
post #55

Like Gravatar but for everything, not just avatars. Gravatar is a service, where you save your avatar. Websites such as StackOverflow can connect to Gravatar and retrieve your avatar from there. So when you decide to change your avatar, you do it in one place. On a more abstract level, the problem here is that people and organizations often create some data and basically Ctrl+C Ctrl+V it to different services. Couple…

Sounds great, if you can hurdle the main obstacle every standard faces. https://xkcd.com/927/ :)

I had "inb4 the xkcd joke" in the comment but deleted it :)

I wish Mozilla would create something like this, they have the power to push it.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#60

NLP as a service. It's a growing field yet setting up training models and all of that for a wide variety of NLP related services is pretty hard still. Things like sentiment analysis, Named Entity Recognition, etc.

Two solutions: Wit.ai for the natural language processing aspect, and then Alchemy's API for the sentiment analysys. Combine those together and you have exactly what you're looking for.
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