| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Value Proposition | Target Market | Unique Selling Proposition | Revenue Model | Competitors | Startup Costs | Barriers To Entry | Exit Strategy | Contact Details | Community Feedback | |
2 | There are currently people that aren't happy with the quality of their writing. This service is integrated into the place of writing through a bookmarklet, blog platform plugins, Word plugin, and possibly partnerships with blog platforms | Anyone who wants help with their writing | Through a bookmarklet, blog platform plugins, Word plugin, and possibly partnerships with blog platforms, this service is made available in the same place people are writing content. You just press a button, specify your content, and then start receiving editing offers from professional editors in real-time. | Transaction fee. Certification tests. Premium features. | Pre-publication editing: Wordsru.com, grammatika.com, gottabewrite.com, editavenue.com, edit911.com, scribendi.com, papercheck.com, editage.com, editorsink.com Post-publication editing: Goosegrade.com | Not sure | Setting up a large enough market of editors to be able to match people with high quality editors in real-time. Blog platform partnerships. | None | jbialer@gmail.com @jbialer | Good idea, Drupal has a module for something like this for those that need language translations for publishing multilingual sites. However, its not real time. It'll be a hit for middle school students essay writing. (gridspy) I really like this idea. You could go so far as to pay editors to edit work that hasn't been requested for an edit yet - offer a preview of some of the edits and upsell them on the whole thing. What you want is for it to be seamless at both ends. Editors tidy up snippets in a web application and some of those get approved (money added like points). Customers get a nice seamless edited experience. You could initially recruit editors through mechanical turk, asking them to edit 10 snippets. Later you could have people who come directly to you and spend hours in your application. When a snippet is approved, the customer can ask the editor to process the whole document and the editor is then given that opportunity. Sounds awesome. | |
3 | 100% return lottery | We provide a lottery where you get just as much back as you put in (on average), as long as you're willing to wait a while. | Socialists, Communists, Poor people | We actually let you play the lottery without having to be stupid. Just wire some money to an account and get the same amount back on average, but distributed according to some desired probability distribution ... | We will keep the money for 3 months or so, earning interest on it. | Regular lotteries | Lobbying costs, bank connections, servers, development time. | Bank fees might be prohibitive. (bemmu) Some laws don't let just anyone host a lottery | Why exit? | twitter:mtrimpe | Sounds like a pyramid scheme. - (sbauman) I'm not sure this is legal in the US (only gov'ts can run lottos i think) Where's the potential of $millions? - (bemmu) Even if you could implement this, which I don't think you could pull off, people who buy lottery tickets probably don't care or understand the "average return", and people who do understand it have their money in bonds / stocks / etc. instead - (Blasa) Premium bonds in the UK serve pretty much the same niche. http://www.nsandi.com/products/pb @jbialer But it's not a 100% return lottery because, as you mentioned, interest. So people who play your lotto would lose money in the long-term vs putting money in a bank/bond/stock. - I had a similar lottery idea but it turns out (in the UK at least, im not so sure about the states) that the law says you cant run lotteries without a government license. And governments typically only have one national lottery. A lottery is defined as a game with a cash price that requires no element of skill to play. Its the reason that on TV/radio phone ins they always ask a pointlessly easy question. If they didnt they would be liable for attempting to set up a non-licensed lottery. Great idea in principle though. My idea was The One Penny (one cent) Lottery. Great mind think alike ay? ;) - bryn@thestartupscene.com |
4 | A calendar system that automatically finds out times when you and your friends / family are free, and suggests local events (concerts, movies, mountain bike races, circus, whatever) that you can attend as a group. The intention would be to make it perhaps based on Facebook, and ultimately have a good view of when your network has mutual free time slots. The big USP would be that it scans the profile info and photo albums of you and your friends to figure out what you like, based on events you attended, music you like, photos of a hiking trip or a mountain bike race or scuba diving or whatever. | There are a few sites that make event recommendations, but the aim of this would be to discover new fun events for families / groups of friends to do together, based (hopefully) on what they all like doing together, what they have done in the past, and when they have mutual free time. | Everyone who is busy, uses a calendar, and struggles to find both interesting new things to do with the people they love/like, and also the mutual free time to do it, as well as the time to make arrangements / bookings etc | I don't think something quite like this exists (AFAIK). Plenty of events sites, but nothing that actively finds mutual free time, combined with some social network data mining / image recognition to make recommendations. It could also integrate with other calendar systems (Google, Outlook etc), but I suspect Facebook would be the main driver since all the data is there, the infrastructure and APIs are there, and people could definitely start using Facebook as the main social calendar function. | Affiliate / booking fees for events (flat fee structure that does not create any perverse incentives to sell some event over another). | - To some extent review sites like Yelp.com, but not sure if they actively recommend events / things; - specific sites for specific event types, like concert recommendations (songkick.com and the like), they are good and have good coverage, but are lacking the "smart image recognition system" and "social planning app" aspects. - I am sure I am missing tons of competitors, but I honestly know very few sites that try to approach this problem in this way (please tell me about the good competitors because I would certainly like to use them!). | - Not sure, but building a MVP that is basically a Facebook calendar app would be pretty quick and straightforward (I imagine, I am not a web developer), surely no more than 2-3 months tops; - However integrating the recommendation system and the image recognition is a much harder problem and would require quite a bit of initial R&D to see whether it is at all feasible to be able to recognise various activities in the photo albums (together with caption and tag metadata) accurately enough to turn that into "Bob likes to hike", "Jane and her friends like to surf" etc. | (1) Getting people to actually use their calendar. (2) Plenty of competing noise around various event recommendation sites. (3) relies on all your friends / network integrating into the app too (but I think if it works people would do it). (4) getting hold of event information - not sure how one would do this or if APIs exist. | Any site that focuses on event recommendations. | HN: MLnick; Twitter: MLnick | Sounds like a great idea, would love to help out? do you have plans for any google calendar integration? HN:stevederico -(fan) Here's a sales pitch: everyone has that friend that finds out all the coolest events in an area, and organizes just the right group of people to go -- why not make that friend a computer? Variations: Meet new people at certain events, but always be assured of having a few people you know there. |
5 | A consumer-friendly home router "service" that ensures fast and safe connectivity without hassle. | Home routers, although cheap, are hard to configure, poorly supported by their manufacturers, and lack features necessary for the increasing number of devices connected in a one's home | Consumers, possibly ISPs who will resell the service to consumers. | Insanely friendly, goal-centric UI. Automatic updates to ensure security. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585 I want my home network to "just work" Today, I must fiddle with a crappy, slow, buggy UI which has bunch of settings I don't understand (even as a software guy). I want a nice UI (not hosted on the little router box) which will say stuff like, "Our traffic analysis showed that you're using Backblaze for backup. Ok for us to make sure this traffic doesn't disrupt your web browsing, movie watching, skype usage, etc.?" | Sell routers and sell management service (automatic active firewall updates, continued use of management website, etc.) for a monthly fee. | Various small-business services which require support from a human. DD-WRT is good but way too hard to use. Fonera. Meraki. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585 | $100K? Need to buy white box routers w/ low minimum quantities. | Getting into Big Box retail. | Large ISPs, Cisco (Linksys), D-Link, etc. BestBuy | @ShabbyDoo. Not sure that this is the right start-up for me, though. It's something I'd love to buy (after having to re-image my DD-WRT router this morning!) | |
6 | A website that allows 1000 people to simultaneously work on one question that has eluded the greatest single minds. | 1000 people working together productively can do more than 10 people ever will. I want to ask a question that seemingly has no solution and would take 1000 man hours to solve. And I want it done in an hour. | Anybody who has a question that 1000 people would want to work on, and no solution exists to it yet. | It's a copy of digg, wikipedia, and twitter. and some kind of organized thought. | Ad clicks. | yahoo answers, wiki answers, twitter, google, wolfram alpha. | 3000 | Getting 1000 people working together in a logical way, thinking productively and moving forward on an intractable problem in real time should be like herding cats. Needs a way to resolve disagreement in direction to go. | Google. | eric.leschinski@hotmail.com MSN: eric.leschinski@hotmail.com yahoo: eleschinski2000 aim: maeon3 | (fan) Can you be more specific? Tell me a story and have a specific use case in mind. Are you speaking of crowdsourcing? Check out Amazon Mechanical Turk. |
7 | Ad network for small businesses to reach specific small markets | Start ad network for local businesses to advertise in Home owners association (HOA) newsletters, and other micro circuluations. | Small businesses | There are probably hundreds of thousands of home owners associations in the US each producing a monthly newsletter. Create a nationwide or reginional ad network to sell adversiting space. There's currently no way for a small business to easily and inexpensively reach certain neighborhoods | Charge for ads | Direct mail | ? | Locating and signing up thousands of HOA's. Marketing to small businesses. | Aqquired by large adversiting company | tocomment on HN | |
8 | ADT or OnStar for personal security. A device measures your heart rate. If it spikes, then device sends wireless alert to command center. Employee then calls the person’s registered cell. If no answer or password not provided, police notified of emergency and provided with person’s location. | Save lives. | Monthly subscription fee. | Device must be wearable and wireless. I know of watches that now have this function, but it'd be better if it was something less bulky. Any ideas? May need to calibrate per person to reduce false positives. So that alerts aren't sent for working out, etc. Maybe there's studies that show when people are scared, how high they're heart rate jumps? | - I've worked on such a device during a two month project in Denmark. I know it's curently being developped by health professionnals and it seems you are not very different from them - (fan) Very interesting idea. What market would you be targetting? THe health concious, or the old? Also, there is a lot of room for cool signal processing. After gathering enough data, you can start predicting when people will have heart events. For things like heart attacks, you can definitely have a few minutes of predictability, and for congestive heart failure you may have even hours. If you get this licensed as a medical device, you might be able to get people to pay tens of thousands + per unit. | ||||||
9 | apt-get update/upgrade for music | If you are interested in a large number of music artists, it is difficult to keep up to date of their current work. Especially new albums of less-known artists do not generally appear in common news sources. Having an automated system for obtaining the latest work of a set of artists and also have the possibility to directly buy and download them, would make life much easier. | Music enthusiasts and consumers | Subscription or transaction fees? (bemmu) Affiliate links to where you can buy the new albums (iTunes / Amazon) | (@royrod) iLike.com and others do this, although agree it could be done better In some ways similar to Row 4, Celeb aggregation & alerts | Fairly cheap. Integration of an artists release source and music download provider. | Aggregated source for new artist releases? | Amazon or other music download providers | HN:soren | (jcs) You could generate an RSS feed for each band. The user subscribes in Reader/iTunes/etc. Either ask the bands to notify your site of any updates, or perhaps initially, do the leg work yourself. (bricestacey) this is a neat idea, but it might not get enough traction as a command-line tool unless you found an existing community to build from (pretty much as an API). Worst case scenario you'll need to build your own community, which would probably fail. | |
10 | Basecamp for travel planning | collaborative & social trip planning made simple | travel enthusiasts | allows private or public collaboration of travel suggestions between users | can act as a good promotional ground for service providers such as travel agents, tour guides, etc. | TripIt is one of the best. http://www.dopplr.com/ | 3-8k | lots of fancy trip planners out there. | ubi_666@hotmail.com | All of us have asked people in our extended social network "what's a cool thing to do over there?". The concept behind this tool is to be an online extension of that habit. - (fan) Great idea! I've wanted to use such a tool dozens of times in my life. I'm going to Denver -- what are other people doing there now? Or some other features: what did my friends enjoy in the past, what have people like me enjoyed in the past? | |
11 | BiakiCRM | Salesforce business model clone in Vietnam | First Paas Service in Vietnam | Monthly fee | www.biaki.com | $200M | the first | IPO | ceo@biaki.com | ||
