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Startup idea list

news.ycombinator.com

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41–50 of 174 posts

Re: Startup idea list

#41

Post by deltapoint »

jpalacio486 wrote: post #25
deltapoint wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

read this http://paulgraham.com/die.html Paul Graham argues the fear of looking bad is what motivates people. Based off of that concept I thought of the idea of a social network kind of like 43things with the major differences being: - you can set a timeline of when you want to accomplish the goals -people could rate the difficulty of the goals and you have a reputation based on how many goals you complete and the di…

I have to say i like the idea. Have you applied to YC?

No, I don't have a team of hackers and I am just now learning to "hack" myself. If someone wants to collaborate email me at abiek13 (at) aol (dot) com

Re: Startup idea list

#42

Post by randallsquared »

rms wrote: post #30
randallsquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked out pretty well for my father, who's 80. It probably ruins the experiment that he had been using (well, failing to use) Windows for years previously, however.

How does he do with the mouse? From my experience, people over a certain age just never quite get the mouse. Touch screens are the ideal solution, touch pads would be fine except the ones on laptops are too small, and trackballs are a whole lot better than mice because they let you seperate the action of clicking and moving... too often I see older computer users accidentally moving the pointer when they want to clic…

He understands and uses the mouse; his problem with that is not the concept, but tremor. The first mouse he ever used at home was a trackball, but he hasn't had much problem switching to the scroll-ball mouse that came with his Mac Mini.

On Windows, he never seemed to get the difference between situations calling for left click and those calling for right click, so the single-button mouse was a relief.

Re: Startup idea list

#43

Post by mdemare »

Oh, one more! A web consultancy that advises start-ups about i18n, translation, local laws, cultural differences, etc, so they wouldn't think: "Foreign countries are scary, let's conquer the domestic market first." Then we, the Dutch, could actually have used great sites like Amazon, Facebook, Ebay, and Craigslist instead of the terrible knock-offs that won here, solely because they were available earlier.

Seriously, Europe is a huge market, and if you wait until you're big in the U.S., you'll be too late. It's the internet - the rest of the world is just one hop away!

Re: Startup idea list

#44

Post by Hexayurt »

A really good quality standard CSS layout.

I don't mean the stylesheets - no, those come later - no, I mean a really good, one size genuinely does fit all, semantic HTML layout. Does blogs, does galleries, does comments, does discussions, in a single well thought out semantic HTML format.

Then you have a library of CSS templates that people can use. And people can upload new templates. And each template gets checked, to make sure that it represents each element properly, and works across browsers (yep, that's a validator).

The business model is this: advertising on the template inspection pages, so that the "greek" text on the layout pages is all advertising.

Advertising is split with the authors of the pages which are downloaded - you copy the CSS to yer drive (downloading the zip file of the CSS + images) and the author of the template gets a cut.

How do you prevent fake downloads distorting the figures? Up to you, but I think you can filter based on IPs.

But the real key is that semantic HTML on the front end, because once you have that, it's easy to do the rest. But that part is a genuine hardness.

Or you could, you know, write the software for this:

http://disastr.org

Re: Startup idea list

#45

Post by jasonm »

mdemare wrote: post #28

Location based gaming: playing games while moving around in your town with an iphone-like device (and having your location matter in-game.) You could port any kind of game to this concept: counterstrike, racing, even monopoly. Or pac-man, chasing your friends around the block. Or Sokoban, pushing giant boulders through Fifth Avenue. I had this idea six years ago. I'm appalled that it still hasn't happened. Of course,…

Check out http://developer.where.com/jin/devprogramfaq.jin

Re: Startup idea list

#46

Post by mdemare »

ericb wrote: post #38
mdemare wrote: post #33

A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.

I'm working on this now... Feel free to take a look. http:/www.ziptuck.com

Cool! Best of luck, if you do it well I think it could be a big hit!

Re: Startup idea list

#47

Post by chaostheory »

mdemare wrote: post #28

Location based gaming: playing games while moving around in your town with an iphone-like device (and having your location matter in-game.) You could port any kind of game to this concept: counterstrike, racing, even monopoly. Or pac-man, chasing your friends around the block. Or Sokoban, pushing giant boulders through Fifth Avenue. I had this idea six years ago. I'm appalled that it still hasn't happened. Of course,…

already has multiple implementations: http://www.in-duce.net/archives/locationbased_mobile_phone_g...

there's one not listed, that's a variant of pokemon; pretty fun I forget the name (when I saw it, it was only available in japan - though the company is French)

Re: Startup idea list

#48

Post by ivankirigin »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #18

A program that scours the obituaries to reverse-engineer email addresses and online identities so that people that you've met online can find out you've croaked.

the list would be more valuable to those looking to steal identities.

How do you think I win all my elections?

Re: Startup idea list

#49

Post by mdemare »

adsyoung wrote: post #40

Macro news. I get the news in my RSS feeds and its damn near useless. These events tell me almost nothing about the world. The signal to noise ratio is not good. I don't want to know that another 6 people in iraq have been killed in some incident, I want to know whether the situation there is getting better or worse, is it happening in a new area than before, does it involve a new group of people...big picture stuff.…

For big picture news I find nothing beats The Economist. No more kidnapped babies or small plane crashes! I've stopped reading (online) newspapers, and I don't miss them at all.

For subscribing to different issues - interesting! I'd like that too. In theory, you could subscribe to the RSS of the history page of wikinews/wikipedia. You'd get all the updates, but I'm not sure how useful or reader-friendly that is in practice.

Re: Startup idea list

#50

Post by mdemare »

chaostheory wrote: post #47
mdemare wrote: post #28

Location based gaming: playing games while moving around in your town with an iphone-like device (and having your location matter in-game.) You could port any kind of game to this concept: counterstrike, racing, even monopoly. Or pac-man, chasing your friends around the block. Or Sokoban, pushing giant boulders through Fifth Avenue. I had this idea six years ago. I'm appalled that it still hasn't happened. Of course,…

already has multiple implementations: http://www.in-duce.net/archives/locationbased_mobile_phone_g... there's one not listed, that's a variant of pokemon; pretty fun I forget the name (when I saw it, it was only available in japan - though the company is French)

Well, I know people are experimenting. But who will come up with the first big hit? I'd buy a compatible phone just to play.
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