What are some market segments / areas that are ready to be disrupted? If you're a VC, what are some problems you don't see a lot of startups trying to solve?
The old shared hosting market is still pretty large. But it is stuck with ancient stuff like cpanel and mostly dominated by stagnant players like EIG, GoDaddy, and the like.
Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.
I use shared hosting too and I got into cPanel like 3 times a year for 2 min each. Sure, it needs to be there but regardless it fills the needs already.
Yeah, I've thought about this. I've even run some numbers.
You'd need to combine an ISP and MSP with an add-on like analytics and integrations.
Trouble is, then you're competing with AWS and GCE.
You have what amounts to bare metal through AWS, available by the hour. You can have that today, plus the ability to scale across geographies at the click of a button. Few colos can offer that.
How about online storage that you will charge me only when I pull data?
I have 20TB of data that I would like to access about 1MB statistically per year (!!) only I don't know which of that 20TB its located. Sure there is AWS and then Glaciar but with my limited knowledge with AWS you need to spin a computer and then set the rules how those files are accessible and it already goes into tens or hundreds of bucks per month. Amazon Glaciar is too expensive to pull data out.
Perhaps I didn't do enough research. If you know company who allows me to cheaply store XX TB in cloud and charge me only per access to it, let me know please.
Therein lies the game; the colder your storage, the more redundant copies you need of every block if you want good odds of retrieval. The only way to know a block is still good is to load it and hash it.
I'm trying to get into this area...I used to work for EIG and frankly they SUCK. I'm wanting to start an employee co-owned hosting firm that values employee/customer relationships. I think honestly it's not so much the systems/software that matter most for hosting - it's the customer service.
When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - Then he moved chats to India. Then he closed down tickets completely. Chats may eventually be on the chopping block. Then he moved sales to Tempe and promised everyone in Orem that their job wasn't going anywhere. Two months later he announced -- hey sorry I lied, we're all moving to Tempe. You can come w/ us if you move yourself, but here have 1 month pay for severance. I'm pretty sure I just heard that if you work for EIG and don't live in Houston, or Tempe you can count on your Brand closing and moving to one of those two places - they really want to consolidate everything in a bad way.
i envision a company -- where Each employee has a book of business, each employee is also an affiliate and can refer business 24/7 and get commissions for life off anyone they refer. Each employee acts more like an acct rep than actual CSR agent grinding out phone calls left and right. Customer's have a dedicated person they can reach out to with any concerns. There would be very generous ESOP plan, it would be setup a bit like maybe Winco Foods, etc... and other bonuses. Exec pay would be capped at 65x avg salaries. Surpluses left over go into bonus pools and activities for employees, etc..
What you're describing sounds awfully like a worker co-op. Why not just do a worker co-op, instead of designing something that would be trivially easy for your board to steal from the employees the moment it gets traction?
I just tried to set something up on DigitalOcean. It's a small website with some PHP (already written), but I'd like the possibility of expanding it with Node later. So I rented a VPS, but setting everything up is such a pain, with all that SSHing and process management and Linux permissions and everything.
Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common shared web host, but also allowed me to do Node with sane permissions etc., would be great.
However, it occurs to me this probably exists, and I just don't know about it.
Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them?
Yeah, so I've just spent about four hours trying it, and unfortunately it doesn't seem possible. They don't let you set more than one proxy setting for a site, which makes it impossible.
I think it's actually being slowly eroded away from different angles. It's niche providers. WordPress being a huge niche, I've been watching it grow from everyone being in the ~$20-30/month range to full on enterprise grade hosting (http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/09/14/500month-enterprise-...).
But there's at least a couple dozen providers now who have built WP specific infrastructure at all sorts of price tiers for consumers.
You've also got your SquareSpace/Wix/etc. Shopify. Traditional shared hosting is becoming less necessary in my mind for a lot of use cases because companies are specializing in areas where you would normally say 'just get a shared hosting plan.'
The biggest problem though to completely get rid of the shared hosting space is price. Digital Ocean works because the lack of customer service. Shared hosting needs to have a lot more customer service (or you get EIG). But at the $5/month price point, the economics of it are terrible. The way to get around it is specializing, reducing complexity and issues, which is exactly what I see happening.
Growth is slowing, but that market is still growing.
I would think there's room for some middle ground, like DO, but with more sophisticated self service tools to deploy popular software, install OS patches, and so on. Tools that work for non technical people.
Yes, at a higher level, dumbed down installers with reasonable default settings. Deploying whatever applications are popular at shared hosts, like Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, BBS software, and so forth.
And providing some equivalent to Cpanel for things like OS patches, domain management, SSL certificate management, automated backups, web analytics, file manager, etc. Cpanel's license costs are pretty high...they charge per customer / per month, and so it sets a minimum bar for what you can charge.
If you incorporated additional functionality, you could capture more of the market. What wix.com does, for example.
And you are talking about mostly hosting PHP application. For some stacks these stagnant players do not even exist.
The user experience of deploying a Python/Django code to production is so bad in my opinion that I started a shared hosting service focused only on that: https://prodmatic.com
I'm currently running http://bitmash.io, which is a shared hosting service for PHP apps (currently WordPress and Piwik) that handles updates and manages the site for you (but also lets you control it if you'd like). I'd love to hear what sorts of features people want in a shared hosting service.
Contract Economy: There is still a significant opportunity for a Freelancer/Upwork group to exist. Something that better vets quality while not pushing for Toptal prices. I suspect you'd need to set up physical presence in the likely countries properly vet and control quality but this could easily be covered by a premium for a know quantity vs going to western rates.
Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption here. I suspect a currency that is both trackable and backed by a pool of commodities/currencies could be quite popular. Traceable would make theft risk reduced as money could effectively be returned if it is stolen and being backed/hedged by currencies/commodities would help with confidence.
Cargo: I'm surprised we haven't seen electric cargo ships. Even combine solar with sail as winds are favorable. This combined with auto-navigation (at least between ports) seems more easily achievable than cars yet technology is further behind.
Dockable Phone to PC (physical or even better if wireless dock): Surprised no-one has done this well yet. I can image whoever does this with really take ownership of the OS space. I always felt this could be the best route for Microsoft to re-enter the mobile space with force.
Cargo ships don't have enough free surface area to mount the number of solar panels that would be needed for propulsion. Sails are already being used on a few ships but they only save a small percentage of fuel.
I'd like to add that cargo ships, while being very efficient in terms of how much they can transport over a unit distance given unit energy, require enormous amounts of energy.
There could be could add battery storage to be used during the journey. They could include wind turbines to add further power generation.
Also ships can go slower. In my limited knowledge of boats every extra knot takes significantly extra fuel. If we were bringing multiple power sources 'slow' cargo may be viable. And the has to be other ways to increase this function.
And there is always hybrid. Not all power has to be renewable sources. A solution could start with supplementing diesel driven thrust with some lower cost green power. Given diesel is 70% of shipping operating cost that seems a potential option.
I think the number one obstacle to this is it would be nowhere near viable from the costs perspective.
No one really wants to build cargo ships right now, shipping companies are barely staying afloat right now because there is a glut of cargo capacity.
This technology would need to be cheap enough that it would make sense to retrofit a ship with it... which would probably not be the case for a very long time.
I do think it's a very thought provoking idea however.
I'm under the impression that both are true. There is overcapacity in the shipping market, which drives down prices. Because prices are low, shippers are investing in ever larger (more efficient) vessels, in order to turn a profit. This in turn leads to more overcapacity, which leads to a drive for even larger and more efficient ships.
It's a type of 'tragedy of commons' situation, where every shipping company is making the right decisions from their individual perspective, but collectively they're driving themselves into the ground.
For me this explains the rise of slow-steaming. It makes a lot of sense in this market because it lowers the cost of shipping a container (less fuel), while simultaneously reducing the market capacity (# of containers / year).
Finally, very few shipping companies make money on the major lines (e.g. China to Europe), because it's pure price competition. They're much more likely to make money in places where they have a 'monopoly' on something: e.g. being the only ship that leaves in the next 3 days, or being the only shipper going to a specific location. For example inter-Africa shipping falls in this category.
An additional detail is also the expansion of the panama canal which allowed more and larger ships to travel through it cutting down the travel time for larger cargo ships eliminating a primary advantage of smaller vessels.
The human crew isn't much of a factor in cargo ship speed. Ship owners would be happy to leave their crews out at sea a week longer if it was profitable.
Drone ships won't be practical any time soon because of maintenance problems. Crews spend much of their time at sea performing preventative maintenance, painting, and fixing broken equipment. With a drone ship all of that work would have to be done at the pier which would be far more expensive than paying a crew.
