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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#431

Post by ippisl »

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…

There's some interesting innovations in infrastructure-less transport:

1. low cost UAV's - have been used in africa to transport blood samples and meds between hospitals and cities. the MATTERNET is a project that on scaling a UAV transport network in africa, using UAV's , currently probably for small weights , but it would probably increase in the future.

But the UAV industry is improving in rapid pace, because of military innovations, so it's a good place to be.

There's also a lot of open source innovation there, radically reducing the costs.

2. There's some work being done on airships(and plane airship combo) for the army, and airships for commercial transport for areas with no infrastructure(oil fields, etc.). might also fit africa.

3. There's a company working on a low cost jeep , fit to the the African muddy roads. It's can also cheaply supported by current african repair networks.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#432

Post by asciilifeform »

xaver wrote: post #199
aptwebapps wrote: post #21

The last graph of #6 is great. I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation?…

You should check out Robin Hanson's idea of 'futarchy' here: http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf

But don't miss Mencius Moldbug's rebuttal of Hanson's Futarchy:

http://bit.ly/7gFYD

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#433

Post by jmduke »

eurleif wrote: post #95
jmduke wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios. I'm not trying to be intentionally dense, but that's just literature. If you get rid of things like actors or cameras, you're no longer operating within the medium of television/cinema. And that's not specifically bad, but that's not specifically good, either.

So Pixar makes literature?

Pixar has actors and studios.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#434

Post by lutorm »

kaybe wrote: post #322
lutorm wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an unlimited supply of energy, you can pretty much recover whatever. The only elements hopelessly lost are those that involve nuclear reactions.

Even then it's just a question of energy. You can do a lot with a particle accelerator.

Well, while you can in principle do something, an accelerator is a pretty blunt instrument. You're unlikely to have practical success putting Krypton, Barium and a few neutrons together into a Uranium nucleus even if it's theoretically possible. The phase space for the reaction is just not there. Chemistry has a lot more tricks for synthesizing molecules than just shooting them at each other.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#435

Post by dkrich »

mrb wrote: post #99
dkrich wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can compare cable to email. I may be in the minority here, but I agree that email is not really a pain point for me. I pay $50/month for cable because that represents a choice of having ready access to television or nothing. The idea that households would pay $50/month for email is a bit of a stretch given that the alternative is free email that works pretty damn well.

I am not talking about email as you know it. I am talking about this service that pg thinks needs to replace email. I do agree with him that people currently use email in a way it was not intended to (todo list, sending files, etc), and that surely there must be a better way of doing these tasks, that would be worth $50/month, while getting rid of the limitations of email such as attachment size limits. In fact I kno…

You honestly believe there are a lot of families that would pay you $50 a month for a service that enables them to easily create todo lists and share attachments? You're a pretty optimistic person.

How many services do you yourself pay for today on a monthly basis? I can count mine on one hand. To get $50 from me every month you better have a life-changing service.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#436

Post by tersiag »

diminish wrote: post #378
Misha_B wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on the idea of "Kill the house"? It sounds fascinating.

If modern human life is a drama (consumption), the house is the center location where it mostly occurs. Most people work for a house for all their lives. You feel safe and comfortable in your house, you sleep there, keep all the stuff you bought such as computers there. Most of us are enjoying our sunday at our houses enjoying the Internet. We had a lot of variations for the "house"; the wood > shared caves by a comm…

I've always thought of creating a dining room where one wall would be a projected screen that would give you the illusion that your dining in a different part of the world.

It would be actually be even cooler if you could get a live stream from restaurants for their "virtual table" dining guests

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#437

Post by nameless_noob »

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…

Don't know if you'll get this,

but it's cause we all want to grow. To keep the gains from growing, and insure it's invested. We intrinsically don't want to see kids starve, why?

That answer's the perspective, I think.

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