12 | Buy comments for your blog or Facebook fan page. Start the conversation if no one else will. "Commentgen" will become a new form of marketing, starting now. | On average, one person comments per 1000 readers. It’s time to change this statistic. | Personal and small business blog writers and Facebook page owners. | ProComments adds spice to bland blog posts, and can create a story where there was none. See Exhibit A: "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" http://tinyurl.com/yzo8gk2 Exhibit B: "Tuscan Whole Milk": http://tinyurl.com/b3ymfe | Comments are sold via Paypal on a per comment basis. | Developer Hut. They have a few years headstart. | Nothing. ProComments has already launched: http://ProComments.com | Low barrier of entry. | PostRank, | procomments@gmail.com | - could cause bad PR if people found out that you had been paying for your comments (nfriedly) A friend of mine started a service like this for forum posting. Owners of empty forums paid him, and then he made several different accounts on their forums and started conversations with himself. He had several hundred dollars in sales within a few days of starting the service, and sold the site a month or two later. see http://forumfocus.net/ and http://paidpostingsolutions.com/ |
13 | Carbon sequestering cement/shell like material that can be made at sea | There is too much CO2 in the air. Also we can't build much at sea. If we could whole societies could grow there. Carbonates, like calcium carbonate, e.g. limestone are great building materials composing cement and shells and coral reefs, and sequester CO2. It is made by oceans but is limited by the production of carbonic acid. Carbonic acid can be made by altering the PH or enzymatically, and pumping atmospheric air in. I suggest both approaches, but PH may be controlled in seawater by using techniques from plasma physics. | Seasteaders, navies, boat manufacturers, people who need cement, who knows who else. | Nothing else can be made at sea, which is land's final frontier. See seasteading. | Licensing, building the systems to make the material, selling the material. | Calera -- they rely on high CO2 concentrations though, and a different ph increasing process. | $0 - $100 K for theory, probably $0.5 MM for a proof of concept at bench scale | Energy efficiency in sustaining ph is the main one. Also efficient mass exchange from atmospheric air. | Large marine manufacturers, chemical processing companies, who knows who else, IPO. | dani.fong@gmail.com | |
14 | Concert calendar that doesn't suck | ||||||||||
15 | Create a database of power usage info per electronic device - with data coming in from consumers and manufacturers alike. | Give people more visibility into how much electricity each of their devices in their house uses so they can start to cut energy consumption. | Give people more visibility into how much electricity each of their devices in their house uses so they can start to cut energy consumption. | None exist that I am aware of | Allow manufacturers as well as resellers to advertise next to their products. Also, potentially sell data to PowerMeter and the like. (bemmu) Affiliate links! (sbauman) good call | No direct competitors - indirect are tools such as PowerMeter, Kill-a-watt, and then sources such as the manufacturers documentation. | Minimal from tech side, mostly just marketing costs to get people using the system. | Getting data into the system will be hard - will involve some marketing wizardry to get data flowing into the system - or - good relations with manufacturers. | Google PowerMeter and the likes | sbauman at gmail / HN:shantheman | - (@holgerd) Possible competitor: http://www.wattvision.com - (sbauman/OP) Thanks for the link holgerd - actually I see them as a potential partner or customer. I didn't know about them though - much obliged. |
16 | Create a fundraising competition between two parties where the winner takes all of the money. | In politics, a lot of money is wasted on the loser in primary elections. Why not have a competition between two politicians in a primary, see who can raise the most money, and then give all of the money to the winner? | Anyone who donates money | New concept | Money processing fee | None I know of | Pay to create and market the website. Possibly, hire lawyers to make it legal | Work out legal ramifications, create website, market it | Not needed | gershon.bialer@gmail.com | Seriously? (timdorr) Might make more sense if this is used to track competitive fundraising (sort of like Girl Scout Cookies can be). In the end, the money goes to a good cause, but you make it into more of a game. The entity can define a goal level and prizes for whomever earns the most money. |
17 | Crowd-sourced shipping. People drive in predictable patterns every day. Why not capitalize on the miles already being driven? It's a sunk cost for drivers. | Shipping is inefficient for small objects, or short distances, and overnight shipping is ridiculously expensive for the same distances. | Daily commuters. People who don't have the time to make the 30 minute drive to drop something off. | It saves you time compared to driving 30 miles, and it gets there faster than a standard shipping service. | As a broker between shippers and drivers. Shippers will offer a fee (ex. "$5 to take these plants to my parents house"), and the driver will get the money through the site, after the shipper confirms that the shipment was OK. Similar to eBay's broker/facilitator/feedback system. | Current shipping giants (UPS, FedEx, USPS), as well as individuals willing to drive the package themselves. | Some time to design and build the web interface to map potential shippers. Must be heavily advertised and promoted to generate awareness in the market. Would probably work best when introduced to a local market. Total cost estimate: $250,000 including 4 months of time by 2-3 people. | Legalities and regulations surrounding transport for hire. Dishonesty by both parties. Lack of interest by drivers (no motivation). | FedEx, UPS, USPS... Google. | Gmail: dkokelley HN: dkokelley LinkedIn: dkokelley Facebook: dkokelley My name is Danny O'Kelley | You'll need to give each participant a device that keeps track of each package and micro payment. A device like that likely costs $1000. So you'll need to move 5000 packages before you break even. Iphone app? (dkokelley) @above iPhone app might work, but I don't think people need a physical device to track packages and payment. A driver could select a job from the site, and contact the shipper to arrange pick-up/drop-off. After the shipper confirms that the package has been delivered, they release the funds through the site. Make refueling stations the hubs for the packages, have a mail boy do the loading and unloading of packages between gas station, work, and home. You should also include the costs of insurance. I don't think many will trust a random person to deliver their package, unless they are insured (bsstoner) I like this idea, think the key to success is finding the 'right' local area to focus on initially. More of a sprawled out, but still populous, somewhat tech-conscious city would work better than more urban areas. I worked for a while on Oracle's enterprise transportation/shipping software, would like to hear more about your plan (bsstoner@gmail.com). (fan) What types of transactions would this service have the most edge? If I were a driver, to track down a couple of houses on a trip in terms of inconvinience might be something that I need to be paid at least $5 or so to do. I feel like the best packages are ones that must then be expensive in classical systems: very heavy items, super fast shipped items, etc. Actually, you know the people who are perfectly positioned to do this must be FedEx or UPS -- why don't they (besides lack of innovation) have opportunities for personal drivers to carry their packages? |
18 | Customer satisfaction iPhone or 'droid app. Stores print bar code on receipt, customer snaps photo of receipt/code with phone, and answers a very brief customer feedback survey (like 3 questions). Store owner can link feedback to a particular day/time and transaction. | Response rate on customer satisfaction surveys is dismally low. This fast and easy phone based app makes the process super fast for consumers, enters them in the sweepstakes automatically, etc. Stores get a much higher, more timely customer sat. response rate. | Retail businesses with a high service component, eg. coffee shops, clothing stores, building centers. | Retailers sometimes give you a 14 inch receipt with printed instructions to go to a website and fill out a survey next time you're at a computer - in exchange for sweepstakes entry. These receipts are usually thrown away - but if I can quickscan the receipt with my phone, and answer just 3 or 4 questions, I'm much more likely to do it. | participating retailers pay fee for ability to download customer sat data and/or view online reports, etc. | customer sat. measurement companies with lots invested in old data gathering infrastructure. Most of these require significant time investment by consumer. | $50k for pilot | Retailer needs ability to codes on receipts. Backend matching and website reporting technology quite simple. | Regional or growing retailer looking for differentiator against big guys (e.g. Caribou in midwest vs. Starbucks) | jonpatrick65 [.at,] gmail [,dot.] com | This is a great idea, but already a pretty crowded space check out medallia.com, allegiance.com, markettools.com |
19 | date someone with similar interests | people provide so much data on social networks and online sites that there needs to be a system that matches a person with similar viewpoints | singles | no other dating site does this. stop asking the person about their likes/dislikes. extract them from their internet life | let people have fun, date. if same people go on second date then charge them money. | other dating sites | ~3K | gathering data from userids that people provide | none | bhaarat.s@gmail.com or @bhaaratcrckt | (fan): I believe OKcupid's philosophy is also to match people who are similar together. Also empirically, how much do people really dislike answering survey question? Your idea can work for interests that are "dominating" though, like religion. Whereas I imagine casual chess players may not just want to date other chess players (despite the fact that they'll always have a fallback date idea) |
20 | Defeating asthma with a hypoallergenic dustmite | Dustmites are one reason asthma is a disease exploding in prevalence, killing hundreds of thousands and depressing the rest. Asthma is much more common in developed countries because dustmites have evolved to fit the precise niche of human comfort, temperatures higher than 70 F, humidity higher than 50%. Blown central heating, beds and bedding completes the perfect storm. Almost all of the skin from your body is eaten by dustmites, and then converted to the excrement, containing a strong allergen. But this allergen is by no means necessary. It has been identified, and it varies sufficiently in prevalence among dustmites to consider breeding it out. | Households, maybe hotels. | Asthmatics currently get to chose between crummy partially affective drugs, suffering, and death. | The idea is to breed the dustmites to proper in the presence of, say, a lemon scent. Then they will spread using beat westerns as a channel into every home. The idea would be to sell the lemon scent. | If people had better circulation, washed their sheets, or lived in hammocks things would be ok. HEPA filters kind of work. Also there are puffers. Nobody likes those. | Not known. We don't have to go into biotech though -- costs might be one allergen detector (as nose?) and breeding. | Could it even work? What are the limits to hypoallegenicity. Also I might just weird everyone out. -- If people had better circulation, washed their sheets, or lived in hammocks things would be ok. HEPA filters kind of work. Also there are puffers. Nobody likes those. | No clue. | dani.fong@gmail.com | Write this up as a novel, make your money that way! Of course, it will all need to go Horribly wrong... (DaniFong: Why would it, though? It's just evolving into a different niche, which insects, viruses, plants and humans do constantly) I think he is referring to the novel and movie "I Am Legend" |
21 | Drill into your power usage, understand how much of your bill goes to each circuit. Make and measure power saving approaches. | The monthly bill arrives far too infrequently and is opaque. Even power monitoring systems on the market today tend to focus only on measuring total power usage. They don't isolate the power usage to one part of the building | Businesses of all sizes, anyone with a monthly bill in excess of $1,000 | Affordable, multichannel, totally real-time monitoring. All online | Profitable sales, Optional recurring subscription for enhanced on-line features. | None in our specific niche. Some in the domestic market : http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-monitoring-tools, also PlotWatt.com | Hardware manufacturing costs - already paid for | Ramp up of the manufacturing | Power companies, Google, Other power monitoring firms. | HN: Gridspy, Twitter: @gridspy, Email: tom gridspy .co.nz | (nfriedly) Can't recall the name but I know there's a tool that does something along these lines. It was basically a powerstrip with an lcd screen to tell how much power each gadget was sucking up. I think it was mentioned in Maximum PC magazine like 4-5 years ago. Had some kind of witty name if I recall correctly. - kill-a-watt: $20 - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009MDBU?ie=UTF8&tag=hn073-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00009MDBU - watts up: $130 - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000CSWW92?ie=UTF8&tag=hn073-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000CSWW92 (dkokelley) I think this is very valuable information to someone in charge of paying a $1,000+ electricity bill, or who needs to break down power usage by renters or sub-letters. The only thing is that in order to track this accurately, the house would have to be retrofitted at each outlet (high time cost up front by consumer). How would the monitoring equipment communicate with the web? Would each outlet be connected via wifi? Will outfitting the monitors be expensive? Will siphoning power for wifi at each outlet be a heavy drain on energy usage? Answer: No, installation is easy. The sensor is clipped onto the live wires behind the circuit breaker or fuses. Live wires create a magnetic field proportional to the current draw which we can measure. The sensor is then either connected directly or via wireless to the home internet connection. Wifi is not used because it is too much of a power hog - instead we use a lower bandwidth proprietary radio system with longer range and better power draw. Retrofitting new plugs into the house is only required if you want to switch loads on and off and that plug is not individually wired back to the breaker box - a cheaper alternative is a device that is plugged between the appliance and the wall. |
