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Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

ycombinator.com

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Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#181

Post by mdemare »

ambition wrote: post #149
dood wrote: post #46

I'm passionate about online learning. I like James Burke's knowledge web idea [ http://www.k-web.org/ ], but I'm not terribly optimistic about their approach/implementation. The idea is to make a network of knowledge which enables self-directed learning. Could incorporate tests/games, dependencies (to learn x, you need to learn y, or even complete a subgame), external references for further reading, and possibly a lo…

A large and frequently overlooked part of what good teachers do: motivating . In my opinion, it's the true hard problem in online learning.

That's why combining e-learning with games is such a good idea.

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#182

Post by cturner »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #110
cturner wrote: post #89

I'm working for (somebody else's) startup at the moment and happy with my positioning there, but I've got thoughts coming from a number of these. > 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. I built songseed.com with the intention of creating a community for artists (perhaps with careers in other fields) who care about the music and aren't hypnotised by the Big Lie that artists get the sign and then ma…

Basically all document production systems you get at the moment suck because they don't handle styles well What about Latex?

You're right in that: LaTeX doesn't suffer from that criticism, and LaTeX is pretty cool, particularly in terms of the quality of the output you get. This system will very likely end up with a LaTeX filter for print rendering.

Limitations of LaTeX for what I want:

1) It does too much - I want to be able to have documents generated once and then offer on multiple outputs. I can't do that if people use features of the platform that go beyond the 'web renderer'. The featureset you need for the save format of a document production system is actually very low. You need to be able to capture five grades of headings, support two types of emphasis, ordered and unordered lists that can nest, tabular data. I don't think anything else is needed. So in this sense, of existing technologies docbook is a lot closer to what I need than LaTeX.

2) Whatever system you end up coming up with, it needs to be able to support Microsoft Word as a frontend because users are sold on that interface, although they really don't care what goes on underneath. While I could have my Word plugin generating LaTeX, it would be much more sensible to have it turned into an intermediate format of simple XML and then transform into LaTeX for what it's good at.

Good suggestion. It does have a place in the plan :)

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#183

Post by cturner »

narag wrote: post #180
cturner wrote: post #89

I'm working for (somebody else's) startup at the moment and happy with my positioning there, but I've got thoughts coming from a number of these. > 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. I built songseed.com with the intention of creating a community for artists (perhaps with careers in other fields) who care about the music and aren't hypnotised by the Big Lie that artists get the sign and then ma…

>I'm obviously sending the wrong message in the way that I promoted it, because I found artists to be not very receptive at all to the idea of them giving away their music. I took the first steps for a similar thing in Spain a couple of years ago. Laws here are different so the problem to solve might not be the same. Anyway, the conclusion was that it's a hardware problem. It's possible, even easy, to atract musician…

Interesting. If you're in London at any point in near future and want to catch up send me a message.

Did you end up with any content? And if so, can we stick it in my system? :)

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#184

Post by agentbleu »

rms wrote: post #165
jerry5 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I sincerely look forward to your futuristic improved economic system, capitalism is lacking in many important areas.

I was so sick and tiered of hearing that capitalism is the best system we have, "theres nothing better", that I designed a new world order. It is better than capitalism by a very long way. It's a complicated idea, slightly difficult to grasp, but given any problem it will robustly yield the best result for the community. You can read it if your interested on the wayback. http://web.archive.org/web/20060613054329/http://creatocracy...

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#185

Post by jerry5 »

voidfiles wrote: post #28

I totally agree with the outsourcing of IT. My father owns a minor distribution company. That deals with spa, pool, and bath parts. No piece of software has ever come to make their life easier. I have been involved with every major software purchase and I am constantly thinking to myself, I know these people I could probably make something that would work. The biggest problem I see is that hosted apps are great, but…

I've sometimes wondered whether IT isn't becoming the 'core' part of a business. I.e. the one that's most complex and drives the competitive edge and success of a business. I have worked in IT in many different industries and often enough found the 'business' part of the business to be easy to pick up while it sometimes took ages and a lot of brainpower to get on top of the technology. In other words, IT people can understand 'businesss' but business people can't understand IT. So, in the future, instead of having a bank with an IT department, we'd have an IT company with a bank department. They'd probably switch sooner from banking to insurance than from one IT infrastructure to another.

I think amazon is a good prototype for this. It's a tech company that also sells books. They later added all sorts of other crap like electronics, then stuff that they don't even deliver but where they just act as a front for other retailers and finally they are now offering their IT services purely by themselves (S3, EC2).

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#186

Post by albertcardona »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #110
cturner wrote: post #89

I'm working for (somebody else's) startup at the moment and happy with my positioning there, but I've got thoughts coming from a number of these. > 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. I built songseed.com with the intention of creating a community for artists (perhaps with careers in other fields) who care about the music and aren't hypnotised by the Big Lie that artists get the sign and then ma…

Basically all document production systems you get at the moment suck because they don't handle styles well What about Latex?

Latex is great. If only it was made easy!

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#187

Post by jerry5 »

agentbleu wrote: post #184
rms wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely look forward to your futuristic improved economic system, capitalism is lacking in many important areas.

I was so sick and tiered of hearing that capitalism is the best system we have, "theres nothing better", that I designed a new world order. It is better than capitalism by a very long way. It's a complicated idea, slightly difficult to grasp, but given any problem it will robustly yield the best result for the community. You can read it if your interested on the wayback. http://web.archive.org/web/20060613054329/http…

Sorry on the first 10 or so pages I saw just blah blah. Don't spam the forum here if you have nothing to offer.

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#188

Post by ig1 »

greyman wrote: post #111

>> 23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Yes, deletionists - this is really one flaw of Wikipedia. The other is, that entities are persecuted for editing articles about themselves. What about just to copy the current articles on Wikipedia and specify another rules for editing?

In a large part the deletionist tract is due to information being unverifiable, non-notable stuff and self-edited stuff both often falls into that category. Verifyability I think has been a key factor in keeping wikipedia at a reasonable level of reliability.

If you remove the verifyability requirement you could quickly spiral into a mess. So if you want to be inclusionist you'ld probably need to keep that requirement - but that would also probably kill a lot of your extra content.

I think if it could have been done it would have been done now, all the mediawiki software is available, you can even get off-the-shelve hosting for a couple of hundred dollars. The fact that it hasn't been done successfully seems to indicate that there's no demand.

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#189

Post by chriscaffee »

My companies have a solution for #1, both videos and the music insustry in one bold move. This will not be made public until Fall of 2008. Go to www.archivemovienetwork.com to get a sense. Our demo under NDAs is more impressive than you ever thought was possible on the technolgy end. The business model this Fall will immediately prove movitization of a highbreed PGC/UGC model with the potential for completely revitalizing the music industry IF they partner with us. We will be attempting this throuth our lawyers at K&L Gates.

In the fall you will be able to contact us. Come build the future.

Re: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

#190

Post by ig1 »

foompy_katt wrote: post #172

5. Enterprise software 2.0. This might be partially solved by my commercial idea for #17. But, that idea breaks down for things which are only rarely sold. And it would be very difficult to apply to corporate buyers, who have varied and changing needs and behaviors. This is where the government could take the lead. The govt. could declare all patents and copyrights, or just certain classes of them, to be public domai…

nationalizing all of the media doesn't sound communist, it sounds like dictatorial fascism.
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