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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#411

Post by nandemo »

nostrademons wrote: post #111
tomwalsham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

An idea I've been musing on: is there a fundamental set of problems of humanity from which all economic activity is derived? For example: "Shrink the world": couriers, seafarers, caravans, riders, roadbuilders, railroads, telegraphs, automobiles, steamships, dockworkers, truck drivers, aviation, telephones, email, social networking, videoconferencing. "Organize labor": lords, finance, education, recruiting, HR, manag…

Not sure if this answers your question, but the fundamental problem from which all economic activity is derived is scarcity.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#412

Post by trevoro »

jballanc wrote: post #76

Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Eng…

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should watch the BBC series "Connections".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#413

Post by aaronf »

jarek wrote: post #405
aaronf wrote: post #400

How do you "just say you're building todo-list software" and not get laughed out of the room? Investors say the space is too crowded, and engineers joke about it being one of their first classroom assignments. And even if you're making traction on the vision to replace the inbox, Y-Combinator's partners will turn you down.

Good reason not to depend on VC funding

Actually, we bootstrapped for 2 years. We had launch coverage in lifehacker, mashable, the atlantic and entrepreneur magazine. We had over 10,000 users the first month. We got to the point where we needed some funding to go all-in, but everyone we spoke to was really burned on the task management space. Based on this experience, I'm really interested in how someone can take on the task management space in a way that gets noticed.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#414

Post by gbog »

jarek wrote: post #409
gbog wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I object to: - the idea that changing grammar is a way to fix moral problems. - any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what one write.

I agree - we should get more people to think in singular they, rather than just write.

I don't like this kind of thinking police, sound too 1984ish to me.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#415

Post by ericd »

tomp wrote: post #241
ericd wrote: post #161

I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the same time, perhaps you could automatically…

There is a fundamental difference between a scientific study and data-mining. Science is based on probability theory. Until we discover the "grand theory of everything", out other theories will be only approximate, and out experimental results not 100% predictable. Therefore, scientists consider a prediction as correct if the chance of predicting something at random is less than some probability, usually 10%, 5% or 1…

I was talking about discovering correlations which aid in potentially discovering relationships between behaviors and results. If you have a sample size which includes everyone in your study, that's as good as you can get on your confidence interval... you can use a different subset of the data for each experiment if you'd like, and that would be functionally equivalent to running individual experiments with a subset of the population each time.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#416

Post by jamesrcole »

gbog wrote: post #348
hythloday wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you find "they" as a third person singular pronoun objectionable, it's not "new"--it goes back to at least Shakespeare (through Austen).

I object to: - the idea that changing grammar is a way to fix moral problems. - any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what one write.

I wasn't talking about the grammar in what was written, I was talking about the content which implied that the person would be male.

any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what one write.

How was this case -- implying the person would be male, vs being gender neutral -- a barrier between what one is thinking and what one is writing?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#417

Post by replax »

megablast wrote: post #271
tintin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are right. I don't agree with PG when he is talking about Apple. "None of them are run by product visionaries" is simply not true. Steve Jobs had great respect for companies like Sony because there are product visionary companies. Sony, IBM, Philips, and a lot of others, all companies that gave us great products we now are using every day. But it took years to get there. E-ink for example was created in 1…

Sorry, Sony was a great engineering company, worthy of being respected, until they sold out and became a content creation company. Look at how the hobbled the mini-disc years ago. Sony deserves absolutely no respect these days.

While I can totally see where you are coming from, I think it is not fair to say that sony does not deserve any respect whatsoever anymore. They were innovators at first, too and have come a long way since.

I do not agree with sony's content creation affairs, however they continue to innovate with good products (e.g. look at the digital cameras, camera sensors etc.)

More often than not, there is no clear distinction between good and bad, certainly less so with amazingly huge companies such as sony, apple, exxon etc.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#418

Post by Tsagadai »

bergie wrote: post #392
rmc wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's study history and see how Europe and America got wealthy and try to do that.

One big deal in Africa is logistics. The railways of the colonized era were designed from quickly moving raw materials to ports. And the new Chinese-built roads are no different. The end result is that trucking food between cities and villages not that far away from each other is crazy slow, dangerous, and profitable. Not much differently from trans-Pacific trade some 100-150 years ago. If somebody would come up with…

Then resources can be raided in remote areas without doing anything for the people who live there. With efficient enough machinery you won't even need to train local people to take part in the operation from start to finish.

Having a major logistics route run through an area does not make that area prosperous. It does, however, make the owner of said trade route prosperous. What your arguing is an extension of the status quo for Africa and many other areas of the world with extensive natural wealth. Nothing gets locally produced if someone elsewhere can produce it cheaper in a free market.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#419

Post by Tsagadai »

nl wrote: post #192
Gatsky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are arguing here... if you are arguing that screening for cancer can be useful and saves lives, then I agree with you! If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated reasons. Also: Prostate cancer screening is not recommended ( http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_st... ) Bre…

pg was talking about something different however See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour. Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoi…

System on chip PCR machine? The lowest hanging fruit would be miniaturization and better engineering of existing diagnostic machines. At the moment the medical diagnostic market is filled with overly expensive devices that could be easily made cheaper and more efficient (somewhere with a favourable patent/legal regime so you don't get sued to oblivion).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#420

Post by lusr »

lars wrote: post #191
samstave wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The breakthrough in your comm analogy will come with the translation of thought to word. We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation, then send that to the recipient. This will be wired-telepathy - the recipient will get a message which they can receive any way they choose; visually (email - they read it) audio playback, or thought-injection.…

> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically imp…

Doesn't have to be "brainwaves". The brain has a few outputs that can be highjacked (e.g. a computer with a neural interface that appears to be another muscle in the body). I don't know whether the bandwidth of these outputs is sufficient for interesting communication; we've evolved to take in far more data than we produce.

Edit It seems that more direct methods of neural interface are already plausible: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37873/

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