22 | Eliminate the telephone as the primary means to do business (in the Philippines) | Leverage the speed and pervasiveness of the internet in conducting business (for Philippines) | Small to Medium enterprises in the Philippines (and suppliers, worldwide) | Rolling out an online sales, purchasing,crm into one package gives users a more complete view of their retailing, trading operations | Charge per user account | In the Philippines, Pen and Paper, email, and the telephone, and the general view that IT is an expense | Servers, development, market research, marketing | Philippine businesses are not as open to technology and would likely maintain status quo | None | nainos.smith@gmail.com | - (coryl) Please clarify on "eliminating the telephone". - (nainos) instead of using paper and pen to record transactions made using the phone, this product allows businesses to use the internet as the primary communication tool to do business - (edge) isn't paper and pen cheaper to use than recording an electronic transaction? no need for a laptop/pc/electricity to power laptop/pc to input the transaction as well. what kind of cost savings are you providing your prospective clients? what is your value proposition? - (edge) your elevator pitch was to eliminate the telephone, yet when asked to clarify this, you mentioned the paper and pen, you may want to refine this. - (edge) a lot of Filipinos still do business thru the phone, by eliminating the phone at the business side, aren't you killing a way for people to reach your business? what if most of my clients are not computer savvy? |
23 | Email anonymizer | Websites like Craigslist and others that need to anonymize their user's data, can do it through this service for free. | Everyone | Will offer spam and scam filtering, it will be done through one main account and therefore be a lot more accurate. (I hope) | Selling our spam list to companies with in-house email. | None. - i cant remember the name but this service already exists. Ive used it in the past | Nothing other than the time I've spent developing it and purchasing a domain. We can launch it on Heroku for free to start and grow with it if needed. | Site is developed, just need to get a few big name clients to use us instead of in-house service. | Yahoo!,Google, MSN; anyone that provides email really. | GMail: celeretaudax@gmail.com | |
24 | Ever heard that your app doesn't work on Firefox 1.5 running on OS/2 but can't really test it? | Have an enormous collection of virtual machines with every browser on earth installed that can be used remotely for a few minutes to test apps. | Web developers | Unlike browsershots which just shows you a picture of a static page, this will let you test more ajaxy stuff or things requiring login. | Charge for usage | Browsershots. Installing VMWare on your own computer and creating your own images. // sorry there are quite a lot of companies offering this service on a monthly fee basis: e.g. http://litmusapp.com/ saucelabs.com | Need to license all operating systems. Microsoft provides some images for browser testing, but not sure how to get OS X etc. | Need to work out licensing. Could probably package VNC in some way to let users interact with the machines. | None specifically, but could imagine there would be many buyers for this. | - | Also has forensic applications. |
25 | Facebook Backup | If Facebook every went down, got bought out, started only keeping the last few months of posts, or otherwise lost your data you'd lose a significant part of your history. Build an application to download everything you do on Facebook and keep it safe. | Facebook users | Keep your social history | small monthly fee | ? | low | complex screen scraping logic? | ? | tocomment on HN | (nfriedly) I just want a tool to export my contacts list to csv, including phone numbers and emails. Profilicious apparently does this, but you have to buy a serial to export more than 20 contacts, and emails to their support address bounce back. (timdorr) Just a note that this might violate the Facebook TOS. The data would have to not be stored by the service itself, but rather it would need to be just a pass-thru to provide a downloadable file. Right now apps can only hold on to data for a maximum of 24 hours before having to delete it. - (nfriedly) What I want is definitely against facebook's TOS, which is why it hasn't been done a hundred times over. Just means less competition :) well you ever heard of socialsafe.net? |
26 | Fantasy Sports and Sports Data API | There is no simple API to get sports data. Existing solutions are expensive. | Entrepreneurs | Cheap, RESTful API that is super simple to get started and lets you build compelling sports apps. | Charge access to API | XMLTeam? Stats.com | Fairly cheap | Copyright issues? Negotiating with different professional sports organizations. | Sports media companies | HN: shafqat | - (coryl) I think this is primarily a licensing issue. Leagues own the data like players names, team names, stats, etc. A successful API would have to convince leagues like the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB, etc. to allow them create an API service. - (jeremyrwelch) What about FanFeedr? - (@jprichardson) The leagues do not own the data. There was a recent court case over this. Google for CBS and Fantasy Football for College Football. You'll be able to find this case. Anyone should contact me if they want to do this business. I've got the data. |
27 | Follow celebs | How to keep up-to-date about famous people you are interested in for interviews they appear in, articles about them etc. opposite of Twitter | Fans | Aggregated and checked content only about the people you are interested in | Display ads :(, for musicians link to concert tickets for affiliate fees? | Simply searching on YouTube by typing in celeb name, but doesn't give satisfactory results (dupes, irrelevant content). Also need to search multiple sites multiple times to get same result. There are also tons of celeb sites that produce original content like PerezHilton.com, People.com but ours would rather be an automated aggregator. (coryl): Celebuzz.com profiles [http://www.celebuzz.com/celebrities/miley-cyrus/] | About 2 months of site design and data entry to get a small test going = ~$10000 | None to start, but if the UGC starts growing, competitors will have a barrier | None | HN: bemmu | (khelloworld) To get some revenue, you could make an iPhone app with push notifications and charge people for the subscription. (JayNeely) http://tourfilter.com for celebrities. (@royrod) I am not sure that a website aggregator would do that well, would be kinda dry/boring, but might work. However I TOTALLY think that real-time alerts (SMS/Email/push notif) would have a huge market. "OMG, Diddy just got thrown in jail!" Seriously. (bemmu) Note with celebs I don't necessarily mean just people like Paris Hilton. But you could subscribe for example to see latest interviews / panel talks / articles where Paul Graham appears in. I thought about this idea when I saw Paul Buchheit's presentation in Startup School and wanted to keep up to date with other talks he might give. But when I went to YouTube and searched for "Paul Buchheit" in chronological order, most of the results were irrelevant. Also I don't want to do 12 different searches to see everything from all the people I am interested in. (@royrod) Gotcha. I think Tracker.com does a bit of this but your idea is broader. I guess it's sort of like Google Alerts... but better UX, specialized to People, and with a stronger real-time aspect. "Enter any name, always know the latest on them" Seriously I think you should do this one. |
28 | Google Docs for Photoshop files | Edit, share, save photoshop PSD files online so anyone can view the layers, edit, etc. in a rich editor | graphics designers, web designers. | None out there that I know of | Charge $ for membership / | desktop software (photoshop), Aviary, Picnik (not as powerful) | A lot. | Rich image editing best done by Adobe, very difficult to port online. A company that develops software like Photoshop is best set to create it. | Google Docs, Adobe (cloud strategy?) | HN: coryl | Aviary is QUITE good, Picnik may see expansion. Tough nut to crack. (khelloworld) If you could find a way for this to work while keeping the app resonably fast/responsive, i think it'd be awesome. Another competitor is SumoPaint.com |
29 | Green collective in which green entrepreneurs and engineers and scientists and folk live and fix their carbon footprint. | The cross-section of the world's resource usage matches the use of a household pretty well. So if you fix each of them in order in a way that is scalable, economical and that people will use you can fix the resource usage of the world, making us sustainable. A company is perhaps the wrong platform for some of these things, like agriculture and home heating/cooling and materials and medicine and social structures because it does not really eat its own dogfood in the same way. If the right people are living together, as has already been shown in, say, the Sausalito houseboat community,green ideas can really come to life. | Individual potential members of the cooperative, and also VC's eventually good ideas will be spun out as companies. | There's nowhere, not even academia, not even ecovillages, where the right people now live together with this explicit goal. | Licensing, eventually to spin-outs and other companies. Perhaps education, events, publishing, consulting, and production of small amounts of rarities (e.g. truffles, carbon nanotubes.) | Not really known. Maybe Saul Griffith's Other Lab in San Francisco? | About $50 K down is my guess, no more capitalization needed. | Getting the right land and people. | Any of the spinouts can get acquired, we get a cut. | dani.fong@gmail.com | Sounds awesome - I'm in. Let's move. efsubenovex@gmail.com |
30 | Green off-grid electricity from SMS payment. | Electricity is bringing the world out of darkness, everyone needs it, and it helps tremendously. But in the developing world the grid sucks because people steal and governments are inept and nobody has the capital. Despite this almost everyone has cellphones, refrigerators, color TVs, etc, which they power via batteries shlepped via e.g. camels and power with diesel generators, which are expensive to run, loud, constantly breaking down, dirty, ugly, and suck. If financing for a better system were available and were there a business model for selling electricity, usage would explode just like cellphones did, following it. Cellphone towers are currently financed by selling phones; then people rent out the phones for sim cards which are practically currency. | Cellphone tower entrepreneurs and others who want to profit by empowering the world. | SIM cards are the currency of the developing world, but their complementary product: electricity, has no analog. This needs to change. | Run the payment service, take small amounts off the top, make the system interfacing with energy production/batteries, make such off grid systems, alternatively finance the entrepreneurs. | Establishing in developing countries is not very easy. | IPO, say SilverSpring, GrameenBank, UN, SafariCom | I work in rural electrification for developing countries, and the major problem isn't financing - at the moment, donors are tripping over themselves to give money to rural electrification projects - but sustainability and appropriate technologies are the real issues. The usual suspects for off-grid projects are solar PV and micro hydro. But both technologies suffer from the same problems -> high cost (check out the World Bank ESMAP report from 2007 that compares the cost of grid and off-grid technologies), complexity, vendor lock-in (invariably from a developed country), lack of local knowledge and support, lack of a local supply chain in spare / replacement parts, etc etc (DaniFong -- could you contact me? would like to talk about this.) | |||
31 | Group Learning community | Finding other people to learn a subject with. E.g. programming language maths. Provides motivation and structure for learning. Leave feedback for users so that you can find the useful people to study with. | People who want to learn things, who find it hard to do on their own. And they don't need a piece of paper | No current place to find people of the right level. | Affiliate ads for reading material. Normal ads. Possibility of letting teachers run and charge money for courses. Ads for test centers? | Facebook apps that do something similar. Crunchbase is doing something similar. | Servers + Development | You want a means of sharing media. Such as screen captures, videos. You also want real time chat and email integration. Lots of complexity, or you require people to use other services. | Search Engines, or no exit. | HN:Blasa. | Adding a whiteboard would be useful too. I had something like this in mind as well...for programming we can take advantage of people with high karma on SO...id be interested in talking more about this (@bhaaratcrckt) Look for ways to have people explain the material to each other right as part of the learning process, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI (HN: ntoshev) @jbialer: This sounds great. I would love to discuss this. You could match people based on learning style. |
32 | Heat exchange through radiation. | Heat exchange limits almost all mobile electronics now, to name just one example. Solving this would be enormous. But almost all of it, for cooling, has to go through air, which is an insulator. Except radiation! | Mobile electronics manfuacturers, power electronics manufacturers, CPUs/memory, Cellphone towers, RF drivers, weaponry manufacturers, medical devices, nanotech, biotech. | People think radiation is limited at black body rates, but it's not. If you pump energy in, you can radiate and thus cool faster (an example is a heat pump making one point super hot and cooling itself that way), and this is ok in many cases. This avoids the physical limit almost everything shares -- air insulation -- and is necessary for the next level of minaturization and nanotechnology | Licensing and manufacturing/selling into specific markets. | Peltier cooling, some others? | $100K for theory -- maybe $2 MM for proof of concept. | Increasing energy efficiency. The idea is to really max out heat pump efficiency at, say, the MEMS scale. | IPO, a conglomorate: GE/Siemens/Hitachi/Toshiba/Panasonic, electronics companies, nanotech | dani.fong@gmail.com | |
33 | Help local businesses do mobile marketing to customers | Customers use their cellphone to give their contact info to restaurants, shops ... etc. Businesses use contact info for marketing | Local businesses | Much less friction than asking for businesses cards. Easier for customers to receive offers | Tiered recurring billing | Bump, Foursquare, nixle | tens of thousands (~30k) | Building relationships with local businesses | IPO / CRM companies | @richcollins | stealth |