They are already slow steaming on many routes. Ship owners aren't idiots; they have software to perform constrained optimization calculations to figure out the steaming speed which will maximize profit on each leg. This is based on fuel price, crew wages, asset depreciation, delivery contracts, etc.
I wonder if they could use an underwater wing design, similar to this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5SHn0SdXjw). You keep swapping the angle of the wing so it's always pushing forward whether the vessel is moving up or down, but it would be powered by the waves moving the ship. It might be possible to get a slow base load speed for 'free' with a large enough wings
Norsepower provides modern sails: "a spinning cylinder that uses the Magnus effect to harness wind power to propel a ship."
"When the wind conditions are favourable, Norsepower Rotor Sails allow the main engines to be throttled back, saving fuel and reducing emissions while providing the power needed to maintain speed and voyage time. Rotor sails can be used with new vessels or they can be retrofitted to existing ships."
I love that you posted an 'in the wild' solution. So many people saying this is not possible. And then someone has found a creative way to offer one alternate. Such a good example of dont listen to the nay-sayers if you want to mentally explore something. There are almost always solutions and I'm sure there are more for this one.
No one said it wasn't possible. Clearly, it's possible since ships were wind powered for millenia. The problem is that with very low fuel costs, it's not feasible because the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
Sure sails will be used for some limited applications. But Magnus effect cylinders won't be practical for the majority of cargo ships because they consume valuable deck space and interfere with loading operations. They would only make sense if hydrocarbon fuel becomes much more expensive.
Unfortunately the energy density of batteries is really bad (in the bigger picture) and, besides, we're supposed to be using weight for cargo. Tankers also burn very nasty fuels that can't be used for anything else - so in practice they're very efficient.
There have been cracks at putting "sails" of one form or another on ships but they've always been heavy, relatively ineffective and basically just not worth the hassle.
The speed of a ship is actually quite easy to work out. You find the time/value curve for the cargo and the cost/time for the ship and see where they cross - essentially. The long and short of it is that the lighter and more valuable your cargo is, the faster the ship goes. This is why container ships are much faster than oil tankers.
I suspect nuclear (be it fission or - someday - fusion) would be much more viable for powering something at that scale in a "post-petroleum" scenario. There already are a couple fission-powered cargo ships out there, IIRC.
The problem is that safe disposal of nuclear fuel is nontrivial.
There are bigger problems with nuclear powered cargo ships than just waste disposal. They would need larger crews of highly trained (more expensive) experts to operate the reactor. Look at how much the US Navy spends to train competent technicians and engineers.
Every nuclear powered ship becomes a prime terrorist target, either to hijack it or destroy it in place and cause a radiological incident. So you also need constant armed security (also expensive).
A more practical way to have "nuclear powered" ships would be to use electric power from land based nuclear plants to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbon liquid fuels, then load that fuel on the ships. Nuclear plants on land are far more cost effective since they can be built much larger to achieve economies of scale on operations and security.
On the subject of highly trained nuclear operators from the Navy, what's the job market look like for those guys after they leave the service? Where else are you going to find a nuclear-powered ship where you can put your experience to work?
Seems like a natural fit. For almost everything in the military, IMO there should be some market in the private space that could use those skills.
Some of them stay 30 years in the service and then retire. Others go to work for civilian nuclear power plants, or the vendors which service and supply them. And there aren't very many trained operators to begin with. The US Navy has <90 nuclear powered vessels (plus a few separate reactors for training and research).
Why not have solar modules in a shipping container form factor. (Maybe shorter in height though) and stack those at the top layer when loading the ship.
You could probably even find some ingenious way to run the current through the containers stacked umderneath to route the power. They are made of metal.
Shipping companies don't own the containers. Solar panels would get broken when they were transferred to shore. Panels and cabling would add more weight to the highest level of the cargo stacks: the worst place for ship stability. And even if you covered the entire top level with solar panels it still wouldn't provide enough propulsion power to be worth the expense.
The problem with using sails is speed. On average, cargo ships travel approximately three to four times faster than sailing ships (20 to 24 knots vs. 5 to 8 knots).
Don't know about Gigster but the first step of Toptal's vetting process is about solving algorithmic puzzles. That's probably inevitable because they need something that scales. However it's so different from what developers do at work that its relationship to quality is very weak. Actually, it could be negatively related because I would have excelled at those puzzles at university, exactly when I didn't have the expertise to write good software. And the one or two of times per year when I have to solve a puzzle I take my time and solve it. Maybe slower but the rest of my work is so much better that it more than makes up for that.
Want a better vetting quality? Look at previous work and read code. It doesn't scale unless you put more people at that but maybe somebody can think about an AI for that.
> The idea that you can get great developers from India for rock-bottom rates is mostly a fallacy.
Yes, at rock-bottom rates(< $25/hr), it is. But >$25/hr starts becoming good money for local Indian developers and you can start comparing them to the good developers in the west (>$50/hr).
That's just my opinion having worked in the industry for a while and seen both sides of that market.
I had the same thoughts for the Contract Economy for quite a while.
I'm on a "Startup break", and started a Service Firm. While working with clients, we realized the need to serve a rather underserved section of projects, which are high enough for individual freelancers or even a small team but too low for established agencies - the $100,000 to $1M projects.
We're experimenting with some of our clients and their connections, to work with our service/marketplace where we manage the project end-to-end to make sure it is done, with other vetted teams of designers and developers. It is not 'cheap' but much more economical than traditional Agencies.
We're Beta Testing it with a small set of clients for now. For those curious, we have a sign-up page at http://www.worksigma.com/
Our Service/Consulting firm's core focus is UI/UX Designs, and Frontend Engineering. We tend to get quite a bit of incoming work that are not in our core focus. We started working with other partners. We either know these partners or are introduced to us. We interview them, talked to them, worked with them (vetting them).
Our clients know that they can go on a vacation while we work on their projects. They wanted that same experience while working with the partners that we introduced. So, we end up handling the client's project and make sure it gets done via these partners.
Work Sigma is borne out of this patterns, and process that we followed. We want to grow this, formalize it, and be able to provide a good service to clients and make them happy. One of the marketing taglines that we tossed around our team is, "Agency in the Cloud".
btw, A friend told me there is something similar at UpWork - https://www.upwork.com/pro/. This is nice - the market is tested and proven.
Dockable Phone to PC: I agree there is market there.
I was on a project about this some time ago and the limiting factor was all the cable mess that cluttered your desk.
Women loved the product because it meant _far_less_ weight on their purses. Both men and women wanted something didn't cluttered their work desks (and I understand them ;-)
Doesn't seem like that many groups have really both studied the existing AGI research _and_ are seriously trying to apply the latest NN developments like GANs to (virtually) embodied AGI.
No group studies AI because it's an unproductive use of research time, and also it's hard to write proposals to raise funding when the goal is ambiguously defined.
Outsourced testing. I can think of a few sites that would pay a pretty penny to have unit, spec, and acceptance-tests written for their pre-existing code.
Was definitely interested, clicked through a bunch and wanted to see pricing and sign up. Unfortunately it's a "contact us for more info" situation, which is really a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.
The opaque pricing is a sign that they've moved up the market to target enterprise. When a company reaches that stage, it's basically telling you, "if this turns you off, then you won't move the needle for us so we don't want to talk to you."
Rainforest uses human testers, a specialized Amazon Turk. You write a test plan in English that is followed. They can also explore your app and write that test plan in English for you.
I'd love to know of a service that will write the test plans in Selenium or Ghost Inspector etc.
Incidentally, that's something that I want to offer when expanding my freelance business into QA agency. Would you mind telling me more about what types of services would you see here? I have some ideas of my own, but I'm still struggling with market validation, so input from someone who says they could need it is invaluable!
Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive (since you chose them) and setting your own prices.
Buysellads is very close to this, and has been around for a long time. I ran beaconads, their subsidiary, for a short time and the biggest issue is that most ad buys are coming from a handful of massive companies.
Old Navy doesn't want to deal individually with a site that doesn't have 10,000,000 visits/month. So we end up needing an intermediary at the same scale as the big advertisers.
Not saying this can't work at some level, just that there are some big economic forces fighting against scaling a product like this.
One can do that with affiliate advertising to some extent. I don't think it would be easy to use other pricing models since advertisers wouldn't trust small website's metrics. (And large websites already manage their own ads through many different methods.)
Wasn't this how independent websites use to work before ad networks such as Google ads took over the internet? Problem with managing your own ads is that it would be very hard to get quality relevant ads if you have a small website, not to forget the overhead involved in maintaining ad space without a dedicated ad server.
But that's exactly what 99% of the Google customers are trying to avoid to do. They don't want to handle the management. They don't want to host the ad management platform. They just want a paycheck after the cut (and after all the legal contracts). They just want a tool that works and everyone is familiar with.
