141–150 of 171 posts
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Besides you guys, who else is doing something like this?
Someone already posted some below: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3524864
How are these sites overcoming the chicken and egg issue of attracting interesting activities from locals? Gathering enough visitors to the site to make transactions meaningful?
A couple of mine are:
- Repurpose the top floors of parking garages to incorporate green space in urban centers
- Black Hole Taxi: Marketplace for on demand user video (eg - I pay you a fee to walk around the grand canyon)
- Open spaces that are free co-working CS learning centers for middle and high schoolers (I'm working on one in Los Angeles)
- Mixergy for the rest of business (eg. the BUSINESS of yoga, the BUSINESS of real estate brokerage, the BUSINESS of photography) not just how to do 5 new poses, hold a better open house, craft a better photo
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Why are you convinced you need to open biology up to engineers? Is that currently not the case? The fact is you really can't do much with a PCR machine. Sure, you can identify your friends boogers. But it only reduces one tiny aspect of overall cost. Add a centrifuge, a flow cytometer, a gel box, some incubators, and then maybe you have a functional 'garage' lab. But again, you don't achieve much by having immediate…
https://www.breakoutlabs.org/about-us.html looks like an interesting entrant into funding early stage research outside academia. Any thoughts on them?
If you ask a science researcher to be able to do the research outside of his lab, the size of your potential audience falls to fingers on one hand.
At least Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does better in pushing a goal with their own agendas. This seems like an unfocused attempt to throw money into the pit, though money always helps.
So, as a researcher, I've learned that researchers are the best ones who can dictate their own goals. That's freedom that hasn't been seen yet, and there's a very simple solution. Just execution is very difficult.
Often the path to a discovery is not direct. Facebook stumbled upon social search several years after putting up college yearbook profiles online first... So I like 7, building a database of biology but to tackle that head on would be impractical (financially). That is the end goal that we have at my startup, but we are starting out by helping labs manage their reagent and chemical inventories first. Sounds mundane b…
We're working on idea 7 as well, but a completely different angle compared to your company, check out http://www.sbgenomics.com -- instead of all of bio, we start with genomics, and also emphasize computation. Sounds like we're compatible pieces of the puzzle!
Also, I've been meaning to contact those guys at Quartzy too. Can I also get in on the strategic partnering?
NOTE: the following is a joke. or is it. Read to the end and decide for yourself. As a VC, I would never fund any of these. How about these twenty-five ideas for starters. 1. Combine local and real-time. (Google isn't) 2. Combine the cloud with viral marketing (Amazon isn't) 3. Disrupt green with crowd-sourcing. (Power companies aren't). 4. Curate blogging (the "blogosphere" is so wide it becomes meaningless. Get the…
Why is Stripe for ACH payments necessary? Why isn't that Stripe?
As far as I know Stripe does not do ACH? We've actually been looking all over the place for an ACH processor with an API (aka a Stripe for ACH) and have had absolutely no luck. And the one company we found, for some reason, wouldn't take us on as a client (I guess we're considered high-risk). Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with the need for an "Stripe for ACH". If you actually know of one please let me know.
There's actually a lot of "AirBnB for Activities." Our company used to be Skyara ( http://www.skyara.com ). We ended up pivoting to RAVN ( http://ravn.com ), which is more of a "Amazon for Activities," per se. I think we were definitely one of the first ones to try to enter the "AirBnB for Activities" space but had a very hard time. While in theory it sounds like a great concept, the key to realize is that no "AirBnB…
Besides you guys, who else is doing something like this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone already posted some below: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3524864
Thanks. How are these sites overcoming the chicken and egg issue of attracting interesting activities from locals? Gathering enough visitors to the site to make transactions meaningful?
"Build a holodeck", "Read/write cells for under $1000", "biological satellite that... deploys/builds itself", "build quantum gears"... This seems more like 25 Startup Ideas for 2042.
"build a holodeck"
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I added some fun ones in there as well...though OpenPCR have made really good headway on the cheap desktop bio hardware front.
OpenPCR is totally different from "read/write cells" much less "read/write cells for under $1000". A truly useful "BioCAD" isn't an engineering problem yet: there's a very substantial amount of basic research required. Synthetic gene circuits evolve rapidly, for one: let's say you designed and "CAD-tested" your circuit, how will you keep it from mutating within a few days? Unsolved research problem. > Build a databas…
I think the most promising method is DNA nanopore tech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanopore_sequencing). It doesn't require labeling, amplification, and, I suppose, could be done in vitro. Maybe that's what the article is referring to?
I'm not 100% sure on this, but it also may be much more accurate than current methods since it doens't suffer from many of the biases present in current next-gen sequencers.
I'm working on my PhD in computational biophysics and this is truly an exciting time to be doing cutting edge bio-stuff like this. Sometimes I think people will look back on the 2010's and say this was like Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s... the beginning of something big.