34 | home nuclear power plant | sold at costco | home owners | no more power company | sell fridge size nuclear power plants for $ | France | 1B$ | Radiation | GE buys you | obama@whitehouse.gov | regulation issues. I think you should work on getting healthcare passed first (@bhaaratcrckt) YES WE CAN!! |
35 | http://Auction4Tweets.com - Buy and sell Tweets in an auction! By selling a future Tweet you can monetize your Twitter following...and by buying others' Tweets you can reach a targeted audience for advertising | Targeted advertising for buyers and monetization for sellers. | First of its kind. Open buying and selling, privacy an option. Fun, interactive advertising. | Transaction fees. | http://ad.ly | $200,000 | Site us up and running...looking for someone to help in design and Ruby coding. | Not sure. | @hagope | 1. The benefit of ad.ly is the user tweeting the message, get to accept or deny the message being tweeted. In an auction model.. how can the person that is auctioning the tweet decline the winner of the auction.. or is this a stipulation | |
36 | HumanATM | Human ATM, most people carry cash with them and why search for an ATM when you can reach out to someone next to you for cash. You only pay a small fee for each withdrawal, stop paying that high of a fee to those BS ATM machines | Everyone | Cash anywhere, anytime for a low fee | Fee per transaction | VISA, Mastercard, American Express, all Banks. | A lot but around $1M should be good to get a good marketing campaign going | None, If your operation gets labeled a banking operation you have to pay the 7 million fee to enter the banking cartel. That's why we get .05% interest on our money when the bank gets 6%. (OP) we don't store money, we're get paid by withdrawal and then pay the ATM human. | Will not sell, yes you will. (OP) If IPO is considered selling then yes. | johnwoe | go on tease me if you will! (nfriedly) I like the idea but safety/security concerns me - a webservice that announces to people that you're carrying cash on you sounds like you're asking to get mugged. Also, would the service know how much cash each person had? (OP) I think the concern is valid, and probably the network will have to be built upon as a trusted network, meaning some kind of authentication like verify credit card for address/etc. The service will not reveal who the ATM person is until the fund transfer have been completed (ie the withdrawer's account has been deducted). (utunga) pretty interesting idea, reminds me of concepts behind ripplepay (though not the same idea, you may be interested/it may inspire) (dnsworks) this would be a great use for Square. (OP)@dnsworks, yeah integration with Square is cool but if Square implements such a feature then it would really be 2012 for HumanATM. |
37 | Hyper efficient heat/mass exchange through cooling towers | Surface area limits heat and mass exchange for everything from power plants to chemical processing to cellular lifeforms. One efficient version is the cooling tower. In it, spray falls and gas rises. The heat and mass is exchanged almost reversibly with little entropy creation, it is highly efficient. However, because spray is inefficient currently, they just drop water from a tall tower and let it splash. The tallness is very bad for two reasons: cost, and visibility. Nobody likes the shape of cooling towers now because they look like nuclear power plants. If you can make a general purpose nozzle for small droplets you can make a short inexpensive cooling/mass exchange tower, and use it almost everywhere. | Chemical processing, power utilities, data centers, other industry, agribusiness | Heat exchange is a limiting factor for many processes, and has been dominated by cooling towers for many years, despite their current drawbacks. We might be able to mass produce a modular solution. | Licensing/construction/design and manufacture at smaller scales. | Not really known; current hyperbolic cooling tower manufacturers, mainly. | Demo has about $100 K of fixed costs, plus salaries. May be as low as $150k. | Industry conservatism | IPO, Bechtel, GE | dani.fong@gmail.com | already |
38 | Imaging REST API | Some cloud services at least Google App Engine don't provide adequate image manipulation options. For example overlaying a line of text over an image is impossible with GAE Image API. | developers of sites with dynamic images | No need to worry about hosting, scaling. | Charge $ for resources used. Also I would personally pay to use this. | Please tell me some! I am looking for them so I could throw money at them =) competitors: http://transloadit.com/ | Just development, can host on AWS | None | Sell to some hawt cloud company rolling in venture money | HN: Bemmu | - (joshwa) bandwidth & cpu heavy; latency? what's the advatange over building in-house on top of imagemagick? also: competitors-- adobe/scene7 (OP response) I have tried to use Imagemagick, but was forced to make own solution because of its slowness. Can take 1 second to do a simple operation on an image that takes 5 milliseconds with custom solution. Imagine if you have to generate for example 1 million images to display in peoples' profile boxes on MySpace. Also why do it again if you can pay the same to someone else who can make profit because they have a faster solution? (HN: antileet): I see the potential of this. If you can have http://app.com/domain.com/target.png/resize/640/480/invertColors/pixelize/56, etc then people ho are forced to do things clientside can start using our api (OP) <-- this is exactly what I had in mind (joshwa) Do you really need to generate profile pictures in realtime? Why not do it once in the background and then cache it? That said I do like the idea of a competitor to scene7. Their primary clients are ecommerce sites that need to display many product images in various sizes and with various overlays (30% off!). Amazon has rolled their own solution for this-- see http://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html question to OP: what were you using to get those operations down to 5ms? (PS my current day job is a top10 ecommerce site that uses scene7, and i'm in charge of digital asset management systems) (bemmu) The 5ms case was where I needed to put a text with a known font on top of a known background image. I wrote a lighttpd plugin that kept every char I needed from that font in memory and the images in memory, then just composited them and output compressed result without hitting disk once. (joshwa) ok so we're looking at storing the base images ahead of time, not a situation of uploading the image, manipulating in real time, and returning it back to the client. I suppose that's the way scene7 works too. I do like the idea of a metered cloud-hosted dynamic imaging service. Keep in mind that building imaging engines is a Hard Problem unless you can be really strict about the formats/integrity about the images you accept (libtiff/libjpeg have the nasty habit of randomly coredumping). this thread is getting long-- let's continue at http://etherpad.com/LLGr7iPRC5 or contact me via info in my HN profile. (flog) I've built pretty much what you're saying on GAE already in about a day. Your offering would have to be pretty unique and top-notch to get any money in. (bemmu) Flog tell me more about your GAE stuff |
39 | Improving heating and cooling energy usage in homes drastically. | You can circulate water for washing or air for breathing without exhausting heat with a counterflow heat exchanger. These are not so expensive to build in the final analysis. | Licensing to anything that moves water and air in a household. Showers, washing machines, dishwashers, HVAC. Might even sell consulting/education. | Anyone clueful could have done this, but they haven't. | Licensing to anything that moves water and air in a household. Showers, washing machines, dishwashers, HVAC. Might even sell consulting/education. | Anyone working on energy efficiency? Not sure. | I can hack something together for literally $20. Integrating with say a dishwasher might take $10 k. Testing might be $50k. | Each home and place and product is different: all sorts of interface issues in the retrofit. | GE, any home builders, Bechtel, IPO | dani.fong@gmail.com | Hey Dani, Gut feeling says one day you will build something that changes the world. This is cool! /Gustaf |
40 | Indepent movie theatre & independent film revival through social media. HubSpot for movie theatres. | Movie theatres suck. They can only show the crap Hollywood distributes, they have no idea who their customers are (or what they like), and the customer experience is crap. All of this could be fixed by building community around the theatre. | Local film lovers, entertainment-seekers, anyone with $15 that's looking for something fun to do. | For theatres: metrics-driven business with guaranteed results. For movie-goers: Better experience w/ access to more than just mainstream movies. | Consulting, evolving into an automated SaaS system. | - filmaster.com - an online community for film buffs (with NetFlix style recommendation system); I'm not sure about the English version, but I know the Polish version (filmaster.pl) cooperates with independent movie theaters. (@pithyless) | Could start as a simple social media consultancy. | Getting initial clients. Film distribution deals. Time needed to develop the software. | Major film distributors, major film festivals, national companies with local-marketing focus. | Available for others to run with. E-mail jay.neely@socialstrategist.com if you want more of my thoughts on it. | |
41 | IPhone-based credit card with P2P lending | Credit card companies charge very high merchant processing fees and have high interest rates. This will dramatically lower these fees, and lower the interest charges | All credit card transactions | Easy-to-use and cheaper than the competition | Flat or percentage fee on the transaction | PayPal, Credit card companies | Work with regulatory rules, develop technology, market it | Major financial institution, PayPal | gershon.bialer@gmail.com | ||
42 | Lock your savings into the housing market, so you don't get priced out! | A simple way to invest your savings in a fund linked to local real-estate prices. Useful when you can't afford to get on the property ladder, but want to ensure that what savings you do have maintain their purchasing power in the local housing market. Most attractive in housing markets which are somewhat volatile, where there's a perceived risk that first-time buyers are going to get priced out of the market | Young first-time buyers saving up a deposit | There isn't (AFAIK!) an easy, consumer-friendly way to do this at the moment. You can do clever things with spread-betting on housing indexes, but it's a bit scary for a non-exert, and also the house price indexes which it's based on aren't localised enough to ensure that your purchasing power is preserved in a particular area and/or segment of the market | Cream some of the money off the top of the pool, like everyone else in finance, I guess | Some existing residential and commercial property funds (although not really targetting the segment of the market that first-time buyers are gonna be interested in), joint equity home purchasing schemes, spread-betting sites allowing bets on house price indexes -- actually case-schiller real estate index futures trade on the CME. not the MOST liquid, but more or less serves this purpose with relatively small transaction costs (compared to real estate) and is roughly on the order of the size of transaction people should need to invest in real estate | Honestly no idea, but i imagine a lot | Regulatory nonsense, needing hard-core wall street types on the board to get credibility. To make it work you'd have to either buy actual property (but then you have to worry about how to manage it), or sell some kind of on-paper-only property derivatives, which you'd need to find people to buy / underwrite, to take the opposite side of the bets consumers want to make. Probably a PITA either way. Perhaps it could provide a way for institutional players to hedge against exposure to residential property prices Finding accurate enough data to base the localised house price indexes on could be a problem. Maybe insufficient liquidity / transaction volume to price things properly if you make the criterea too narrow | Could be profitable in its own right, could sell to all manner of financial players | matthew.willson@gmail.com | I'm sure this is flawed - just adding it because I'd like to know more about why. If it were available it's a product I'd consider buying... -Matt /n |
43 | Mail server with API access. You take care of incoming mail (remove spam, virus etc.) and give an API that web applications can access | The most difficult aspect of handling mail is not the actual mail server part (it's easy to setup a mail server) but parsing the actual mails. Clients will send mail in HTML formats, strange encodings, attachments etc. If someone could take care of that and provide an easy to use API, the developers can concentrate on other things | Developers of applications that handle mail | You combine a secure mail hosting service and do the hard part like separating attachments, extracting / sanitizing HTML mails etc. Perhaps you could even let the client register a call back page. The client should not have to poll your sever. Just call the client's web page for each incoming mail | Charge for large volumes of incoming mail. Alerts using SMS could also be useful | sendgrid.com | Very little. You just need a standard mail server that supports sending incoming mail to a script. As volume increases, you may have to make a custom mail server (using Twisted perhaps) Bandwidth would probably be small, compared to a standard web server You could probably reuse some of the code found in some mail clients for parsing mail | The hard part would probably be to find potential partners. You could perhaps make a plugin to existing CRM / CMS systems. | CRM companies | No time to do it myself | (@royrod) I don't get the idea here. You mean like, for a company's *inbound* emails, if it's part of their product offering to intelligently process them? Like, FB's newish feature where you can reply to a comment via email and it'll post your comment? It's a good idea, not sure how big the market is though. (nfriedly) I've had to struggle with this some myself and think it could be a viable business. Another idea that could be built on top of this service: lead email parsing. I work with a couple of insurance sales companies and they each have a rather poor email lead-to-database parser that requires a person to write a new set of parse rules every time a lead company changes their format. seems like postageapp.com might do the trick. - (nfriedly) I think postageapp.com does the opposite of what he's talking about here. They do outgoing mail whereas this idea is about incoming (if I understand it right) (@midnightmonster) lamson pretty well solves this if you can work in Python (op) Yes, you understood right. This is for developers of applications that handle incoming mail.ddd |
