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25 Startup Ideas for 2012

judegomila.com

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Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#161

Post by stevenou »

niallsmart wrote: post #146
stevenou wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Steven – are you posting debit or credit txns? If crediting, would PayPal mass payments work for you?

Crediting. As far as I know PayPal Mass Payments requires the recipient to have a PayPal account (in fact, we do use Mass Payments for customers who choose to be paid by PayPal). Crediting via ACH, on the other hand, merely requires routing and bank account numbers - which is something everyone has! The whole point, which neither PayPal nor Dwolla solve, is to use the existing financial network, not create a new means of money exchange.

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#162

Post by lubujackson »

itmag wrote: post #98

2. Gamify learning core subjects: specially maths and physics to start. 3. Allow the community to make lessons and have voting systems for quality. As someone who is itching to start an e-learning startup, what would be some ways to implement this? For the user-created lessons, maybe have an IDE-like enviroment with a domain-specific "programming language" that enables non-coders to easily create educational modules…

As someone who's done a lot of work in e-learning, the biggest problem is making something for subjects that anyone would bother using. It's a lot of energy to go learn physics so who wants to try it in some half-finished, inconsistent, unverified e-course. Programming is easy to teach because it's all conceptual, and the concepts are clearly defined and structured. So you could maybe teach linguistics in this way, but not something like Spanish. Or if you tried to have a collaborative Spanish curriculum it would be a huge effort to collate everything into a logical progression ("they don't know that grammar rule/word yet") so you might as well pay someone to write a consistent one from scratch. Same for physics/math/any open-ended science or humanities class.

Your second big problem is getting anyone to actually contribute a lesson plan in a way that is consistent with the format you're trying to structure things. People aren't going to make one from scratch for you, for free. So you either pay people or accept all manner of half-baked, duplicate lesson plans.

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#163

Post by lubujackson »

apollo5 wrote: post #142

These are really good..and thought provoking 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 b…

How about reddit for businesses, so the subreddits are business categories ("gyms, restaurants, florists") trading tips and meeting each other.

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#164

Post by iRobot »

its_so_on wrote: post #31

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…

Wow, your so disillusioned (funny it isnt) ;-)

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#165

Post by johnx123-up »

daveambrose wrote: post #136
stevenou wrote: post #130

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?

Some guys sell it as a product http://labs.agriya.com/burrow

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#167

Post by agilebyte »

frisco wrote: post #34
agilebyte wrote: post #28

>> Build the database of biology We are running a biological data warehouse, with a clean API in 4 languages. The problem is that the source data are incredibly messy and you have a lot of "blank" values. People then do not know if data are missing or if there really are no data to begin with. Who does the curation?

Who is 'we'? (I'm curious!)

http://intermine.org

Running as FlyMine, metabolicMine, RatMine, YeastMine, TargetMine etc.

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#168

Post by agilebyte »

irollboozers wrote: post #32
agilebyte wrote: post #28

>> Build the database of biology We are running a biological data warehouse, with a clean API in 4 languages. The problem is that the source data are incredibly messy and you have a lot of "blank" values. People then do not know if data are missing or if there really are no data to begin with. Who does the curation?

Is that because you have lots of variation over different values? I've tried using websites like Bionumbers, but can't tell if it's curated or not, and is basically now useless. How is yours different?

Ours is not curated either (our sources should be). We take data from the likes of Flybase, Ensembl, UniProt, BioGRID and really anything you want and make a more coherent picture using various graphs and widgets.

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#169

Post by niallsmart »

stevenou wrote: post #161
niallsmart wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steven – are you posting debit or credit txns? If crediting, would PayPal mass payments work for you?

Crediting. As far as I know PayPal Mass Payments requires the recipient to have a PayPal account (in fact, we do use Mass Payments for customers who choose to be paid by PayPal). Crediting via ACH, on the other hand, merely requires routing and bank account numbers - which is something everyone has! The whole point, which neither PayPal nor Dwolla solve, is to use the existing financial network, not create a new mean…

I'm interested in chatting in more detail with you about this. Would you drop me an email if you would like to discuss further? My contact details are in my profile.

Re: 25 Startup Ideas for 2012

#170

Post by rayhano »

code_pockets wrote: post #85
rayhano wrote: post #80

The biggest problem is this: We spend our lives accumulating valuable knowledge and relationships. Then we allow our elders to just die and let that knowledge and their relationships die with them. Why are youngsters forced into teaching jobs, when they have no life experience to novate to kids? Find a mechanism for achieving a solid transfer of knowledge from the elderly to the young (the caveat being the young need…

Great point. Though you may have not thought of something: wisdom (which is what you seem to be referring to) works something like this: wisdom = knowledge(experience(actions(decisions * time) * time) * time) * time //why do I always end up writing lisp? We spend our whole lives developing our wisdom, but we also spend our whole lives learning how to acquire it, and how to understand it. How do we transfer something…

Is not some of the best learning those things we don't appreciate at first but then we encounter an example and that pearl of wisdom someone imparted on us years ago flashes up and all in the world makes sense? :)

I love the lisp... can I post it on twitter? What's your twitter handle?

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