Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#101

Post by tomwalsham » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:00 AM UTC

densh wrote: post #97

tomwalsham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

I don't seem to understand why did you put "Facebook Messages" in a line of great inventions. Isn't it just another "Live Chat"? Am i missing something?

Facebook (and Twitter to some extent) solve one of the biggest problems of email which is the concept of verified sender.

I add it to the paradigm shifts as it resolves (in its own [large] namespace) a longstanding problem with email.

I add it to the 'transient' list as its solution is purely driven by network effects which leaves it vulnerable to the next player sideways market dissolution.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#102

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:00 AM UTC

densh wrote: post #97

tomwalsham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

I don't seem to understand why did you put "Facebook Messages" in a line of great inventions. Isn't it just another "Live Chat"? Am i missing something?

[deleted]

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#103

Post by tomwalsham » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:06 AM UTC

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #100

tomwalsham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

> there is still massive value in some of the oldest methods, with some evolutionary shifts. Yes, and newer protocols often carry emulation layers for older protocols, so we have things like POTS running on top of TCP/IP, when just several years ago most of us still had TCP/IP running on top of POTS via dialup modems. The other day I needed my insurance company to send a fax to my bank (banking regulations mandate th…

Some would argue Email is little more than USPS over IP.

I think the most interesting aspect of modern communications - accidentally in the 90s, deliberately in the post-twitter-era - is the simple addressability of people.

There was a tradition of letter writing for centuries (visit the British Library), but it required some level of introduction to connect. The academic roots of email broke some communication boundaries (to the time-detriment of prominent academics), and Twitter has opened the same addressability to celebrities and field-leaders (with a more voluntary twist I would say).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#104

Post by run4yourlives » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:07 AM UTC

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).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#105

Post by patrickaljord » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:11 AM UTC

mmphosis wrote: post #59

0. free internet - as in beer and as in liberty 1. a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ 2. replace email - with a todo list? - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk, my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync 3. replace universities - yup, and recreate the free university of olde 4. internet drama - indie drama titles (movies/sh…

> - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine? > - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures?

Western medicine is nothing more than medicine being tested scientifically before being accepted. If you know anything better than the scientific method to test medicine than please do tell. How would you prove to people your medicine work, because "it is so"? Nonsense. If by "medicine from all cultures" you mean medicine who refuse to be tested scientifically, then thanks but no thanks.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#106

Post by jamesrcole » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:16 AM UTC

Great post, but minor quibble:

The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.

That really should be:

The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But they wouldn't have to. They'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#107

Post by samstave » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:16 AM UTC

tomwalsham wrote: post #86

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…

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

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. It is played back on the nerves and is "heard" in their head as a thought. (evolutionary results to be sure)

As a life long Cyberpunk enthusiast who, at 37 years old, has been using computers daily since I was 8, I really have concern over the mental health of the yet-to-be digital world.

I.E. the ADHD that will result in direct cerebral access to information 24/7.

What will be the impact on the (generally) serially wired brain to vastly parallel inputs?

I suspect massive upheaval on the social level. There will always be adopters of immersion, as there will be the future Amish who will eschew all digital, but the median social reaction will be a result more of our true, and unknown, innate biology that we wont even be aware of until this happens.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#108

Post by allenbrunson » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:17 AM UTC

Oh man! Replacing email is my personal Holy Grail. The ongoing escalation between spammers and spam fighters is proof enough that it is a system that has lived beyond its time.

I first became aware of PG when he was working on Bayesian spam-fighting techniques, circa 2002. Email already seemed absurd to me. I was thinking of writing my own email client, but I would have preferred to get on whatever email-killing bandwagon there might be on the horizon, so I sent him an email asking if he knew of such a successor. He wrote back and said no, he was not aware of such a thing.

That we are still using SMTP in this day and age just boggles my mind.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#109

Post by codex » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:18 AM UTC

It's not ideas which make billionaires, and it's not a lack of ambition which keeps these ideas from being reality. It's that it takes killer execution with a huge amount of luck. People think that they can predict the future, but they can't. Capitalism triumphs because it lets a million monkeys do a million zany things, and when a few become mega hits those particular monkeys are hailed as visionaries.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#110

Post by Gatsky » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 6:19 AM UTC

repos wrote: post #6

Preventative Diagnostics as Paul describes in #7 will really be the future - it's barbaric that we can only make a diagnosis when the disease has already manifested (in most cases). There are a few players in this space (Scanadu comes to mind), but it's seems like nano biosensors and the like are still very new technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not optimistic. I think pg's discussion of automatic diagnosis is a bit ill-informed.

For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if it is even a cost effective measure.

It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with the results - for example, if you are diagnosed with possible pancreatic cancer, the treatment is a massive operation to replumb your upper abdomen. 5% of people die because of the surgery alone, and the surgery costs a fortune.

Unfortunately a simple relationship like "find cancer early = good outcome" does not exist. There are incredibly high barriers for a startup developing diagnostic tests for screening. There is a good reason why the only people doing cancer screening studies are large government funded research consortia that can afford to wait 10 years or more to prove a result.

The example of Bill Clinton is misapplied - cardiovascular disease is really common, maybe 30% or more of people will get heart disease in western countries. We don't need to have a cool machine to screen for it, we need to risk stratify people with a few simple tests (ie ask them if they have a family history, check their cholesterol and blood pressure) and improve their risk factors (eat better, quite smoking, exercise, lower cholesterol etc). But then you are talking about modifying human behavior...