44 | Map phonenumber with device database | If you could pay for access and be able to get information about what device is linked to a particular phone number you can target mobile applications directly to those devices without determining if it works | Mobile app developers | Lower costs for distritbution | Charge per access. $0.001 per number? | I don't know http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ http://deviceatlas.com/ | Super-strong Network effect. First mover advantage | @gustaf | (coryl) I don't get how this is useful. How can you better target mobile apps by knowing phone numbers associated with their devices? Answer: You can send them an SMS and you know what phone they have and if it's likely they have internet access. For example if you have a db och 1 million numbers and could figure out who have iphones it would be useful (olegp) when a device connects to your service to download an app, you can determine what device it is by inspecting the user agent http header Answer: Yes, if they have Internet, If you had built an app for that phone. By that time 80% of your distribution cost is wasted. You sent 800k SMS's to phones unable to install the app. (gridspy) How is this not an opt-in SMS marketing spam list? | ||
45 | Matlab on the web. Interactive data analysis in your web browser. The data and computing resources live in the cloud. | Getting useful information out of large datasets quickly. | Researchers (university, pharma, etc.) | You don't have to wait until the end of time for your computation to finish only to realize that there was a bug in your code, or that you were asking the wrong question in the first place. And if you want to let others play with your data or your results you can send them a link instead of shipping them a hard drive. | User subscriptions, probably per user with bulk pricing available. | Matlab and Mathmatica are stable, mature products in which a lot of people have invested a lot of time and money (both the venders of those systems and their users). The switching costs for something like this are very high. But the reduction in the load on in-house IT staff and the increase in productivity that comes with not having to wait for your computation to finish could overcome that. | A few man-years of developer time (living expenses if the developers are the founders). Using something like ec2 means there's no extra initial capital required. | * Figuring out a pricing model which is easy for the customer to understand and predict, and which scales with infrastructure costs. One could do this by dataset size, but if you want to introduce shared (public) datasets this becomes complicated. * Writing the parser, and the interactive editor/repl is a lot of work * Getting the resource allocation right. (How many compute instances should I be running right now? How many pieces should I slice this dataset into? Where should I send those pieces to minimize communication overhead?) * Getting people to hand over their data. This isn't so much of a problem in academia, but a lot of the applications of this sort of thing are in pharma/biomed, where data is closely guarded. And, the big one: * Getting people to invest the time required to learn how to use it. Being on the web makes this a little smoother, but it's still a huge obstacle. | Wolfram Research, Mathworks, National Instruments IBM, Oracle, Microsoft: This sort of thing isn't their core business, but it would mesh well with what they're already doing. | HN: rabidsnail This is an idea for you to steal and make tons of money off of. I don't want to start a business right now. | How does the R Project fit into this? There's only partial overlap w/ Mathematica, etc. |
46 | Menupages with ability to rate and comment on individual food items. Currently, restaurant rating services focus on the restaurant level. This service would focus on the individual food item. Mobile app. Yelp like social network. | When you're at a restaurant and trying to decide what to order, you can open this app and view reviews of individual food items from people who visited the restaurant. You can also review food items. Maybe even a urbanspoon like pick a random food item off the menu. | People who eat at restaurants | This service is focused on the individual food items rather than on restaurants. | Advertising. premium accounts | Yelp, Urbanspoon, Menupages, Foodspotting, Foodlets.in | Not sure | Getting enough people to use the service to make it a valuable resource. Preventing shills | None | jbialer@gmail.com @jbialer | I like this idea a lot. I feel like I'm always telling people not just where to go to eat but what to eat when they're there. Restaurants could benefit from knowing what consumers like, consumers could benefit by finding other people with similar tastes, etc. (@csavage) (jcs) I'm a fan. Could make an accurate recommendation engine out of it. (gridspy)Automatic OCR of the recept would be a big plus. Point the camera at the recept and press a button, reads the resturant name and collates the purchased meals. Presents a menu to rate each item on the bill. Also offers a simple budget of where and what the user spent money on if they want to see later. Same thing for the menu. OCR on the name of the restaurant or just autocomplete to see which items were ordered and read ratings.Perhaps even learn which other diners share your tastes and make it into a social network to meet those people. |
47 | Mint for nutrition. | People don't know what they're eating, an dietary diseases are the leading cause of death and likely sadness in developed countries. My idea would have the nutritional value of everything you buy, which you will likely eventually eat, printed on a receipt in an easily readable format, along with a URL to your account, tracking your habits over time. It's hashed to your credit card, so you don't have to do any sign up. We can make recommendations and give people goals and games from there. | Grocery stores, maybe restaurants, maybe community supported agriculture and school districts and hospitals and large corporate cafeterias, maybe something like Kaiser Permanente and health clubs and diet supply stores. | The limiting factor in doing a good job in tracking your nutrition is that data entry is too tedious. Many people work on nutrition calculators, just like many people worked on financial software before mint. People were too lazy to use it. | Sell the service to the grocery stores as a distinguishing factor, at first, possibly per ticket, eventually make it free and sell personalized advertising tunes to help people get healthier and eat tastier, better food. | dailyburn.com, workfoodout.com (Brandon: I created this) | Not known. Depends on founders/engineers/biz dev people. No hard expenses. | Apparently something already exists: dailyburn.com. It's clearly not in every grocery store: if you had any deals like that you could kick butt. (encoderer) I came back to this because I was thinking about it some more. I was reminded of a talk that Michael Pollan (sp?) gave on NPR last year sometime. He mentioned that such basic things as calorie counts are probably incorrect. That the way we calculate calories is based on decades old science and it could be significantly off. If you're talking about a tool to truly aid the nutrition problem in the world, this should be examined more closely. | Grocery stores (e.g. whole foods), the public market. | dani.fong@gmail.com | Grocery stores don't necessarily seem to have an incentive to implement this (DaniFong: Not true -- they all have to distinguish themselves in a commodity market -- whole foods already does similar things, such as selling books), people need to buy groceries anyway. It is possible that this could be targeted to organic supermarkets, because consumers are already health conscious. In my opinion, from research I've done in this area it seems as if the best bet would be to add incentives via insurance companies and employers who have a stake in the health of the consumer. This would create demand that supermarkets might then be keen to capitalize on. (@royrod) I think this is a pretty good idea. It could chart, over time, how much of various vitamins and nutrients you're getting. I think people would eat that up (er, bad pun) (stevederico) Response Updated: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BofwYLXtIC (MLnick) I had an idea for a feature for an app like this that is a bit out there: you could take pictures of everything you eat on your phone, and it would recognise what it is and input it into your daily calorie counter. So you have a record of every packet of junk / Starbucks white chocolate mocha with whipped cream you had today! (I realise the image recognition is not quite there yet, but hopefully not too distant future). (jonpatrick65) regarding taking pics of food: could you use something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to identify pictures of food? I've never used it, but as I understand it, companies use it a lot to tag images that can't be recognized mechanically (it's essentially large volumes of low skill tasks that are outsourced to people around the world for a small fee per transaction). This IMO is the best idea on this page. (encoderer) DailyPlate.com ? (@sloversam) I love this idea (although connecting to a credit card always causes some issues -- you would want the option to be able to manually enter food products at the site too (even if it is tedious)). I think you are on to something big -- the UX/UI interface and some game dynamics would be the key. Did you see Jamie Oliver's recent TED talk? (a must watch for you). People being uninformed about the shite they put into their bodies is one of the biggest problems we have as a society today (a must read for you: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html?_r=1). You will have a captive audience if you pull this off -- do you have a background in nutrition or food at all? @Aurametrix I am actually working on this, e-mail me (irene at aurametrix) if interested |
48 | MMO simulating the world and much in it, especially climate | People want to feel powerful, want to learn, want to feel like heros, want to really identify with their imagined selves. If you give them a platform for a cause that gives them this they will take it. Additionally, climate models do not predict human or political response, which is the wild card. If people played an MMO, on, say facebook, and they kept seeing how cooperation is required to avoid various global calamities, maybe they would cooperate. We need an actual climate and biosphere model though. | There are trillions of dollars worth of money that people can save by saving energy. There are billions of dollars to be made by selling or financing things to save those trillions. We will make millions by advertising to those billions. | There are no games that go to this depth in simulating global realities. | Advertising for ways people can save money or earn money, get power, and improve the climate. | Civilization V? SimEarth? Things are pretty new. | Probably $500K for the demo. $50 MM for full development, possibly more. | It is a huge development project, and has to start relatively big. | Game companies, organizations like the Grameen bank, the UN. | dani.fong@gmail.com | (JayNeely) Needs a much better-defined target market. (DaniFong) Ok. (JayNeely) Read the revision; still don't think it's a "target market". Who are the people that would play this game? (DaniFong: Enivornmentalists, Scientists, armchair politicians, anyone who played Civilization, Spore, SimCity, etc.) What are their characteristics? Which companies would want to advertise on this game? (DaniFong: For example, people selling efficient lights.) Why? (1W on all year = $60 expenditure, so good lights save tons of money. But people don't buy them, because they don't know; it's a hundred billion dollar market. Education sells savings.) (JayNeely) That's much better. Put that in the target market section. Also, take a look at http://www.nationstates.net/ - it's a governmental policy simulation game that sounds similar. |
49 | Movie credits website | Text only version of movie credits to make for fast searching and very light user interface. Movie credits will be presented exactly as they are at the end of the movie (white text on black background) and will have an optional scroll text mode. Possibly also find the ending credits music and stream from some service (last.fm?) | Super easy movie searching. Will also provide FULL movie credits for each movie. No pictures, no ads | Allow users to download music from the movie or purchase the movie online (amazon affiliate link) | imdb.com, themoviedb.org | 30,000 (plus licensing for movie information) | Gathering all of the information. IMDB does not have an api so we'd either need to find the information somewhere else (themoviedb.org has limited information) or allow users to fill in the information on their own. This could quickly croudsource the data but would require more programming on the backend to track revisions and block spam. | Start selling ads, movie tickets or just ditch the idea all together | justinleegarrison@gmail.com | ||
50 | Music Hobbyist Match. Match amateur and hobbyist musicians at similar ability levels for in-person or virtual jamming, feedback, or collaboration. | Hobbyist musicians (aka the guy jamming alone in his basement), outnumber those that play in bands by a factor of thousands. Many of these people don't really want to play in a band but would love a little collaboration and feedback (me, for example). Trouble is, most people want to play with people at a similar skill level, which can be hard to find. | Lone musicians - guitarists, bassists, saxophonists, cellists, violinists, anyone who ever studied an instrument and wants to "pick it up again." | Existing services are focused on people who want to join bands, and go out and perform in public. This is for people who want to mingle, jam, and collaborate for fun and self-improvement in a low-risk way. A key feature would be an on-line "audition" ... you diagnose your own skill level by playing a series of progressively more difficult pieces (customized for each of several instruments). Since all participants grade themselves against the same pieces, you can find people with similar skill levels. Also, you could upload a recording of yourself for others to judge against their own ability. This reduces the risk of that terribly awkward moment when you get together to jam and realize your fellow musician is waay better than you and can't wait to get away (or vice versa). | tbd - small participation fee perhaps | Bandmix.com, musicianmatch.com, craigslist, meetup.org | $20k | Finding high enough concentration of interested musicians in a single city/geography to encourage in-person meetups. Otherwise, web-based jams could be done, but maybe difficult to do real-time. | tbd | jonpatrick65 [.at,] gmail {,dot.} com | |