Yes, it's a shitty problem, but it's because the industry is shit. There must have been extensive studies on ad UX but I see little improvements because so many companies just wanted to sell ads to make $$. Take Forbes and similar new sites - freakin' annoying. But NYT ads are good, at least not as distracting as other news sites seen to be.
Since no one wants to host the ad platform on their own, how do you think you will get your idea across? I think what you really meant is build a better ad platform, not self-hosting ad platform.
It's less valuable to advertise a Lego set to a person on a Lego fan site than it is to advertise a car to a person on a Lego fan site who happens to want a car.
I'm a little sceptical of first party content sensitive untargeted advertisement, but we'll see. I also think the people who would block ads would block these too.
See responses to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576611 where people say they will block ads anyway. It's not the tracking. It's not the bandwidth. It's just because it's easy to do.
Actually I believe the problem is more about relevance...
However I don't see why this problem isn't been solved yet! Just ask what the website is about and serve only ads in the same space would be already a big win...
> displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive...
Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...)
This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.
If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...
As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.
OpenAds - now OpenX - was this tool for a very long time.
There are a couple of drawbacks. First, it turns out that there's not much money to be made developing that software. Second, it turns out that running it is a lot of work, to the point that it's not worth it for most people. Third, most ad buyers don't want to juggle dozens of small publishers, they want centralization.
Mostly posting this because I want to see it, but drones to automate residential property inspections. I'm actually thinking about miniature drones that can do internal and external residential inspections. My startup is in property management and a lot of the work a human does could be done by a drone + healthy amount of machine learning on the images captured.
I think the biggest problem will be that drones can't open doors or cabinets. You'll still need someone there to look under the sink, go into the basement.
The human element of home inspection is invaluable. That interaction between homeowner (or prospective) and a knowledgeable professional is critical. But drones as tools for that professional could be great.
I think he may have been referring to rental inspections, of the quarterly kind. A pretty standard checklist. "Is there mess, is there mould, is there damage, are there pets and is that allowed?"
What, specifically, would the drone inspect? The only thing I can imagine a drone being useful for is inspecting the roof and chimney. And that's counting on the home inspector being too lazy too get on a ladder. In fact, most of them just use binoculars and call it a day. You really need a licensed professional who knows the local codes and is experienced enough to know what to look for. I don't see home inspections getting either fully or partially automated any time soon. The value-add just isn't there.
A retail store allows for differentiation in experience, service, and brand. It is the most important competitive advantage you can have in a commoditized, high-margin business.
ChatBots: One big opportunity that i can see is the rise of chatbots on popular messaging platforms. It is going to bring the tech advances to a lot more people in a much easier way.
Question: I've seen a large amount of hype around chat bots, but is there any evidence that "normal" people really use these for anything more than novelty, excluding the realm of Amazon echo et al.
Completely anecdotal - a non-programmer at my work used a chat bot provided by their ISP to help them with some internet connectivity problems. I was surprised too.
I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.
Chat bots would make new and prospective customers FAQs/enquiries easier for lots of small businesses, especially in emerging markets where a large swath of people are coming online for the first time via their mobile phones.
Many of these users are not that familiar with the WWW aspect of the Internet; Facebook and Whatsapps is really the Internet for them.
I'm not sure if this would pass a security review, but occasionally I've had some issue with a bank or credit card account, I've then used the chat-based technical support, and the conversation was very straightforward.
I could definitely see chatbots becoming advanced enough to handle "I'm locked out of my account and need some part of it reset" type questions within the next 3 - 5 years. I could even see it being superior to the current experience (right now there are significant delays after each thing I say to the customer service person, presumably because they're handling multiple chat windows simultaneously).
Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in:
- Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem domain and tooling requirements.
- IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using open source backends.
- Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant tech gaps here.
- Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data.
- Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.
- AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
A lot of that is really really specific for what you do. I think people are generally trying to solve ONE problem rather than creating a solution for the general problem, because usually, a general solution breaks down very very quickly and thus low retention rate.
An IoT database requires the intersection of three software capabilities in a single platform, which have varying degrees of accessibility (the technology exists in principle) and none are available in open source currently.
- An exabyte-scale storage engine. Nothing too exotic here technically and a few companies have built them, but the design needs to address continuous data corruption, continuous hardware failure, geo-federation, etc.
- A real-time database kernel that supports very high throughput for mixed workloads. A production kernel of this type doesn't currently exist though several people working in closed source databases understand the necessary computer science in principle; the academic literature is far behind the state-of-the-art. The ability to gracefully shift load and transients between servers under full load with many millions of writes per second is not trivial.
- Native discrete topology operators. Necessary for geospatial analytics, sensor coverages, etc. If you can do it natively in the database kernel, it makes the second requirement easier to achieve since you don't need secondary indexing generally.
Any solution even halfway toward the general solution would be viable. The value possible if you have such a system is hard to overestimate. Companies have paid half a million dollars for the output of a single analytic query on tens of trillions of IoT records; the differentiator was that it was possible to execute such a query at all.
It is extremely high-end and polymathic computer science, but serious valuable if you can make a credible dent in it. And unlike some advanced topics in computer science, there are no epic unsolved theoretical problems you have to solve, though some relevant computer science may be unpublished.
A friend is working on an IoT problem with two of your three capabilities: storage and analytics. He has voiced similar concerns. (To be fair, he gripes constantly that nothing exists which would work for him, within the budgetary and timing constraints.)
His company provides sensor systems for civil engineering projects. A single large bridge can have sensor packs every 50m or so - per beam. The amount of sensor data coming in for a single municipality or region is already staggering. Vibration and stress analytics are required on a daily basis.
The final requirement, one which you didn't mention, is that this setup should be fairly low maintenance. If you need a team of rocket scientists to operate and just keep it from falling over, the cost structure will be unsustainable.
A service that provided all this in a platform with sane APIs and good BI integration should be making tons of money.
Maybe a general solution just isn't cost effective and may never be cost effective, regardless of how much we bring down actual costs for the resources involved in solving data-intensive problems. The (possible) reason? The performance advantage you gain from tailoring specifics to structural relationships within exceptionally large datasets may just be too large to trade off for some "generalized" solution.
I'm just speculating, of course. I was sort of entertaining your idea and going back and forth between "a sounds-good fantasy" and "No, that would be awesome, why does this not exist?"
The first two challenges are quite familiar in the financial industry, and kx, with its kdb+ time-series database, is arguably the industry leader. Most people in the open source sector don't pay it much attention, since its proprietary nature and terse APL-inspired syntax [0] lend themselves towards "I'll make my career in this, become a wizard, get Wall Street money, and not be very incentivized to compete with myself by sharing knowledge." To the third question, I'm not sure to what extent it treats topology natively, but kx is certainly positioning themselves as an IoT solution provider [1]. Of course, the cost is likely prohibitive for smaller IoT startups, and more innovation would certainly be good from a supply-demand perspective, but from a technical perspective I'm not sure this is an unsolved problem.
KX is a leader in what it does but it doesn't really fit the canonical IoT use case, either from a workload or analytics perspective. The challenge is that IoT isn't just temporal, most of the interesting relationships are spatial as well since you are analyzing relationships across sensor and telemetry streams, and the analytics are real-time mixed workloads with ridiculous working set sizes. It isn't their market. They rock the time-series market though.
A good example of an IoT data analytics problem is analyzing a petabyte of drone sensor data, which on a large drone amounts to a few flights worth. Typical raw sources tend to be some combination of hyper-spectral imaging/video and LIDAR. Or RF probability functions e.g. mobile. Or a combination of all of the above because you are fusing multiple sources to reduce the uncertainty for your analysis.
FWIW, the "tens of trillions" of IoT records I mentioned was a real-world example from one of the most famous financial companies. It was a spatial analytic on a polygon model, and a classic IoT data model. If KX solved that particular analysis problem, they would have used it.
kdb is awesome, but very tailored to one-dimensional (time-ordered) data. I've built a couple multi-dimensional array database engines in my time and -- trust me -- it's a really difficult problem to solve. That said, I have a design kicking around for one that meets most of the OP's demands, so if anybody wants to join me...
There's been an explosion in raster data in just the last 5 years. Cheap satellites, cheap drones, and cheap platforms have really turned the firehose to "high". And the resolution on scientific data -- climate and weather model output, astronomy data, particle physics data, seismic data, etc. -- just keeps going up.
This is an area of massive growth for which no existing solution is quite adequate. If I had the time and/or the cash, I'd be diving in head-first.
Flurry (now part of Yahoo) has experience with IoT storage at that scale (or near it). The "T" just happens to be your phone. Data processing (and staying in business) at that scale is a matter of great teams and solid architecture. This won't be a "service" easily sold to a general audience.
