#3 New News: There has been a tendency to focus on mass audience news. This inevitably leads to incremental improvements on news delivery. Think about the news that matters most to someone running a household--it's inherently local. But newspapers can't scale to deliver this kind of news and aggregators can only aggregate what others can deliver. The real source of local news comes from the people who live there discussing what is happening around them. We're working on a neighborhood network that allows neighbors to share and discuss what is most important to them, whether it's a shop where they had great customer service, or the little league championship game, or traffic calming issues at a particular intersection, or an event going on at the local park this weekend. By putting neighbors in touch with neighbors to discuss key issues, we think that there is an opportunity to redefine what "news" means.
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
151–160 of 401 posts
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#152Search engine that concentrates on design? What that supposed to mean?
I don't know. I was just saying that if you want to beat Google, that's their weak spot. Or at least a big one. Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.
Or: the "weak spot" might simply be that people inherently differ in their display preferences. _I_ happen to like Google's clean design, but if even 5% of the population actively dislikes it, someone could make some money. Google's "weakness" then becomes the fact that they can only present one face to the world. The beauty of this approach is that it will be tricky for Google to counterattack since they won't want to confuse their brand.
In short, Google may not have weaknesses, but their market does.
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#153Regarding "23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia" - I investigated this myself a while back. A viable BUSINESS is much, much harder than it looks. To begin with, note Jimmy Wales's separate commercial company "Wikia" is already in that field, and both Wikia and Wikipedia people assist in moving some content from the noncommercial Wikipedia to the commercial Wikia. Let me be clear, I don't say what they do is illegal (even if does raise eyebrows sometimes). But it's a fact that there's already a very strong established competitor, one with a huge amount of insider access that another start-up would not have. Moreover, while it's obvious Wikipedia has a huge amount of Google-juice, few people realize how difficult that is, and how many other sites have floundered in the bottom of the search results. So what's likely to happen is the start-up ends up with a website full of junk, or even worse, gets penalized by Google for having content that's too similar to Wikipedia and/or Wikia sites.
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#154I can't believe you miss the biggest market in the world. Is everyone in your office under 30? It's HEALTH CARE, it dwarfs EVERY "INDUSTRY" in the USA right now. Even the defense industry pales in comparison. Hey, I have a zillion health care ideas! Google saved my life. :-)
The health care market is a hard one to sell to, and while it is probably the most deserving area for research and development, there are many many many legal and organizational hurdles to overcome to get to a 'sell' or 'win'.
If you have a zillion ideas, that's real good, since there are a zillion different systems/formats/workflows/protocols in place in all the hospitals/laboratories/clinics in the USA alone. Unfortunately, you can only realistically work on one idea at a time...
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, but I hear what mechanical_fish is saying, too. I suffer from much the same problem: many elements on the list are things which I have thought about to an extent that I've worked out every single step needed to make them work. The problem is, I haven't the time to pursue everything I would like to. Let's take the "simplified browsing" problem, for example. I worked phone technical support for an internet…
"there is a huge, absolutely massive number of people out there that need a simpler computer" This is a good observation. Anyway, the issue here is, whether that massive number will have some common notion of what the simpler computer actually is.
They don't, nor do they have to. In fact, they generally don't have any idea of what to expect from a simpler computer, other than "it's not frustrating".
For those of us that are computer literate, it's hard to imagine that even basic abstract concepts like email are completely foreign to the majority of the population. I would guess that over half of people don't know how to answer the question, "what do you use for a web browser?".
So you have a blank slate, a free pass to design anything you can imagine. If you can deliver it to these people, and if they don't find it intimidating, or hard to learn, or unpredictable, then they'll like it.
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#156sophomoric, I'm not sure why this appeared on reddit.
I'm not too thrilled about this having been posted to Reddit either, but fortunately so far not very many Redditors have bothered to post a comment.
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#157Help. Help. I feel like that guy in the Sandman comics who gets cursed to have nothing but original ideas, as rapidly as possible, day and night, forever. Seriously, this list is exhausting to read. It's like the topic sentence for an entire century. I'm going to have to take it a little piece at a time.
There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already. There is such a thing as being the first to give a real physical (or commercial) form to an idea, though.
Isn't a twist on a worthy, original idea also a worthy, original idea?
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I think you're misunderstanding my statement. I did not say that people do not have new ideas. That is a blatantly ridiculous statement. I said that worthy ideas have already been had. My argument comes from looking at literary and philosophical ideas, and my comment was a jest in response to another jest, but there's truth in it. There's a persistent quest for originality in literature, and after some years of c…
Chasing originality is a self-defeating thing to do, but not because all worthy ideas are unoriginal. It's because it points in the wrong direction, away from the wellsprings of creativity. It's like trying to be funny. The most striking thing about all those "persistent quest[s] for originality in literature" is how utterly samey they are. Ditto for music. But then someone like Bob Dylan or Kurt Cobain does do somet…
Oh, for sure, and to be fair, my response was not meant to be a rigorous logical statement, since it was in response to a jest about Sandman comics :-) However, I felt there was some truth to it so I defended it anyway.
I'm quite comfortable with the idea (original or not) that opposing concepts can both be true simultaneously. Your opposite generalisation does sound very interesting too. I'm going to write it down in my little idea notebook for further thought some day :-) Thanks!
(Thinking about it now, putting both these statements together appears like it could well need to a very interesting Borges-like story)
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#159Hm, seems like pg & co. want to have all the big problems of business and the economy solved for $15,000. I guess if you're only funding kiddies with amounts equivalent to the allowance they get from their parents, all you get is kiddie solutions. As soon as $15m are on the table, call me.
What's your number?
Just put the offer on ycombinator's - or another reputable entity's - web site for everyone to see. However the "call me" part is half joking; while I have ideas to tackle some of those problems, especially the economic foundations of them, they are not amenable to funding by ycombinator or similar entities. The smaller problems being purely practical such as not being - or wanting to be - in that funny country of yours over there, the larger ones being that it's a contradiction in terms to use an old economic model (invenstments, corporate structures, sell-outs) to create a new economic model. Look at the file-sharing example quoted: A P2P network technology, even one that created economic benefits for its participants, such as musicians and listeners, would never get VC funding since there's no central entity to siphon the profits off.
Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already. There is such a thing as being the first to give a real physical (or commercial) form to an idea, though.
Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long, familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what distinguishes truly original minds. The first discoverer is ordinarily that wholly common creature, devoid of spirit and addicted to fantasy - accident. (Nietzsche)
See, even the idea that original ideas are not original is not original. If only Borges was around to help guide us, we'd probably found that Nietzsche got this idea, in slightly different form, from an 18th century academician, who in turn was able to lift it from the writings of a Russian monk, who in turn found it in a little-known greek play.
From André Maurois' preface to Borges' Labyrinths (about Borges):
His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: 'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.' Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): 'We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.' But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'