51 | Online Mentor | Educating more people through social media. People are eager to read and learn online because it is more comfortable, social and convenient. People who post on forums or answer question s on SO are knowledgeble and can teach a lot to other people. They can be mentors and can be 'followed' by students. there won't be any commitments but whenever a blog post is | people who are eager to learn new things about their subject area. | it is different in a way that it will be more like a online classroom without grades, assignments but still be knowlagable | Premium classrooms | none | ~3K | getting good mentors to start writing articles and be followed by more people | can be acquired by online classroom software like BlackBoard | bhaarat.s@gmail.com @bhaaratcrckt | (fan): What would differentiate this service from Khan academy? There are also some video sites i've seen online with tutorials. |
52 | Online spreadsheet to develop new startup ideas | g | Entrepreneurs | Informed community, open, novel interface | halfbakery, already large audience, but all fictitious + ideane.ws (defunct?) | $0 | Overcoming stealth mode mentality. Griefers - those who take joy in wrecking content. | None | HN: jcs, james.summerfield@gmail.com | Fun, but will probably lead nowhere. Already getting some good ideas! Yeah but unlikely someone will find a partner here. Probably will stay on HN for a few hours and then be forgotten. The site ideane.ws met that fate. very interesting experiment Flawed because "stealth mode" is utterly key to IP. (BOGUS! [JMC]) You can do the same on Orgvolve.com, plus list your skills, start a virtual organization, etc hmm...some _____ are disappearing Needs a way to control vandals. Why just a spreadsheet? Why not a dedicated website? A dedicated site would have a bigger community, plus people could "own" their ideas and not worry about someone else editing them. - as listed above orgvolve.com, you don't even have to register (bemmu) Because a spreadsheet everyone is familiar with, takes only minutes to set up and is probably 90% as useful. | |
53 | Pandora for ChatRoulette using Facebook. | People are lonely. People assume that ChatRoulette has taken off because of the anonymity and how crappy it is: I think it's that there's a great demand to see other people's faces. You can get more than enough info and enough of a social network from people's facebook profiles that you can link up people in the same area, with the same interests, with the same friends. Or totally different ones, it's up to you. | Lonely People. You sell the opportunity to connect -- you both need to agree, it's otherwise anonymous with no contact info. You're selling social connections | Technology is amazing and people are still lonely. | You sell the opportunity to connect -- you both need to agree, it's otherwise anonymous with no contact info. You're selling social connections | ChatRoulette? Don't know. | All the stuff *has* to be built on scalable cloud services if it explodes. Other than that I'm guessing $200 k of startup development polishing the marble until it's nice. Could launch on way less. | Not really. | Facebook, Google, Loopt, IPO. | dani.fong@gmail.com | faceroulette.com (@royrod) What is the Pandora aspect? Are you saying there'd be Channels or Filters? e.g. I just want to surf through/talk with Girls, Guys, Young, Old, etc.? I think this could work, although probably getting enough girls and filtering the scary guys would be a challenge. I guess you could have voting/reputation to help with it. Not sure if it's differentiated enough from CR. Tried it. The biggest issue is getting traction, or a lot of users on the site at the same time to make reccomendations work, and at the same time.. just making the experience fun. My site was using the users facebook profile data.. algorithmically being able to match up users on chatroulette style product and being able to target the users by attributes found in their profile. I think my biggest assumption that was wrong.. was trying to legitimize chatroulette... could be just wrong timing. @cheolhominale |
54 | Public Takeover - Use capitalism to control the ills of capitalism, one share at a time. Use crowdsourcing and social network effects to take over public companies by linking all socially-responsible minority shareholders. | Create a "public option" where the public can opt to vote out management and board members that don't have the benefit of society as a priority and to vote against issues that create externalities (environmental damage, social injustice, hurt workers rights). | People who want to build a better world via the market. | Instead of waiting for the government to step in and "correct" public companies, the public can step in and "correct" them and the management. | First, an irresponsible company is identified. Second, the site users determine via voting that this is a company that needs to be put in check by society. Third, the users buy shares of the company to be taken over via this new startup. The startup holds the shares as a fund. Fourth, issues to be voted on at board meetings are presented to users, who then vote on the possible socially-responsible options. Fifth, the majority rules and all these "minority shareholders" vote together. Dividends maintain operations and can be used to fund future takeovers. Donations can be accepted, but does not confer extraordinary voting rights for the person donating. | Lobbyists, Hedge-fund managers, Banks, Fundamentalist Republicans, Unscrupulous politicians. | Honestly, I haven't a clue. The development wouldn't be too difficult or time consuming. The legal and financial issues may be expensive to resolve. Pro Bono work by those that believe in the idea could help us bring this to market cheaply. | Integrity of those running the company. Everything needs to be "black-boxed" but auditable to prevent insider trading and SEC regulation violations. We also need to find talented people with the financial market experience to bring this to market in a way that does not run afoul of regulations and that is not game-able by the market. Those running this startup should not be able to see how the users are voting for or against a takeover at all stages until the takeover is complete. After a successful takeover, everything is made public. | None, except maybe the public. Dividends stay in the company to further its mission. | @andrewdeandrade | (akikuchi) What you are suggesting is 1. Identify a "bad" company 2. Donate large sums of money to that firm's shareholders 3. Run the firm not for your own benefit, but instead for the benefit of "society" etc. (in other words, run the firm inefficiently, while personally covering the cost of inefficiency in the name of the greater good). Admirable goals, but this is not the way to achieve them. (coryl) sounds pretty flawed. this is essentially communism, no? you want public control of private companies. how is the public suppose to know what goes on in private businesses (and thus when to kick management out)? the public would need 51% of ownership in order to vote out management. (seltzered on HN) karmabanque.com tried to do this, they even had a private (hedge fund?) firm pitch in. basically worked by crowdsourcing people to short businesses that were potentially unethical. Max Keiser has some info on why it failed in one of his podcasts. One reason mentioned is the dichotomy of the activist, where they will happily have their protests independent of the companies, but are afraid of directly shorting/etc. because they're afraid it may hinder their employment chances. It would be faster, cheaper, more profitable, and more impactful to start a competing company that "did things right" (andrewdeandrade) @coryl, not exactly. communism is an entirely different beast. if you look up the definition of communism, you'll see that it has nothing to do with this. What I am suggesting is a market-based mechanism to allow the public to participate in activities of public companies. Inside a company, most decisions are made in an effort to reduced internal costs and expenses. In many cases this can result in externalities, which are basically costs for societies. Think of a coal-fired power plant. Coal was chosen to reduce the cost of producing energy, however coal pollutes and this produces a cost for society and the environment. Toxic-waste cleanups by the government is one example of an externality upon which society can place a price tag. Not all externalities are as easily priced, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a cost. Most of these externalities are paid in either taxes or in the loss of quality of life. What I'm suggesting is no more socialist than the idea of cap'n'trade carbon credit markets. Take note that I am only talking about publicly-traded companies. Remaining private would shield a company from this "market force", but also shield them from the cash that public markets provide. Imagine if an option like this were available during the financial crisis 1-2 years ago. It would have been much easier to make bankers accountable. It's a potential solution to keeping Wall Street greed in check. If the public doesn't agree with AIG continuing to keep giving out ridiculous bonuses to those responsible for the problem, then they would have a "financial option" to take over AIG and correct this problem. What this idea in effect does is democratize company voting rights and reduce the impact of majority shareholders who are typically only looking to be self-serving. Of course this idea would only be actionable for companies with a small enough market cap to be taken over, but with smart money management and time, this could grow into a large enough fund to be able to wield the same power as a fund like the Blackstone Group. This organization would only get involved in taking over companies that have done something to merit enough ire from the public that the public decides to take them over. The obvious problem is that I imagine share price might fall significantly as soon as a fund like this intervenes in a company. So users would have to be prepared to lose money in order to make companies more responsible. How exactly would the fund dump its 51% of the company back onto the market after making its intervention, without losing its shirt? (I'm presuming that, for better or worse, management policies aimed primarily at 'tempering the ills of capitalism' wouldn't generally be beneficial to a company's stock price, and the market wouldn't like the idea of a company being run by the mass vote of a bunch of amateurs) After thinking about it though, there are firms who specialise in this sort of thing - they're called 'activist investors'. Knight Vinke is quite a famous one. Not activists in the sense of voting for corporate responsibility, necessarily. Hardcore wall street types who're looking to make a buck like everyone else, but go about it via shareholder activism against management of poorly-run companies. Poorly run as in genuinely inefficient attempts at capitalism, rather than poorly run as in 'raises political ire' (although the two may occasionally coincide) |
55 | Real Time pic, I own the domain, hashpic.com and looking for partners and cofounders, I do code but need more hackers | Hundreds of thousands of pics are being submitted to Twitter real time. Get people to hash tag the pics, geo location is already there. We do not host the pics, but we bring classify pics using their hashtags. | Everyone on Twitter/Social media sites | A better way to discover real time pics | Ads | Twitpic, yfrog, tweetpic, tweetphoto.. AND you who just read this :) | hosting (not for pics, we just link to twitpic/etc) and coding | Low, but no one is doing this now and I own the best domain name to execute this hashpic.com | Google. No just kidding, but any social media co can be potential acquisitors | @khangtoh, HN: khangtoh | Will be obsolete if a company (Google?) comes out with a near perfect auto-tagger. (OP) (OP) I wouldn't worry about Google, Delicious never did and don't underestimate the power of UGC. @jbialer: If you could pay attention to number of tweets/ who is tweeting images, you could make a tweetmeme for images. You could also aggregate the tweets about a specific image under that image and have a comment button on the images that uses Oauth and sends their comment back out to Twitter. |
56 | restaurants on your route | help people find a restaurant along the way to wherever they're going | people with cars | google/yahoo/microsoft/mapquest can all find restaurants near a place or routes to a place, but they can't find restaurants near the route to a place. | restaurant advertising | same as the acquirers. quality varies, but has improved a lot in recent years. | not too much | would probably be built on top of an existing map service, meaning that we're at their mercy. could somewhat negate by building it to use multiple map services. | google/microsoft/yahoo/mapquest | http://nfriedly.com/contact | |
57 | Review site of ebooks and other digital products. Often these sites are giant sales pitches and can be misleading. The only reviews they have access to are testimonials posted on the website. | Giving users access to an independent review source to help in the buying process. It also provides ebook authors with an additional marketing channel. | Potential shoppers and authors | No central independent source for users seeking reviews | Advertisements. Although my main interests with solving the problem, money is the 2nd focus | Online retailers of ebooks. This site focuses more on the niche of independently produced ebooks. | Would need more help in this area, my expertise is more on the marketing/business side of things | User and content acquisition | pjharrin@gmail.com | (JayNeely) Essentially, you're creating a yelp.com for information products. One of the main ways Yelp has gained traction is by getting high-quality business owners to promote the good reviews they're getting on Yelp. (pjharrin) You're right it is essentially a yelp for information products. My initial plan to build up content during the beta stage by contacting authors who would likely receive positive reviews and would promote that fact. (JayNeely) If you can find people blogging / tweeting about these products, and get quick permission to quote them, you could use their off-site reviews as seed content for your on-site system. (pjharrin) Thanks for the good idea, do you mind if I contact you to discuss the idea more? (JayNeely) Sure, happy to provide feedback. E-mail me at jay.neely@socialstrategist.com - I'd love to see a more detailed overview of your idea, but questions about specific areas you're looking to improve / problems you're not sure how to solve would be best to include, too. | |