The data processing could become a commodity but the architecture won't be -- its highly tied to your specific industry.
I'd also add, there's a component of streaming analytics that isn't solved either.
One of the points I've tried to make at various companies (we've worked at the same one before) is that streaming solutions and batch solutions need to be fused into a single execution engine.
A streaming system on its own (operating on temporal windows) is not nearly as useful as on that can be joined to a storage engine with data at rest. It also needs to be disk based, so windows can be large, which most people do not want to take on. It also needs to be extremely parallel, and efficient.
Thousands of requests a second per server is not even in the right ball-park (which is lots of current execution engines now). Operating at line rate is generally table stakes IMO. The operations on the stream should be parallelized automatically, up to petabytes a day of input. Humans don't have the necessary context to do the partitioning up front, especially with streams that change.
The issue is (and I've tried to come up with designs to address this, though not in practice), is that co-locating the data at rest, with data that is moving through the system is a tricky problem, especially with complicated joins.
They can be the same engine (and should), but traditional database engines tend to have a problem with streaming queries, since they are just repeatedly executing a query against every new record. They are expressible, just not efficient. There is room to innovate in this space, but most people building these engines either solve the parallelism problem naively, or not at all.
There's also the problem of driving this computation to the edge, which is also something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing, but have not yet met a company willing to take this level of effort on.
All the points you make about the kernel are apt, as are the points about the distribution algorithms. Also, the protocols used aren't nash safe, so at scale most of these systems become an operational juggling act under pressure.
All streaming systems that I know of do not know enough about the underlying data to gracefully rebalance and co-locate, since they all tend to embody the map/reduce paradigm, which is oblivious to underlying data distribution, at least in current practice.
There is available computer science to solve all these issues, I think some of the spatial algorithms out there can also be applied to the streaming space, especially in join evaluation.
> something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing
Is the general direction for this something you can share? 30 years of database literature accumulated a lot of knowledge. It's be a bold claim to say there's something powerful yet non-obvious.
Very insightful. In your expert opinion, what are some of the core features / functionality that an IoT database platform should have (that existing solutions or combinations of them on AWS / Google Cloud / Azure don't provide)?
I spent many years repurposing cartographic tools myself. :-)
Three big missing features off the top of my head:
- Insufficiently correct and high precision computational geometry, which compounds with the iterative/recursive nature of many complex sensor analytics. Many people don't notice unless they ground truth their analytic process; I learned this the hard way. For many industries, 1% cumulative computational error is a catastrophic bug for analytics and the reality can be much worse in many common systems.
- Lack of first class tessellation types and operators. Once your data scientists have them, they'll wonder how they lived without them. Such things are completely useless for cartography and therefore don't exist in those platforms.
- High-performance computational geometry. This is particularly noticeable if you work with sensor coverages (like drone data). Your typical cartographic system has serious difficulty joining a few terabytes of complex polygons, but these are tiny data sets for many remote sensing sources. It literally takes weeks or months to run these types of queries. You can optimize this to be much faster but there was no pressing market need in cartography and cartographic systems aren't designed for scale-out generally.
Unfortunately CGAL is not suitable, and yes you do need to support it in the underlying representation and database. The litmus test for a suitable computational geometry engine is the ability to do arbitrary ellipsoid computational geometry at something like one part per trillion error, and the ability to compute intersections of very complex polygons on that surface quickly.
On that last point, you can execute an effective denial of service attack on most GIS databases with a well-crafted set of polygons and polygon intersection queries. It doesn't even require malicious intent. (Yet another thing I learned the hard way.)
For example, the intersection of n polygons could have exponentially many segments. To prevent denial of service, accuracy has to be sacrificed, but "one part per trillion error" sounds hard.
As another example, representing the intersection between two line segments without error requires a data type that has three times as many bits as the x/y components of their endpoints, so rounding has to happen here, too.
The only solution I can come up with that would not have those problems would be to subdivide a plane into grid cells of size one trillionth of whichever unit, rasterize all polygons into it do the Boolean operations at pixel-level, but that would require huge amounts of memory and processing power. And additionally it would be vulnerable to a DOS attack where the attacker sends many very large overlapping rectangles.
Lastly, huge amounts of data would require many computers to be able to work on this problem in parallel, but if an attacker sends only overlapping polygons, parallelization would be very tricky if not impossible.
Any chance you could give an example use-case or three? Sounds fascinating -- I use PostGIS and find it to be slower than I'd like day to day, but it sounds like your uses demand a lot more precision than I have call for.
I am late in this conversation, I would like to dig more into the IoT and the needs for tooling for spatial analysis. Could we talk more about the problems you are facing? My email is on the profile page. Thank you!
> AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?
I think the OP is referring to algorithmic probability. See
[1] R. J. Solomonoff. A formal theory of inductive inference: Parts 1 and 2. Information and Control, 7:1--22 and 224--254, 1964.
[2] R. J. Solomonoff. Complexity-based induction systems: Comparisons and convergence theorems. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-24:422-432, 1978.
I believe he is referring to AI that can generate new ideas, similar to 'thinking' versus pattern recognition, which is 'I've seen something like that before (during training!).
Perhaps he means old-fashioned AI techniques like production-rule systems, knowledge representation, and truth maintenance. If so, and if he's right, that would interest me, since I know how to do those things.
> Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data.
I am co-founder of tensorflight.com. We do computer vision analytics of drone imagery. Interesting that you mention it, as I thought it's a somewhat obscure market. When we talk to investors in the valley 75%+ have to be educated about why what we do is a viable business.
Please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you have any ideas!
> - AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
I know it's fashionable to hate on deep learning, but algorithm induction is literally what deep learning does.
I understood the question as, what makes you think: the current system could be streamlined so easily that I can hardly believe someone hasn't already disrupted the complacent firms extracting rent.
Such a question usually gets answers mostly comprised of work that is extremely boring at first glance. For example, create a system than halves the work to complete documentation for some sort of compliance with regulations.
Every one of these ideas just sounds incredibly interesting to work on. The type that gets a lot of really bright people together on a team (that I'd really want to be on too), yet they might not deliver a product, and possibly even less likely figure out how to monetize it.
Anyway, I'm not developing a friction-reducing product either, but worry about choosing something because it sounds like a rewarding, intellectual challenge.
If the data is there, and if we insist that machines need to predict trends for us based on that data, then why do we need to hire analysts for this job?
> Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.
Making Asimov's Psychohistory from Foundation a reality!
We need to simplify the whole lifecycle of data management. It is still considerably complex. We'll see an accelerated revolution in other areas such as machine learning when this simplification is complete.
I am not sure what kind of data and what kind of data management you are referring to. But from my own perspective, data management is not always a technology problem. Data management should be addressed top-down, with business owning the data quality. Technology should be used to help identify and correct data issues.
'Top-down' is actually why data management is still the way it is. Our handling of the primitives (think bottom-up approach) that build up to how things are structured at the higher level is still subpar at best, resulting in the massive inconsistencies, scaling issues and data integrity problems we face daily. Neurons (near-atomic components), from the biological sciences are still being compared analogously with more complex data structures in computing, raw grapes and wine style. Per being a technology problem, the question was about area/market segment requiring a breath of fresh air, not particularly what technology needs to be deployed.
Top-down means the top is responsible for data quality's failure. Engineering can only build what the business anticipated to get, but in the end, human needs to be the one driving the mandate. When you are looking at enterprise data management, with many data format and global business, with many legacy systems in place, data management is not possible without a full commitment from the top. Heads of each business division has to be responsible for the shit their department produced. Whenever engineering shouts "data management" the business will just leave that to the engineering folks to build automated system, but who is actually looking after the data? Machines doesn't know what they are doing - someone is coding the expectation, that's all. But data management is dynamic. You can't just have an engineer shouts "this stinks". The business needs to own the shout and the mandate.
That is a wish that has been there since 50 years, yet nobody was able to solve it. There's just no golden rule for managing data.
Even if you find smart ways to manage much of it, there will always be exceptions.
Data management is a hard problem because most of the companies have different requirements and culture, that's why many "data-driven" companies try to build their in-house own analytics solution.
In order to address this problem, we're working on an open-source data analytics platform that let's you to collect data from anywhere and manage it easily with our cloud. Unlike many other analytics services, it solves ETL, data warehouse and BI problem transparently to you so that you can customize them for your needs. It stores your data in optimized format with a schema and allows you to query your data with both SQL and complex behavioral analytics queries via RESTFul API. Check it out: https://github.com/rakam-io/rakam
It serves a purpose. But, in practice it means 1/3 of my life is spent doing nothing but checking the clock to see "Am I not dysfunctional yet? Nope. Dammit."
If your body had enough sleep that night (6 hours, uninterrupted) and you aren't sick or otherwise stressed, then yes, power through.
