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

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

#321

Post by KingMob »

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…

I'm surprised none of the comments mentioned ZocDoc, which does most of this already. You can fill out forms once, schedule appointments and click to send your info to the office.

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

#322

Post by analog31 »

An easy way to design things using catalog mechanical parts.

I imagine being able to create a structure or assembly from stuff in the McMaster-Carr or ThorLabs catalogs without having to be a CAD expert. When I'm satisfied with the thing on my screen, I press a button, enter my credit card number, and the parts arrive from their respective vendors in a couple days.

A search feature would be vital, of course. Being able to modify some parts would be useful, e.g., if I need 14 inches of pipe, I can cut down a 24 inch piece. Drawing from multiple disciplines would be necessary, e.g., combining an electrical box, optical assembly, and structural framework.

Maybe you get paid via a little kickback from those vendors, who also agree to integrate their catalogs with your service.

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

#323

Post by ecopoesis »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #7
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…

Too much inertia on the provider side for this to catch on and reach critical mass - many septuagenarian sole practitioners out there using paper diaries / files, and larger organisations with some monstrosity written in COBOL (or MUMPS?) that will never change to accommodate this. I'd suggest something much more low-tech - a website where you can punch in all your details - insurance, allergies, medical history, etc…

Maybe the problem is we're trying to get the wrong people to pay. Since the pain point is with patients, fix it for them and make them pay. Gets around the industry inertia.

Sell the service to the patients for some smallish fee ($5 per month) and then provide the integrations into the various provider systems for free.

Later on you could scale it up to be an add-on to employee benefits or the health plans.

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

#324

Post by cbr »

weaksauce wrote: post #176
contingencies wrote: post #13

Normally I live in China, and rarely eat western breakfast. Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended family. A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers, toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic…

To be fair there shouldn't be any voltage inside the toaster basket area when the toast has popped up. Unless they did something stupid when designing the toaster. And you can always unplug it before sticking utensils in there.

    you can always unplug it before sticking
    utensils in there
Not 'can', 'should'.

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

#325

Post by ninjamayo »

Bret Victor-style dashboard and visualisation systems. I 've been using Qlikview, Tableau and Excel for years and they are all very limited in what they can do. New dashboard solutions come out every hour but everyone is copying each other. I want something that I can mould to my problem, that I can touch and fully interact with. Hard, hard problem but worth spending time on this. Make it work in real-time scenarios too please.

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

#326

Post by koz1000 »

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.

My colleagues at Creaform have something that works pretty well. Their latest handheld scanner can generate a wire mesh on the fly with 0.030mm resolution.

http://www.creaform3d.com/en

10K scans/day is way beyond their limits, and I'm not sure that's a very common use case. But I bet they could get there if they wanted.

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

#327

Post by muraiki »

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…

In my current job I use Informatica Cloud, which either by itself or in combination with other Informatica products can do these things. I have two main complaints about it:

1. The UX is subpar. It insists on running in only a single tab at a time, and attempts to open multiple tabs will instead override whatever it considers to be the master tab. This is a huge pain, because I often need to have a mapping workflow open in one window and some other relevant part of the application open in another. Instead I have to save, go find the thing I want, and go back. Another problem is that when working with data sources containing tons of fields, there's no easy way to search.

2. It offers an expression language to perform some computational tasks, similar to what you'd find in Excel, but it's hamstrung by a poor UI and a limited amount of functions. The built-in editor for expressions is really poor (see Tableau for an example of a great editor for a simple Excel-like language; it even has type linting) and, unless I've misunderstood something, you can't declare any variables so you end up with huge nested expressions. There aren't many functions available, so something as simple as removing whitespace ends up as lstrip(rstrip(foo)). In combination with no support for statements (or at least a let expression like in lisp) this makes any nontrivial data munging completely indecipherable.

I've looked around in this space and it seems like there are a variety of products, but the supplier of our main CRM will only support Informatica Cloud. I think that a company that can offer a product that does what you've said but makes a serious effort at UX could cause users to revolt and demand to use it! I know the joke is that Slack is just a pretty IRC with better UX... but that's exactly why it has become so successful.

In terms of data munging, take a look at Microsoft's Power BI. It's visualization software but it has a nice data munging mode that, crucially, keeps track of all the changes you make and displays them in a linear format. This is great for getting a quick idea as to what was done with the data and is essential for doing reproducible data analyses. Unfortunately, Power BI also suffers from poor UX in insisting on tiny fonts and gray-on-gray palettes that are totally unreadable to anyone over 30.

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

#328

Post by ThomPete »

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.

Yeah think about it as icons but for 3d models.

That's been turned into an industry with very high throughput.

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

#329

Post by AndrewKemendo »

cc439 wrote: post #220
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 mo…

Unfortunately not. FARO and other structured light systems don't export texture and are generally too precise (micron) in current form. So they take too much post processing by default.

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

#330

Post by AndrewKemendo »

rsp1984 wrote: post #299
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.

There's $BNs waiting for you. Who would be the primary customers? The entire 3D capturing market is currently several $B per year, including services. Where would be the customers that aren't getting served today that would double this market?

Well it would siphon everything away from the existing 3D capture industry and open it up to smaller groups and those that aren't savvy on it yet. The consumer space generally isn't doing this so anyone that sells anything would get on board at a low enough price point and simplicity.
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