58 | Schedule your wakeup call online | Web application to schedule a wake up call. Features include advanced scheduling, and machine learning. It could learn what times within a given 20 minute window to call that minimizes the number of rings. You could be forced to answer a quiz on the keypad so we know you are awake. | Consumers | High Availability, Low interaction from end user. No need to set alarm before bed. Dynamic scheduling for different days of the week. No reliance on power cord attached to alarm clock. Receive wake up call/text. Peace of mind. | Small monthly or yearly fee/ Free with ads | Alarm clocks, mobile phones. | Minimal, need som | Understanding of VOIP or text messaging server products. | ? | tocomment on HN | (stevederico) new wave here: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BofwYLXtIA (Barnabas) extremely easy to implement this with Twilio or Tropo or similar. |
59 | Self-Cleaning, Continuous Disinfection Toilets | Eradication the age old adage of Toilet cleaning 'Of the People, For the People, and By the People'. We are solving the problem of cleaning and disinfecting the toilets, automatically, without human intervention, every time, for every user. | Hotels, Airports, malls, high-end HNI's. et-al | It cleans 'itself' automatically with any human intervention. Saves water and space. World first fully automated and encapsulated integrated sanitation system. | Sales, After-sales (AMC), margins from OE' components, Body advertising. | Large sanitation players, and sanitation industry giants with global standards and strength. like Kohler, Duravit, Moen, Hans Grohe, etc. Large scale laterally hungry real estate biggies, like Hiranandani, Raheja, Oberoi etc. | INR 50 Lakhs | Change in mindset, first mover fight, large capital for market capture, product refinements. | Large global Sanitation companies, like Jaguar, Kohler etc. | email: alokvp@gmail.com email: apdinnovations@gmail.com Ph: 9373100073 Ph: 9272117097 | great idea, but should bear fruits. also privacy and sheet layout need to improve. Your onto something if the toilet also cleans the floor and seat and walls around the toilet because of people who miss. It'll have to cost less than the time it takes a minimum wage worker to clean the toilet several times a day. I was promised robo-maids by 2010. (fan) I've seen at airports toilets that have a sleeve around it that automatically rotates after each use. How do the expenses compare here? |
60 | Service that aggregates all the journal articles and then lets people discuss them and attach notes and other metadata to them. It will have a social network component. Librarything for journal articles. | Provides a place for people who are reading journal articles to connect with each other and share notes and thoughts about the articles. | academic, anyone who reads journal articles | I don't there is anything like this. It would be really useful. | Advertising, premium access | none? | Not sure | Getting people to use it | None | jbialer@gmail.com @jbialer | Read more books. I suggest MIT Opencourse ware. Sounds like Wikipedia. Different from wikipedia - wikipedia is not a valid source of reference/information in academia. Journals are peer reviewed. (fan): how do you ensure the discussion is quality, versus say, random comments? |
61 | Software recycler | Allow users and companies to donate/recycle old software for credits to trade for newer software or different software completely. More details here http://j.mp/wL0b28 | Get rid of stuff you don't need anymore, and get something you do need. | Allow users to pay for credits if they do not have old software to trade in. Also sell ad space to software alternative companies and free software developers. | none that I know of | $150k | Need to verify that software licenses allow for the programs to be transferred to another user. Would also need to make sure donated licenses are valid upon submission. | Offer free software alternatives instead of trade for other paid software. Good for people to get educated on what's available. | justinleegarrison@gmail.com | ||
62 | Source once distribute everywhere. Multi submission service that allow you to post your video, blogpost etc. to many sites and social networks. | Tedious to do by hand. | People who want to make it easier to submit their content | Instead of having to go into each network and publish it this would automate the process. | A limited free version that only submit to some of the most obvious ones and then a paid that allow you to submit to all networks. | ping.fm, tarpipe.com | Servers | Setting up accounts on each network for the individual and being able to submit without being seen as a spammer | None | @hello_world, thomas.petersen@gmail.com | (JayNeely) http://tarpipe.com does this really well - allows for post once, post everywhere functionality, *or* much more fine-grained control.Will check it out thanks |
63 | The "double index stock fund" When the New York Stock Exchange closes everyday at 5:00 P.M., the opening bells for the ASX (Australian stock exchange) are only hours from ringing. Take advantage of this by investing money in "the double index fund." With the double index fund, your money never sleeps. During the day, your money will be invested in an index fund that follows the NYSE. At market close, this money will be transferred to Australia and invested in an ASX stock index. This way, investors will get twice as much bang for their buck, as 100% of investments fluctuates back and forth between the ASX and the NYSE daily. | Long-term stock market investors | With the "Double Index Fund (DIF): Investors will get more out of their money while not taking on additional risk. Index funds hold a portfolio of well diversified assets and are considered a relatively safe investment. With the Double Index Fund, investors are getting a 2-for-1 deal: money bounces back and forth between an index in the U.S. and a stock index in Australia. Historically, index funds have outperformed most financial institutions in the long term. They average a 7% return per year, which will doubles an investment every 7 years. By investing in a double index fund, your money is capable of growing even faster! 7% gain in the U.S. Index + 7% gain in an A.S.X Index =14% return! A 14% return (minus fees) is a great rate of return for investing in only stock indexes that don't have any inherent risk. | Fees / Fund transfers | None that I am aware of | $15k for additional research + $150k for development | -Fees (commisions to brokers, fund transfers,) -Currency risk | dschlossman@gmail.com | How are you going to choose stocks to invest? DIF will hire some brokers? ..or use day to day recomendation? Target Market says: "long term investors" - this kind of investors use more of fundamental analysis and do not change theirs stocks' portfolio very often. In this kind of system you could look at HFT guys (high frequency trading), however they probably cover already all the markets. I think that the last thing is the weakness - transfering money between continents is so expensive that only pro-brokers can afford it and pro-brokers already do it. Without the estimates of costs of money transfers it is hard to say if it has any future ;) 7% gain in each index does not equal 14% gain in your fund. In fact I think your returns will be far less than 7% since you are forced to trade at opening and closing times. (encoderer) Trades are expensive. Frequent trading will eat up your returns. Recently saw a quote about the 90s bull market where frequent trades (200% annual turnover) earned an 11%ish return but that buy-and-hold investors (75% annual turniver) earned a 17%ish return. IMO this isnt' viable unless you come up with a good solution to this issue. Especially because you're talking about an index fund... that will be buying and selling every stock in an index every day, times two indices! (fan) Trades do not need to be expensive if you are buying and selling stock indexes in mass. For example, executed correctly each trade can be under 1 bps. However encoderer is right in that over a year, trading for 252 days, you'll lose about 1-3%. Regardless, I feel there are strong theortical grounds for why this idea may not work the way you think. The problem is that most of the gains in the stock market come from the risk you take in that market. As it stands right now, you can already get in on both US and AUstralian risk by buying index futures. Thus, there is already a very simple way of doing what you propose without sloshing the money back and forth. Also, a lot of gains come *between* the market close and market open, by sloshing the money around, you'll miss this. | ||
64 | The world needs phosphorous in order to grow food, and it's running out of accessible reserves, and running out with the wastewater. So, I propose phosphorous recovery from waste water. | Phosphate flats, the supply of phosphates that have been the P in the NPK fertilizer that feeds almost everyone on the plant, is running out -- it will be mostly gone in 30 years. China even stopped allowing exports. This could be a disaster. Phosphorous used to run in a cycle from plant to animal to waste to plant. Now it goes out into the ocean with waste water and messes things up there too. There are many valuable things in our wastewater, water being one of them, but phosphorous may top the shortlist. If you can cook the waste to recover energy, and then desalinate the water and extract phosphates form the brine chemically or ionically, you could provide a very lucrative supply. | Chemical processing industry. | We can run out of oil but if we run out of food we're fucked. Eventually we have to run phosphorous in the cycle again; it is an essential part of the infrastructure of the planet. | Selling the phosphorous. | Not sure. | My bet is ~100k for theory and early proof of concept, 1-10 MM for scale prototypes, 50 - 100 MM for a pilot plant. | Getting the physical efficiency up, lifetime up, and costs down. Can it work acceptably at all? | Public market. Fertilizer producing companies, mining companies, agribusiness. | dani.fong@gmail.com | |
65 | TL;DR browser add-on... because your time is precious! | http://syskall.com/project-idea-tldr-browser-add-on | High information consumers. | Doesn't really exist. | No idea :/ | None | 10 $ | Critical mass is needed for success. | Social networks | http://syskall.com/ | Not sure if this is a money making business ;) |
66 | Track movies you've seen, where and who you've seen them with, reviews, ratings and more. | Ability to look back and see when you saw a movie, your ratings, your friends ratings, where you or your friends are seeing movies. Suggest movies your friends enjoy that you haven't seen. See movie listings and "check in" at a specific showing of a movie. 4sq+yelp+imdb kind of thing. | Movie buffs, people looking for movies to see, or movie reviews. People looking for local movie listings at theaters. Check-in or movie addicts | People watch a lot of TV and movies - possibly more than people go out to places. If they could track all of it the same way they track checkins, that's potentially a lot of use. Also ability to track when, where and with who you saw a movie which i don't see anywhere else. (is this anywhere?). Checkins, reviews, ratings, watching a movie could go out to twitter/facebook/etc. | Affiliates for movie sales. Maybe ticket sales? Tie in with theaters or distributors for movie releases. | Imdb, flixster, rottentomatoes, movie theater listings, iheartmovies, icheckmovies, 4sq? | 15k to license imdb data. licensing movie theater listing information (?) | Lots of parts - website, mobile app, friends integration, movie information, theater tie ins, finding local theaters | Larger movie sites probably. Movie distributors. | HN:dyogenez | (akikuchi) basically a Goodreads for movies? (dyogenez) Exactly! There's last.fm for music, goodreads for books, but nothing for movies. (jimmyjim) Be sure to check out http://www.icheckmovies.com/ - it sounds a lot like what you're describing (dyogenez) Very true, good site! Not as social as I'm thinking, or with the ability to track when/where - but one of the only place I've seen to implement some of the ideas listed (joseakle) Why would i care when or where i saw a movie? Movie showtimes is a solved problem in the US but not everywhere. I guess it would be better to be able to quickly find movies to watch, tell your friends you want to watch it and help you organize the "viewing" either in a theater or at home by renting, netflix, borrowing, buying, downloading etc. (jimmyjim) joseakle: In the "target audience", dyogenez has listed "movie buffs". i.e., the guys who want to make sure they've watched every movie in the IMDB top 250 movies list. Although I'm no movie buff myself, I've realized the importance of movies as a resource for foreign-language learning material. I watch popular movies with subtitles and foreign language audiotracks (and I choose to watch the more popular movies because their translations are generally more reliable). (dyogenez) One example would be answering questions like "what's the best movie I saw last year?" or "What are my favorite movies that came out in 2009?". The location side I'm still not sure of the usefulness other than tieing it in so that you know when you saw a movie - that's more important than where. Although you could later on see who else was at the same movie as you if there was a large userbase. (joseakle) I guess this discussion would be so much beter with wave, here's the link, https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BedIWBbJMA (jonpatrick65) Cool idea ... My wife and I tracked all the movies we rented for about 2 years, to settle the argument: which one of us picks better movies? We logged 50 or 60 movies, tracking: title, date, which one of us picked it, and our respective ratings (1-10). Naturally, there was some tendency to rate our own picks higher - but the results were surprisingly "objective." I kept a chart showing average rating of ones' own pick, vs. rating of the spouse's pick, overall rating, etc. This way it was easy to see if one person had excessive bias toward his/her own pick. Interestingly, she ended up, on average, picking "better" movies. I think because she spent more time reading the description on the box, and was more likely to pick a movie that appeared, on the surface, to be a "quiet" movie, whereas I tended to pick movies with more crime, violence, action, etc - which, on average, tended to be not that great. It would have been more fun to do this online - and compare to my broader family and friends as well. Everyone we showed the ratings to loved it, loved seeing how we rated them, etc. Also, with a DB-driven approach, you could see if you like summer movies better than holiday movies, movies that take place mostly outdoors vs. indoors, movies with Brad Pitt vs. movies w/ George Clooney, etc (the Pandora for movies). |