Getting sleepy is your brain telling you to preserve energy. Only sometimes it does that because something about the work itself bores, infuriates, disgusts, or otherwise upsets you.
That means getting "procrastination-sleepy" is your brain trying to prevent spending energy on the miniature emotional turmoil "breaking procrastination".
That is an individual effort. Reducing one's sleep can be done. There are processes to do it. You have to make your subconscious more efficient at processing. During sleep your mind makes subconscious connections and processes events of the day. By practicing different forms of meditation it can allow your mind to do that.
Better marketplace discovery systems. Apple's App Store, the Google Play store and Steam all suffer from the same problem: it's very hard for the people who would enjoy your app to find your app. This probably also applies to streaming video and music.
Isn't that basically what Product Hunt does? I notice when I look for an app that I need, I now search Product Hunt first before checking the App Store.
I'm saying it now, apps are on their way out, web only is the future. Everyone is completely sick of installing a stupid app for everything the want to use. Compound that with a billion notifications for all of those apps. With that said Steam does a pretty good. The discovery queues have led me to some great finds, as well as all of the curator lists.
The web has a long time to catch up in terms of technology (iOS has poor support for APIs that would make web apps compete with native) and culture (most businesses don't care that their app is slow and bloated and defer resources to the app).
I'd say the one really important thing web is missing is notifications for when your not on the site. I don't really know how a browser could ever implement in a similar fashion.
Email, or SMS? Though I don't see why Apples Push Notification Service, can't be opened up for the web side. They are already going through Apple servers correct? Safari has push notifications, let's combine the two.
Person to person IT support. A service where I could get help with my computer, but not from a company that tries to sell me junk software. I let a person with IT skills connect to my pc while interacting by chat or microphone, I pay them by time spent helping me.
There's MouseSquad or local IT. A lot of computer problems tend to be more hardware or require reboot or physically attaching disks/usb to the machine for troubleshooting.
Mousesquad has shutdown, that's the first google result. I don't see results for localit related to computer.
About your comment, imagine that the app can know my location, and pair me with a local expert, if the expert has to go to the other person home to fix their computer the price increases.
I meant geek squad at best buy. I still remember the old mouse squad learning program (but not entirely dead it's just launched with a different initiative). Thanks for correcting.
Do you see the name "Best buy", how can I work for geeksquad?
I mean something more like Uber, where everybody that knows how to drive can become a taxi driver in an hour.
I understand your focus here, but I'm not sure how you'd establish consumer confidence. Driving at least comes with a state issued certificate that you are capable of driving the car, and it's a bare minimum requirement. Obviously other factors will come into what makes a good taxi driver, but the bare essentials can be quickly verified.
I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide the same baseline of consumer trust; peek on craigslist and you'll find dozens of computer service postings for even a small town, and in large cities it gets even bigger. I agree that it's probably an area that could benefit from a loosely centralized provider, but adoption seems like it will be very difficult.
"I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide the same baseline of consumer trust"
Have you heard of IT certifications?, each vendor provides certifications based of their technologies, Microsoft has a lot of different certification programs.
If the client only wants to know the basic usage of a program, the service could pair it with another person not certified. If it's a company requiring for help or a developer in their home, he could request for "advanced service" and then a certified person could help in the specific field of the problem.
You can have a reputation system, with badges that determine how the person has being helpful, reviews from the clients etc.
I am not sure where you live, but "become a taxi driver in an hour" is not even remotely possible.
You need a TLC license, at least in NY. Insurance, exams and getting a car. Uber in NY requires TLC. Some other states in US are more relaxed.
BestBuy could extend their GeekSquad service by incorporating other vendors into the service line. Half of computer problems require physical touch of the computer. I guess what you wanted to do is to turn SuperUser on stackexchange into a paid subscription, allowing people to pay a few $$ to do remote help, and a platform for people to sell their computer help service.
Sometimes you need Stripe for a side project or stuff like that. Atlas is focused in large corporations and, besides, you have to pay to be incorporated.
The high volatility and past problems with exchanges make it basically unusable for anyone without deeper knowledge in the field.
Also, it'll take a few seconds to pay via credit card, whereas converting the money on your account to bitcoins in the sellers account can easily take several hours.
Yep, but it's still better than not using a second factor at all. It all heavily depends on your threat model. I don't think Yubikeys scale to the general population, carrying around something on your keyring is a hard sell for many. (But if you've got your PGP private keys on it, too, etc, it's a fantastic tool/toy for nerds!)
ML in CRUD apps. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be sophisticated. I think you could do a lot to make basic business tasks more efficient with some basic decision trees.
While it's easy to say IoT, cryptocurrency, or whatever the latest buzzwords happen to be—there's ideas that have been floating around for years which are still viable, it's just that they're hard and require exceptional execution. In that sense, they are almost timeless until implemented correctly.
For example, another comment suggested marketplace/content discovery. That's been an unsolved problem for almost a decade now. Ads are another great example: they've been dishing out human misery for about the same length of time. People hate them, so they use ad blockers, and everyone loses. These aren't new problems or opportunities.
It may be in areas that don't even look unsolved. Pretty sure that a few years ago many people would have declared messaging to be a solved problem. Now it's the white hot center of multi billion dollar tech warfare.
Figure out a way to reduce the not-in-San-Francisco penalty for startups.
There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including "lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive (due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the current presidency) being the first two which come to mind.
If you can find some way to give non-San-Francisco startups the same advantages that San Francisco startups have -- better tools for remote workers, for example, so that companies can easily hire from anywhere rather than needing to be where the largest number of potential employees are found; or something to make VCs interested in investing in companies which aren't within a narrow radius of Sand Hill (since I've never dealt with VCs, I have no idea what such a solution would look like) -- then you'll create a huge amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to transfer some of that value into your pockets.
>then you'll create a huge amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to transfer some of that value into your pockets.
Corollary: It's probably time for a much wider adoption of bitcoin in tech. To transfer that value from halfway around the world to personal pockets capitalism style, we need crypto to become a primitive member of apps, markets and tech deals, and no longer a big deal.
Part of the San Francisco premium seems to be the concentration of M&A dollars from local incumbents who constantly acquire more local talent. I'm an investor in half a dozen startups that would have already been acquired if they were in the Bay Area, but instead struggle to build viable standalone businesses since they are located elsewhere. Perhaps this is part of the reason YC focuses most of its time, money, and effort on local teams. Besides the concentration of resources for those fortunate few who become rocketships, the downside protection on the rest of the portfolio seems much better (in human, not just dollar terms).
I wonder if this is really solvable by technology and tools?
In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper. Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :)
I feel that it is something else, culture issue, that still makes teams that are physically in the same location, to perform more effectively. Fixing work culture to support remote work better is likely the key instead of tech and tools.
And money will follow: when VCs believe that remote teams and remote networking are as effective, they will invest everywhere.
There's nothing quite like sitting next to someone to facilitate the rapid course-corrections that maximize the chances for early-stage startups to thrive. That said, places like New York are growing as hubs of talent where it's possible to assemble talented in-person teams. And niche investors who understand i.e. the advertising/media/fintech spaces can mitigate the lack of Silicon Valley VCs for companies focused there. Silicon Alley is very much a thing on 23rd Street!
I wonder if this is really solvable by technology and tools?
I have no idea. The answer might turn out to be a social question of redefining the concept of a "job", for all I know. If the answer was obvious, I'm sure it wouldn't be an untapped opportunity. ;-)
Why do you say that? It's quite easy to see that the person on the other end isn't making eye contact, even when they think they are, looking straight in your eyes. To me, it seems like they are looking at my tits or something. It matters quite a lot. Also, FPS and resolution.
There's a long, long way to go before video conferencing feels more like an actual face-to-face conversation, and it hasn't really changed much in the past 10 years.
I mean, the main complaint against remote work seems to be that there's still no substitute for an actual face-to-face conversation. That IS a tech problem that CAN be solved with tech. The current tech is woefully inadequate.
I say that because: depending on those factors (and some others like lense type, focus etc) the difference between the angle eye/screen and eye/camera is insignificant...
You just have to draw a schema to understand.
3 to 5 meters is a good distance for a video conference.
It's not insignificant. Humans are pretty good in determining whether someone is making eye contact or not. At 5 meters, we can easily detect a 10cm deviation in gaze direction [1].
Also, I'd like to be (or feel like I am) much closer than 5 meters when talking with someone.
Interesting that you think it's insignificant. A lot of group photos are taken at 3 to 5 meters away and it's immediately obvious who's looking directly into the camera and who isn't...
> Fixing work culture to support remote work better is likely the key instead of tech and tools.
