Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#211

Post by jsingleton18 » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

capkutay wrote: post #160

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

Check out Striim http://www.striim.com/ It's a native streaming platform so your data will be cleansed, processed, scanned for outliers event-by-event rather than in batches. We have dozens of streaming connectors IT/Enterprise/Web data sources. We also support initial load for your firehose data. For unstructured data, we have support for RegEx based parsers. Shoot me a message if you have any more questions. We hav…

We solved RegEx and can guarantee worst-case linear time matching for any number of expressions. We should talk!

www.watchful.io

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#212

Post by kedean » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

danielvinson wrote: post #68

scrollaway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For themselves! It's also not a great system, lots of legacy. More to the point though, it's not a commercial system. Steam behaves as a distribution platform and licenses the publishing rather than the distribution. Which is not at all interesting for self-published games (be it indies who want to avoid steam, big publishers with their own systems etc).

Steam supports any game from any publisher, including self-published games. Steam is exactly what you get when you try to solve this problem, because none of the big companies want to be involved, since they see it as competition. Blizzard and EA are the only two big companies I know of that are not on Steam, and they both have direct competitors to it that are vendor-locked.

I'm not disputing your claim, but EA does have plenty of games on Steam, they just aren't publishing any new ones to it.

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Electronic%2...

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#213

Post by biztos » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

This is not the industry I work in, but one of which I'm often a customer:

A turnkey package tracking system for small-to-medium shippers.

In much of the world the shipping (as in DHL, FedEx) markets are still very fragmented and do not look like they're going to consolidate all that much. (As to why, I have guesses but I don't know for sure. I'm looking at Central Europe right now but I expect this is true in many other regions).

As far as I can tell the package tracking systems are something the companies compete on, with the result that a lot of them suck or (worst case) don't exist.

Case in point: I'm currently waiting for a shipment that the seller swears they gave to the shipper, but the shipper's system doesn't recognize the code. Both parties maintain it's probably just not "processed" yet at the shipper's, going on three days now.

As a software guy, I find it crazy that nobody has a generic white-label tracking system that any random shipper can use in combination with some smartphones/tablets for label scanning. It only has to cost less than the company pays the owner's cousin's teenage son to write the tracking PHP code these companies would otherwise use, and I bet you could upsell all kinds of premium add-ons if it worked well.

I would love to see this, and I think it's a big enough market to actually accommodate a startup.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#214

Post by snarf21 » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

EricDeb wrote: post #200

dvdhnt wrote: post #2

Semi-related... I work in wellness and healthcare. I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where (a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that) (b) the office then requests x, y, and z information (c) a push is sent t…

agreed providing the same exact 4 pages of info to every doctor's office is insane.

It is but you need to understand why that happens (hint: $$)

When you go to the doctor for a sinus infection, the cost of this is not fixed, even across insurance companies. The other factor is the "level" of service. (ref: http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...)

The more in-depth the examination and the more time you spend with the patient, the more they can charge. All those forms are "taking family history", etc. and it is free money since you have to do the work. Those are then scanned so they can be used later in an audit.

(Source: I also worked at a start-up that was trying to disrupt out patient medical systems. It's very hard and has lots of roadblocks. btw, of the top 50 EMRs in the US, only 3 have APIs and these are mostly to pull data, not push it back in).

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#215

Post by trevmckendrick » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:39 PM UTC

emerongi wrote: post #198

rmrm wrote: post #130

My wife is a corporate attorney. They pass drafts of contracts around by email using MS word with change tracking enabled. Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git would be a mighty step forward.

I'm actually close to launching this kind of product. A bit more complex than Word + Git, but I hope it will be worth it. One question: is there a use case for live group-editing? Same way live code editors work. I have to admit that I'm not super familiar of the workflows in that industry, so I am mostly just designing features the way I would like them to work.

I ran into this exact problem when selling my company. It's horrible.

How far along is the product? Have you talked to any lawyers about it?

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#216

Post by endisukaj » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:39 PM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #178

Email parsing and extracting data from it, (input data in multiple languages), that is not strictly depending on predefined templates but being able to adjust itself. Think parsing emails from multiple providers of certain kind of service and exposing common data model. Looks like perfect usage of machine learning.

Doesn't GMail do this already? It's not perfect but it extracts data such as plane tickets or hotel reservations and saves those to your calendar.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#217

Post by buzzybee » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #33

juskrey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have devoted 10 years to game content distribution, packing, compression etc. (Now not in gamedev anymore) This is a very easy problem which usually solved by attaching fairly simple script which is aware of your file formats to any commercial installer system. Some companies are even selling more or less standard solutions for that, but in reality from any given 1000 games 900 will have very different data formats…

I think the "900 different data formats" problem is something that will go away as we move towards better tools which cover all the standard use cases. Gamedev is riddled with really smart people that reinvent the wheel all the time because they found a way to micro-optimize this or that. They get to do this because until recently, there was no "good enough" solution for a wide range of games (or the "solution" was p…

The path forward for games is roughly similar to where digital audio is now: Comprehensive workstation environments with an easing facade through plugins, presets, etc. The coarse elements of a rendering algorithm or a piece of game logic can be reduced to a processing graph, behavior tree, or other convenient abstractions. They can plug into each other by exposing both assets and processing as globally addressable data. Original coding for game logic will still be required for the foreseeable future, but most of the development problem is weighted towards getting assets in the game, and that can be abstracted.

This is done in bits and pieces across existing engines and third-party tools, but there's a lot of room to make it cheaper and easier.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#218

Post by kedean » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

takinola wrote: post #10

As a SaaS provider, one of the key indicators of a customer at risk of churn is the presence of another competitor in their account. A service which notifies you once an account signs up for a competing service would be immensely valuable in helping to target retention activities.

This sounds like a massive invasion of privacy, to me. It also sounds like a great opportunity to drive customers further away when you contact them based on that information.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#219

Post by nwatson » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #27

Data management. 1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc.... 2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data 3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data…

I think startups Trifacta and Paxata are doing this or some aspects of this ... see a comparison (from 2015): https://www.quora.com/How-does-Paxata-compare-to-Trifacta

I don't know much about Paxata but I think Trifacta are well-regarded in industry and academia. Trifacta founders worked on research / open-source-? project Data Wrangler http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/ and turned it into Trifacta.

I don't know much about either product in truth.

Re: Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?

#220

Post by cc439 » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #85

Rapid generation of high quality 3D models of existing objects. Process should be independent of object size eg. a coke can should use the same process as a car and process time should scale with object size. Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput. There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.

This might already exist depending on your exact requirements and it's a fairly common technology in the world of metrology. I regularly work with manufacturers to reverse engineer and/or measure molds, jigs, and fixtures for which there are no drawings available. A ROMER or FARO arm with a laser scanning head outputting its point cloud to a software like the PolyWorks suite can generate an incredibly accurate CAD model of incredibly large parts in a very short amount of time (an hour or two at worst if the mesh needs a lot of cleanup).

I assume that process would be easy to speed up if the requirement for absolute accuracy was removed. The 8' ROMER arm we use is accurate to ~!2 microns over its entire volume which is absolutely overkill for something intended to produce models for visual arts applications. A quick and dirty approach to generating the mesh might increase the inaccuracy by several orders of magnitude but when coke can has dimensional tolerances to the tune of tenths of a millimeter, the quick and dirty mesh will still be representative of the end product.