67 | Train dating/meeting service. You specify when you leave, where you're going, what time and then find other people that you can meet and chat with on the train. Start with NYC | People don't talk to other people on trains anymore. This helps people find a conversation partner for their train ride. | Bored people on trains | Nothing like it. | Premium accounts. | None? http://www.submate.com/ | Not that much | Getting enough people to use it. | None | jbialer@gmail.com @jbialer | I like this idea. I had something similar on row above. In your idea only concern would be privacy. some people will be hesitant to reveal their schedule out like that. I'm in the DC area and take the train a lot to have noticed this similar problem. if you do run with this i'd be interested to help (@bhaaratcrckt) I also had this idea too. It was a sort of broader Foursquare for dating. See who's around you, find out some limited info, and maybe ping them with the phone. I still think it's a great idea with a huge opportunity but a lot of potential players (which I found doing research on it). hackernews: freshfunk (gridspy): You could make an iPhone application that you use while on the train itself. The GPS while the train is travelling localises the route (and probably the particular route based on stop times). Then you could find someone on the train in real time (or book a trip with someone else who did the same thing some time in the last few months). (fan): Why limit it to train? It could be an app that anyone can activate anywhere if they expect to have more than N minutes free and want to talk to others. I recall there was a device like this for dating a few years ago (e.g. you'd have it on if you'd like to date and it'll match you up with people of the other gender) |
68 | Treasure Mapping meets Google Maps meets Pub Crawls and Running Routes | Friends are always asking each other for the best route, the best stores, where that ice cream place is in relation to the favorite pizza shop, what the best way is to run around the Charles River | The socially inclined | Google maps allows you to tag your favorite places (and maybe share with others) but it is very complex and un-simple. Allow users to integrate their current "Chat list" into maps - click on a friend, and see their shared points of interest and outlined routes on a map. | Based on your tagged favorites, businesses along a friend's tagged route will show up and advertise to you. Sell information of who is tagging your place of business. | Foursquare and the like are very hot in the market. Google is a behemoth. | Could likely be designed using Google Maps API, so under $25k | I may not be able to work Google Maps well enough to know they already have this feature. Geolocation startup may have beaten me to it as well. | Google, Foursquare, Magellan? | j.vincent4@gmail.com | |
69 | Using video playlists, people create radio stations (the playlist songs expire), and friends work together to keep it running. Listeners can hear their friends introduce songs, they can go back and forth among tracks, and there's a plugin for downloading as mp4. Listeners can also choose to get news, sports and weather reports from individuals around the world who create them. | Music on the web has been stuck. Last.fm and others are good but not good enough. This leverages the power of the social network to create a unique value proposition: Farmville allows friends to group together to upkeep a farm -- here they're grouping together to upkeep their own "radio station". | The same demographic a Facebook users. | Friends /use/ their connections. They have a chance to show off their taste in music, to publish what they're listening to. They can find and download tracks. They can even create, say a daily sports report that anyone can listen to. | None yet, but the costs are minimal. | Live365, Pandora, others | Just links are stored, so the only costs are hosting costs. An early alpha is already working on a VPS. | Getting viral. This is something that will either work well or not at all. | vevo | david 927 at gmail.com hn: david927 | (Bemmu) I like the idea of friends introducing songs, but doesn't really have much to do with Farmville other than possibly being a FB app =) (Reply: David) I used Farmville because friends worked together to get results. Connections just didn't sit there -- you /used/ them. (bricestacey) I actually have an ongoing FB message (a couple years old now) where we share music videos amongst a handful of friends. This is a great idea - if for nothing more than enhancing the interface (e.g. FB messages begin to get unwieldy after about 10 messages and looking back on old ones can take awhile to load them all). |
70 | Watch movies with friends. | What movie to watch, with whom and when. | Moviewatchers. | Simple, easy, social. | Good question. | Flixster, Fandango (et al), Google Movie Showtimes, Yahoo Movies, Theater weppages. // Netflix on Xbox 360 does this too. -- timdorr | Some time. Built on appengine. | Licencing showtime info. | Entertainment portals, newspaper websites. | https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:search:in%253AInbox,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BedIWBbJMA.2 | https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:search:in%253AInbox,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BedIWBbJMA.2 (JayNeely) http://doodle.com w/ IMDB / Netflix integration already been done by Lycos (service was called Lycos Cinema and failed due to lack of quality content) |
71 | What do teens want? | Finding other people to learn a subject with. E.g. programming language maths. Provides motivation and structure for learning. Leave feedback for users so that you can find the useful people to study with. (JayNeely here; it looks like your value prop got copied over by someone else's) | Parents, grandparents, aunts, unlces, older audiences who have a teen in their life, and who are not caught up on pop culture (this is a lot of people) | Easy, no BS, site that shows top 10 things teens want | affiliates, partnerships (special discounts for particular vendors), possibly subscriptions? | Blogs, amazon + amazon user wishlists, listings sites, online research. But, this site will aim to make it *dead* simple to see at a glance what teens want. | Not much. 10k? | Need to get "Experts" in what teens want, but not many other barriers, and should be pretty easy to editorialize at first. The big challenge is to make it scalable, without much intervention. (a good network of experts) | grow out more sites, like "what do X want" for major lucrative demographics. Potential exits to amazon and other online retailers - or, simply be a lifestyle business with a healthy amount of rev. | (bemmu) Does this really need to be a site? Isn't this more like an article in some publication? - (OP) the difference here is that the focus is on the list of items, that are "guaranteed" to be liked by teens -- kinda like a woot.com for gifts. The next step is to make the site do "what do X want", depending on how it works out for this one niche. - (coryl) Amazon user wishlist? - (bemmu) This site would obviously be easy to monetize, but how do you get people there? It would be very expensive to advertise it. How about making it instead be a very compelling message you can send to someone? Like video presentations for different products, for example a heartbreakingly sweet "please buy me a PS3 mom, because I love you so much - music video" you can send to your mom. After the video plays, there's an aff link where you can buy it instantly =) - (OP) marketing would consist of some advertising, but also trying to get a lot of word-of-mouth going in those particular target demos (like parent forums, etc). Maybe also run ads alongside particular product searches. also, the making a compelling message idea is reallly neat :) that's targeting the gift-receiver audience, and would be smart to tie those people in as well (bemmu) Yeah and the value prop for the gift receiver is that it becomes more likely that their mom will remember to buy that PS3 for them =) (OP) plus, if the site could offer exclusive discounts when teens make a video/message, this would be even more compelling for teens to create the content (bemmu) We could actually host contests where people can upload their plea messages and give prizes to the best ones. I had positive experience of this, I did an experiment where I asked people to count to 100 to get 100 "points". Search "coolestfr" on YouTube for the results. (OP) here's where the idea should IMHO: it's a site that allows potential gift receivers to give coupons to gift givers along with a video or textual message. The message would basically say : "Hey, get me this item, i'm giving you an exclusive discount!" The gift giver would now be much more likely to purchase through the link. Think groupons, except instead of group discounts, it's 1-to-1 discounts. | |
72 | What is your elevator pitch? | What problem are you solving? | Who are you selling to? | How is it different? | How will you make money? | Who are they and what quality? | How much will it cost to launch? | Any obvious obstacles? | Who are the potential acquirers? | How to reach you to discuss further | Thoughts and suggestions |
73 | Winter tires that are heated using the heat created by the engine, this will ensure that ice or snow would not play a factor when stopping | In most developed countries winter is a nuisance that increases the number of accidents, more than just women on the road. By having tracks on tires that operate at temperatures of over 200C the snow or ice wont be an issue. | everyone that drives in winter | instead of depending on crazy polymores to try to grap the ice, this will melt it and ensure that the ice or snow wont be an issue. | In talks with Michellin | tires makers, all that make winter | not too much from the regular manufacturers, they can actually be removable since we have elements and other materials that shield heat very well they wraps wont affect the tires | people that get run over and ending up with 3rd degrees burns | Michellin | @zzzreyes (twitter) | I have a prototype that I created in my baseman and it works miracles! (Gridspy) Really interesting! I would have thought that you would be promoting the creation of a water layer between the tire and the ice - it is that water layer that makes ice slippery. Do you blow hot air on the top of the tire? How do you go about doing this? Do you blow hot air down on the road ahead of the car? Sounds interesting. - No need to blow hot air. The solution has its limitations, but in an independent ice road on normal winter driving conditions, winter tires, pose no challenge, my prototype stops as quick as it would in the summer. The physics behind it is that not only do we ensure to have 100% CONTACT with the ground we drive on (meaning there is a special thread pattern with alloy metal studs that come into play) we also ensure that the tire itself is a top of the line winter tire as well. PS: I have raised 3 million from people that have tested the product first hand and have even gotten a second mortgage on their homes in order to invest. The only problem now is how do we go to market... I feel like I have invented the beta max... |
74 | Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging | There isn't a good hosted solution specifically for video blogging. Video blogs have unique qualities that can make the traditional model of blogging (reverse chronology, single flow of posts) poorly suited for them. | Video bloggers, video content producers, internet personalities | Because the production costs for video (both money & time) are higher than for text, it's much more important for each video to receive as much traffic (because viewers = value, no matter how you extract it) as possible; reverse chronological is a poor way to accomplish this. Offer better interfaces than a single embedded video per post in a regular blog. Provide more ways to connect viewing. Provide more automatically-created / easy-to-add video meta data. Add TED-video like "bookmarks" in the video, and make them linkable. Allow video creators to apply CreativeCommons licenses to their videos as easily as Flickr does for photos, and use the CC-licensed footage as a huge, "stock" collection available on your hosted service for easy remixing. | SaaS premium options. Advertising for free users. | YouTube. Other services (Justin.tv, traditional video blogging software, traditional blogging software w/ video embedding capabilities) are really different offerings. This is a blue ocean strategy kind of thing. | If you're a UX wiz, you could get a prototype kicking with just time; host everything on YouTube at first. Get seed funding with that, develop better web video technology, get a bit of traction, and then do a series A to develop the serious content hosting / CDN infrastructure you'd need. | New technology development. Many unsolved problems around in-video interactivity, linking, processing for meaning. Bandwidth intensive. | SixApart, Google, Automattic, Yahoo, life-streaming companies | Available for others to run with. E-mail jay.neely@socialstrategist.com if you want more of my thoughts on it. | |
75 | Location-aware Chatroulette. Call it landscaperoulette. | Lonely people | Chatroulette involves men masturbating in their bedrooms. Landscaperoulette involves men masturbating on rooftops and in front of scenic landscapes. | Advertising for hand cream, silicon lube, and travel guides. | Chatroulette? Kink.com | $20,000 + 3% of the company. | People might need cameras with wide-angle lenses in order to show the landscape and their penises. | Kink.com | |||
76 | Priceline model to buy new cars (name your own price!) | People hate going to the car dealership to negotiate when buying a car. Towards the end of each month/quarter, car dealers are often willing to lower the prices of their cars to hit their quotas and get various kickbacks/dealer incentives. Customers could name their own price for a specific model/features and that "bid" would be sent to all the local dealers interested in being considered. | Car Buyers | Negotiating with a car salesman sucks, just show up and sign paperwork. For dealers an additional distribution channel for times when demand is low. | $X would be charged to the customers credit card and $Y charged to the dealer? Charged only if the deal is accepted to prevent repeat bidders, and refunded if the transaction isn't successful (bad credit, dealer tries to renegotiate, etc.) | carsdirect.com, autotrader.com, local dealer | time | do people feel comfortable buying a car online? | jonathanschen@gmail.com | ||
77 | Share your wifi | People pay 30-50 a month for wifi in their homes. For areas that are highly populated (major cities, high rise apartment complexes), people often live close enough to share wifi and hence the cost (I did it with my grad school neighbors). | Neighbors living in close proximity to each other | Save on costs | Charge nominal monthly fee for hosting and providing the centralized portal to link with your neighbor along with the service (notifying your neighbor that wifi is down) | traditional cable providers http://www.fon.com/ | Should be pretty low | Shitty cable connections. Technology: range of routers. Billing model? | jonathanschen@gmail.com |