To take it even further, is work culture even broken? It seems to me like there's already quite a lot of remote work (at least in tech) for those who make it a top priority. I wonder if the fact that it isn't the default is because most people would rather not work that way? Aside from the obvious social benefit of face to face contact with your coworkers, I find the second order effects very valuable as well - the energy in the office helps keep my excitement about the projects we're working on so I enjoy my work more (and conversely the shared commiseration when the company hits a pitfall is nice too).
Plus the scalability of remote work is dependent on living somewhere where a lot fewer people want to live - if you live in, say, Manhattan and work remotely for an SF company, you're still taking up housing someone at a NY company could be living in. Some people value being near family or nature or something above all else, but generally (by definition) most people want to live where a lot of other people want to live.
So I wonder if the underlying solution is improving cities - something like the city project YC is running, or beating the NIMBYs in places like SF so the city can actually grow to support the startups it has and more, or maybe improving transit so people from further out can commute at least some of the time into cities, etc.
:)
It is true that many managers are afraid of remote working. Because to make it effective as a manager you have to know how to evaluate the tasks and subtasks and that requires also technical skills.
However the modern manager has these skills, remote working is here and it will stay. I believe the ideal teams will have both type of workers.
Having worked with mostly remote Devs for the past 5 years as a designer I have some thoughts on this.
1) bandwidth in many parts of the world is still not nearly good enough for high quality video
2) need good inexpensive remote whiteboarding tech. The MS surface TV looks good but too expensive to fit in everyone's remote office
3) initiating remote video should (either for screen sharing or video chat) be immediate, like 3 secs max, zero friction, not something you have to schedule or spend minutes setting up - just like turning your chair to talk to someone sitting next to you in an office
There are a ton of online whiteboard apps, but it's hard to find a good one (know of any?).
Then there's the problem that drawing with a mouse is difficult. It's hard to quickly express ideas as boxes-and-lines without something like a drawing tablet. Wacom makes some low-end ones that are pretty affordable though (like this one[0] for ~$80). Maybe that'd be a good solution, though it does require some practice to get proficient.
Figma is pretty good although for all types of design. It has real-time collaboration and perf is pretty good.
Whiteboarding specifically - don't know of any good ones. It should ideally be a collaborative multi user real time web app (websockets?), support drawing on top of uploaded images, have very large canvases you can zoom/pan, and run together with hangouts/Skype or have VoIP built in. Want to collab on building one? :)
I've used many Wacom tablets - even the cheap ones are good and pretty intuitive - no real learning curve after setup.
A related market for some of this tech: remote interviews. I've seen lots of solutions for this: collaborative code editors, hangouts, Skype etc. There are frequently problems with bandwidth and friction with coordination (handoff to other interviewers).
Solution to "frictionless" remote work / collaboration among teams (not just engineers) seems similar to interview problem. The target market may also be distinct (teams don't remote work, but remote interviews are common).
A related market for some of this tech: remote interviews. I've seen lots of solutions for this: collaborative code editors, hangouts, Skype etc. There are frequently problems with bandwidth and friction with coordination (handoff to other interviewers).
Solution to "frictionless" remote work / collaboration among teams (not just engineers) seems similar to interview problem. The target market may also be distinct (teams don't remote work, but remote interviews are common).
In a similar vein as dirtyaura's comment, it's not a technology or tools problem. It's a people and relationships problem.
Successful businesses are built on the backs of relationships. Your product is important, your tech is somewhat important, but THE most important part of a building what many would call a "successful" business is the relationships you create.
It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve -- convince people to buy your product, convince people to work for your company, convince VCs to give you money, convince Google to buy you -- all of these things may begin on the premise of merit, price, features, value, but they end up based on the relationships built between the people involved.
Deals are closed over drinks. People work for people they enjoy spending time with. VCs invest money in people they trust. Yes, all things in life have exceptions, but the longer you stay in business, the more you realize that businesses are run by people -- they are not opaque fact-driven entities -- and people are social creatures. The actual reason that people in San Francisco still cling to an age-old culture of doing business together in person instead of over Slack is because humans enjoy spending physical time around other humans. Maybe it's communication bandwidth, maybe it's something else, but until VR replaces physical intimacy, there is no perfect substitute.
If you want to succeed outside of San Francisco, begin building the relationships you need to do so. People can claim that Slack, Hangouts, and the phone match the effectiveness of physical presence, but try switching to a permanent long-distance relationship with your significant other. Good luck.
I just read this article today and thought a great idea would be to develop a platform for simplifying the process for starting up community credit unions. Kind of like Stripe Atlas but for credit unions. It could benefit a lot of small communities.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadSeems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the VPS space.
You'd need to combine an ISP and MSP with an add-on like analytics and integrations.
Trouble is, then you're competing with AWS and GCE.
You have what amounts to bare metal through AWS, available by the hour. You can have that today, plus the ability to scale across geographies at the click of a button. Few colos can offer that.
I have 20TB of data that I would like to access about 1MB statistically per year (!!) only I don't know which of that 20TB its located. Sure there is AWS and then Glaciar but with my limited knowledge with AWS you need to spin a computer and then set the rules how those files are accessible and it already goes into tens or hundreds of bucks per month. Amazon Glaciar is too expensive to pull data out.
Perhaps I didn't do enough research. If you know company who allows me to cheaply store XX TB in cloud and charge me only per access to it, let me know please.
What do you mean by this?
When EIG took over Bluehost the first thing they did was outsourced ALL tickets to India (Hari the CEO's parent's company) - Then he moved chats to India. Then he closed down tickets completely. Chats may eventually be on the chopping block. Then he moved sales to Tempe and promised everyone in Orem that their job wasn't going anywhere. Two months later he announced -- hey sorry I lied, we're all moving to Tempe. You can come w/ us if you move yourself, but here have 1 month pay for severance. I'm pretty sure I just heard that if you work for EIG and don't live in Houston, or Tempe you can count on your Brand closing and moving to one of those two places - they really want to consolidate everything in a bad way.
i envision a company -- where Each employee has a book of business, each employee is also an affiliate and can refer business 24/7 and get commissions for life off anyone they refer. Each employee acts more like an acct rep than actual CSR agent grinding out phone calls left and right. Customer's have a dedicated person they can reach out to with any concerns. There would be very generous ESOP plan, it would be setup a bit like maybe Winco Foods, etc... and other bonuses. Exec pay would be capped at 65x avg salaries. Surpluses left over go into bonus pools and activities for employees, etc..
Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common shared web host, but also allowed me to do Node with sane permissions etc., would be great.
However, it occurs to me this probably exists, and I just don't know about it.
Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services that suit them?
I think Google has that cornered
edit: Nope, they don't let you setup a proxy (for Node) and PHP on the same server :( it's one or the other
But there's at least a couple dozen providers now who have built WP specific infrastructure at all sorts of price tiers for consumers.
You've also got your SquareSpace/Wix/etc. Shopify. Traditional shared hosting is becoming less necessary in my mind for a lot of use cases because companies are specializing in areas where you would normally say 'just get a shared hosting plan.'
The biggest problem though to completely get rid of the shared hosting space is price. Digital Ocean works because the lack of customer service. Shared hosting needs to have a lot more customer service (or you get EIG). But at the $5/month price point, the economics of it are terrible. The way to get around it is specializing, reducing complexity and issues, which is exactly what I see happening.
I would think there's room for some middle ground, like DO, but with more sophisticated self service tools to deploy popular software, install OS patches, and so on. Tools that work for non technical people.
And providing some equivalent to Cpanel for things like OS patches, domain management, SSL certificate management, automated backups, web analytics, file manager, etc. Cpanel's license costs are pretty high...they charge per customer / per month, and so it sets a minimum bar for what you can charge.
If you incorporated additional functionality, you could capture more of the market. What wix.com does, for example.
The user experience of deploying a Python/Django code to production is so bad in my opinion that I started a shared hosting service focused only on that: https://prodmatic.com
Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption here. I suspect a currency that is both trackable and backed by a pool of commodities/currencies could be quite popular. Traceable would make theft risk reduced as money could effectively be returned if it is stolen and being backed/hedged by currencies/commodities would help with confidence.
Cargo: I'm surprised we haven't seen electric cargo ships. Even combine solar with sail as winds are favorable. This combined with auto-navigation (at least between ports) seems more easily achievable than cars yet technology is further behind.
Dockable Phone to PC (physical or even better if wireless dock): Surprised no-one has done this well yet. I can image whoever does this with really take ownership of the OS space. I always felt this could be the best route for Microsoft to re-enter the mobile space with force.
See some resources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
- https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_c...
There could be could add battery storage to be used during the journey. They could include wind turbines to add further power generation.
Also ships can go slower. In my limited knowledge of boats every extra knot takes significantly extra fuel. If we were bringing multiple power sources 'slow' cargo may be viable. And the has to be other ways to increase this function.
And there is always hybrid. Not all power has to be renewable sources. A solution could start with supplementing diesel driven thrust with some lower cost green power. Given diesel is 70% of shipping operating cost that seems a potential option.
No one really wants to build cargo ships right now, shipping companies are barely staying afloat right now because there is a glut of cargo capacity.
This technology would need to be cheap enough that it would make sense to retrofit a ship with it... which would probably not be the case for a very long time.
I do think it's a very thought provoking idea however.
It's a type of 'tragedy of commons' situation, where every shipping company is making the right decisions from their individual perspective, but collectively they're driving themselves into the ground.
For me this explains the rise of slow-steaming. It makes a lot of sense in this market because it lowers the cost of shipping a container (less fuel), while simultaneously reducing the market capacity (# of containers / year).
Finally, very few shipping companies make money on the major lines (e.g. China to Europe), because it's pure price competition. They're much more likely to make money in places where they have a 'monopoly' on something: e.g. being the only ship that leaves in the next 3 days, or being the only shipper going to a specific location. For example inter-Africa shipping falls in this category.
However ironically though, these mega vessels are considered with quite a bit of disdain by many in the industry. This link can provide quite the rabbit hole of information. http://www.supplychain247.com/article/state_of_ocean_contain...
Further exacerbating the problem with the glut of cargo capacity.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/25/slow-shi...
Drone ships won't be practical any time soon because of maintenance problems. Crews spend much of their time at sea performing preventative maintenance, painting, and fixing broken equipment. With a drone ship all of that work would have to be done at the pier which would be far more expensive than paying a crew.
"When the wind conditions are favourable, Norsepower Rotor Sails allow the main engines to be throttled back, saving fuel and reducing emissions while providing the power needed to maintain speed and voyage time. Rotor sails can be used with new vessels or they can be retrofitted to existing ships."
http://www.norsepower.com/
There have been cracks at putting "sails" of one form or another on ships but they've always been heavy, relatively ineffective and basically just not worth the hassle.
The speed of a ship is actually quite easy to work out. You find the time/value curve for the cargo and the cost/time for the ship and see where they cross - essentially. The long and short of it is that the lighter and more valuable your cargo is, the faster the ship goes. This is why container ships are much faster than oil tankers.
The problem is that safe disposal of nuclear fuel is nontrivial.
Every nuclear powered ship becomes a prime terrorist target, either to hijack it or destroy it in place and cause a radiological incident. So you also need constant armed security (also expensive).
A more practical way to have "nuclear powered" ships would be to use electric power from land based nuclear plants to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbon liquid fuels, then load that fuel on the ships. Nuclear plants on land are far more cost effective since they can be built much larger to achieve economies of scale on operations and security.
Seems like a natural fit. For almost everything in the military, IMO there should be some market in the private space that could use those skills.
You could probably even find some ingenious way to run the current through the containers stacked umderneath to route the power. They are made of metal.
https://www.engadget.com/products/motorola/atrix-4g-lapdock/
https://www.engadget.com/products/asus/transformer/book/v/
I feel its like Palm vs. iPhone. Sure Palm was earlier to market with a reasonable solution, but someone needed to nail it.
I was thinking recently that I'd like a liberated Android, found CopperheadOS, but I'm still not sure I'd like to use it on the desktop.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/25/slow-shi...
Why do you think this is possible?
That's pretty much exactly what Toptal or other premium shops like Gigster do: vet remote developers to ensure high quality.
The idea that you can get great developers from India for rock-bottom rates is mostly a fallacy.
Want a better vetting quality? Look at previous work and read code. It doesn't scale unless you put more people at that but maybe somebody can think about an AI for that.
Yes, at rock-bottom rates(< $25/hr), it is. But >$25/hr starts becoming good money for local Indian developers and you can start comparing them to the good developers in the west (>$50/hr).
That's just my opinion having worked in the industry for a while and seen both sides of that market.
Microsoft has done this already but thanks to their poor marketing and crappy Windows phones, no one even knows about it.
I'm on a "Startup break", and started a Service Firm. While working with clients, we realized the need to serve a rather underserved section of projects, which are high enough for individual freelancers or even a small team but too low for established agencies - the $100,000 to $1M projects.
We're experimenting with some of our clients and their connections, to work with our service/marketplace where we manage the project end-to-end to make sure it is done, with other vetted teams of designers and developers. It is not 'cheap' but much more economical than traditional Agencies.
We're Beta Testing it with a small set of clients for now. For those curious, we have a sign-up page at http://www.worksigma.com/
Our clients know that they can go on a vacation while we work on their projects. They wanted that same experience while working with the partners that we introduced. So, we end up handling the client's project and make sure it gets done via these partners.
Work Sigma is borne out of this patterns, and process that we followed. We want to grow this, formalize it, and be able to provide a good service to clients and make them happy. One of the marketing taglines that we tossed around our team is, "Agency in the Cloud".
btw, A friend told me there is something similar at UpWork - https://www.upwork.com/pro/. This is nice - the market is tested and proven.
Thanks for the recommendation though.
Yes. Like Amazon and Google, with their contact us for pricing.
* Ruby
* Rails
* Grape
* Go
* Redis
* Postgres
* QueueClassic
* GraphQL
* React with redux
* KVM
* Puppet
* Heroku
* AWS
0: https://www.rainforestqa.com/jobs/
I'd love to know of a service that will write the test plans in Selenium or Ghost Inspector etc.
Old Navy doesn't want to deal individually with a site that doesn't have 10,000,000 visits/month. So we end up needing an intermediary at the same scale as the big advertisers.
Not saying this can't work at some level, just that there are some big economic forces fighting against scaling a product like this.
Also, I can't help but be struck by the similarity of "mainframes -> PC -> cloud".
I would think this is the main contributor to why we have shitty ads. Everywhere.
Since no one wants to host the ad platform on their own, how do you think you will get your idea across? I think what you really meant is build a better ad platform, not self-hosting ad platform.
I'm a little sceptical of first party content sensitive untargeted advertisement, but we'll see. I also think the people who would block ads would block these too.
See responses to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576611 where people say they will block ads anyway. It's not the tracking. It's not the bandwidth. It's just because it's easy to do.
However I don't see why this problem isn't been solved yet! Just ask what the website is about and serve only ads in the same space would be already a big win...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327125
Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...) This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.
If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...
As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.
There are a couple of drawbacks. First, it turns out that there's not much money to be made developing that software. Second, it turns out that running it is a lot of work, to the point that it's not worth it for most people. Third, most ad buyers don't want to juggle dozens of small publishers, they want centralization.
On another note: Are quarterly rental inspections a thing in the US? Never heard of that, why should my landlord care if I tidy up my apartment?
See Apple and OPPO and Vivo.
I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.
Many of these users are not that familiar with the WWW aspect of the Internet; Facebook and Whatsapps is really the Internet for them.
I could definitely see chatbots becoming advanced enough to handle "I'm locked out of my account and need some part of it reset" type questions within the next 3 - 5 years. I could even see it being superior to the current experience (right now there are significant delays after each thing I say to the customer service person, presumably because they're handling multiple chat windows simultaneously).
Unfortunately we couldn't put in as much time back then. But I am thinking of picking up the project again. Any feedback would be appreciated.
- Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem domain and tooling requirements.
- IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using open source backends.
- Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant tech gaps here.
- Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data.
- Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.
- AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
Thanks in advance.
- An exabyte-scale storage engine. Nothing too exotic here technically and a few companies have built them, but the design needs to address continuous data corruption, continuous hardware failure, geo-federation, etc.
- A real-time database kernel that supports very high throughput for mixed workloads. A production kernel of this type doesn't currently exist though several people working in closed source databases understand the necessary computer science in principle; the academic literature is far behind the state-of-the-art. The ability to gracefully shift load and transients between servers under full load with many millions of writes per second is not trivial.
- Native discrete topology operators. Necessary for geospatial analytics, sensor coverages, etc. If you can do it natively in the database kernel, it makes the second requirement easier to achieve since you don't need secondary indexing generally.
Any solution even halfway toward the general solution would be viable. The value possible if you have such a system is hard to overestimate. Companies have paid half a million dollars for the output of a single analytic query on tens of trillions of IoT records; the differentiator was that it was possible to execute such a query at all.
It is extremely high-end and polymathic computer science, but serious valuable if you can make a credible dent in it. And unlike some advanced topics in computer science, there are no epic unsolved theoretical problems you have to solve, though some relevant computer science may be unpublished.
His company provides sensor systems for civil engineering projects. A single large bridge can have sensor packs every 50m or so - per beam. The amount of sensor data coming in for a single municipality or region is already staggering. Vibration and stress analytics are required on a daily basis.
The final requirement, one which you didn't mention, is that this setup should be fairly low maintenance. If you need a team of rocket scientists to operate and just keep it from falling over, the cost structure will be unsustainable.
A service that provided all this in a platform with sane APIs and good BI integration should be making tons of money.
ain't that the truth
During development or if you want to store the raw data you can split the stream. eg: collect | tee >(store) >(anotherAnalyzer) | analyze | report
I'm just speculating, of course. I was sort of entertaining your idea and going back and forth between "a sounds-good fantasy" and "No, that would be awesome, why does this not exist?"
http://spacecurve.com
[0] https://a.kx.com/q/d/q.htm
[1] https://kx.com/solutions/utilities/
A good example of an IoT data analytics problem is analyzing a petabyte of drone sensor data, which on a large drone amounts to a few flights worth. Typical raw sources tend to be some combination of hyper-spectral imaging/video and LIDAR. Or RF probability functions e.g. mobile. Or a combination of all of the above because you are fusing multiple sources to reduce the uncertainty for your analysis.
FWIW, the "tens of trillions" of IoT records I mentioned was a real-world example from one of the most famous financial companies. It was a spatial analytic on a polygon model, and a classic IoT data model. If KX solved that particular analysis problem, they would have used it.
There's been an explosion in raster data in just the last 5 years. Cheap satellites, cheap drones, and cheap platforms have really turned the firehose to "high". And the resolution on scientific data -- climate and weather model output, astronomy data, particle physics data, seismic data, etc. -- just keeps going up.
This is an area of massive growth for which no existing solution is quite adequate. If I had the time and/or the cash, I'd be diving in head-first.
The data processing could become a commodity but the architecture won't be -- its highly tied to your specific industry.
One of the points I've tried to make at various companies (we've worked at the same one before) is that streaming solutions and batch solutions need to be fused into a single execution engine.
A streaming system on its own (operating on temporal windows) is not nearly as useful as on that can be joined to a storage engine with data at rest. It also needs to be disk based, so windows can be large, which most people do not want to take on. It also needs to be extremely parallel, and efficient.
Thousands of requests a second per server is not even in the right ball-park (which is lots of current execution engines now). Operating at line rate is generally table stakes IMO. The operations on the stream should be parallelized automatically, up to petabytes a day of input. Humans don't have the necessary context to do the partitioning up front, especially with streams that change.
The issue is (and I've tried to come up with designs to address this, though not in practice), is that co-locating the data at rest, with data that is moving through the system is a tricky problem, especially with complicated joins.
They can be the same engine (and should), but traditional database engines tend to have a problem with streaming queries, since they are just repeatedly executing a query against every new record. They are expressible, just not efficient. There is room to innovate in this space, but most people building these engines either solve the parallelism problem naively, or not at all.
There's also the problem of driving this computation to the edge, which is also something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing, but have not yet met a company willing to take this level of effort on.
All the points you make about the kernel are apt, as are the points about the distribution algorithms. Also, the protocols used aren't nash safe, so at scale most of these systems become an operational juggling act under pressure.
All streaming systems that I know of do not know enough about the underlying data to gracefully rebalance and co-locate, since they all tend to embody the map/reduce paradigm, which is oblivious to underlying data distribution, at least in current practice.
There is available computer science to solve all these issues, I think some of the spatial algorithms out there can also be applied to the streaming space, especially in join evaluation.
> something I have a solution for in a way that no one is doing
Is the general direction for this something you can share? 30 years of database literature accumulated a lot of knowledge. It's be a bold claim to say there's something powerful yet non-obvious.
It's not necessarily new computer science, just a clever (if I can be so bold) way to tackle edge computing in the context of a streaming engine.
Three big missing features off the top of my head:
- Insufficiently correct and high precision computational geometry, which compounds with the iterative/recursive nature of many complex sensor analytics. Many people don't notice unless they ground truth their analytic process; I learned this the hard way. For many industries, 1% cumulative computational error is a catastrophic bug for analytics and the reality can be much worse in many common systems.
- Lack of first class tessellation types and operators. Once your data scientists have them, they'll wonder how they lived without them. Such things are completely useless for cartography and therefore don't exist in those platforms.
- High-performance computational geometry. This is particularly noticeable if you work with sensor coverages (like drone data). Your typical cartographic system has serious difficulty joining a few terabytes of complex polygons, but these are tiny data sets for many remote sensing sources. It literally takes weeks or months to run these types of queries. You can optimize this to be much faster but there was no pressing market need in cartography and cartographic systems aren't designed for scale-out generally.
On that last point, you can execute an effective denial of service attack on most GIS databases with a well-crafted set of polygons and polygon intersection queries. It doesn't even require malicious intent. (Yet another thing I learned the hard way.)
For example, the intersection of n polygons could have exponentially many segments. To prevent denial of service, accuracy has to be sacrificed, but "one part per trillion error" sounds hard.
As another example, representing the intersection between two line segments without error requires a data type that has three times as many bits as the x/y components of their endpoints, so rounding has to happen here, too.
The only solution I can come up with that would not have those problems would be to subdivide a plane into grid cells of size one trillionth of whichever unit, rasterize all polygons into it do the Boolean operations at pixel-level, but that would require huge amounts of memory and processing power. And additionally it would be vulnerable to a DOS attack where the attacker sends many very large overlapping rectangles.
Lastly, huge amounts of data would require many computers to be able to work on this problem in parallel, but if an attacker sends only overlapping polygons, parallelization would be very tricky if not impossible.
Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?
[1] R. J. Solomonoff. A formal theory of inductive inference: Parts 1 and 2. Information and Control, 7:1--22 and 224--254, 1964.
[2] R. J. Solomonoff. Complexity-based induction systems: Comparisons and convergence theorems. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-24:422-432, 1978.
[3] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability
I am co-founder of tensorflight.com. We do computer vision analytics of drone imagery. Interesting that you mention it, as I thought it's a somewhat obscure market. When we talk to investors in the valley 75%+ have to be educated about why what we do is a viable business.
Please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you have any ideas!
I know it's fashionable to hate on deep learning, but algorithm induction is literally what deep learning does.
Such a question usually gets answers mostly comprised of work that is extremely boring at first glance. For example, create a system than halves the work to complete documentation for some sort of compliance with regulations.
Every one of these ideas just sounds incredibly interesting to work on. The type that gets a lot of really bright people together on a team (that I'd really want to be on too), yet they might not deliver a product, and possibly even less likely figure out how to monetize it.
Anyway, I'm not developing a friction-reducing product either, but worry about choosing something because it sounds like a rewarding, intellectual challenge.
Predicting mid to long-term trends and demographic shifts far enough ahead of time to make investments.
Making Asimov's Psychohistory from Foundation a reality!
> There are many VCs currently hunting for this product
Implies a difficult problem.
> algorithmic induction tech
Do you mean inference?
- How can I determine the best time to sleep?
- What food to eat before sleep?
- How can I be productive all the way until I fall asleep?
- Why no sleep drug without harsh side effects?
Just a few things I'd like to see research into...
Also you're mixing up many different aspects. Feeling sleepy doesn't mean you're sleepy. Motivation is a different thing altogether.
So power through?
Getting sleepy is your brain telling you to preserve energy. Only sometimes it does that because something about the work itself bores, infuriates, disgusts, or otherwise upsets you.
That means getting "procrastination-sleepy" is your brain trying to prevent spending energy on the miniature emotional turmoil "breaking procrastination".
http://w3c.github.io/push-api/
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
About your comment, imagine that the app can know my location, and pair me with a local expert, if the expert has to go to the other person home to fix their computer the price increases.
I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide the same baseline of consumer trust; peek on craigslist and you'll find dozens of computer service postings for even a small town, and in large cities it gets even bigger. I agree that it's probably an area that could benefit from a loosely centralized provider, but adoption seems like it will be very difficult.
Have you heard of IT certifications?, each vendor provides certifications based of their technologies, Microsoft has a lot of different certification programs.
If the client only wants to know the basic usage of a program, the service could pair it with another person not certified. If it's a company requiring for help or a developer in their home, he could request for "advanced service" and then a certified person could help in the specific field of the problem.
You can have a reputation system, with badges that determine how the person has being helpful, reviews from the clients etc.
You need a TLC license, at least in NY. Insurance, exams and getting a car. Uber in NY requires TLC. Some other states in US are more relaxed.
BestBuy could extend their GeekSquad service by incorporating other vendors into the service line. Half of computer problems require physical touch of the computer. I guess what you wanted to do is to turn SuperUser on stackexchange into a paid subscription, allowing people to pay a few $$ to do remote help, and a platform for people to sell their computer help service.
- Twitter w/out fake accounts.
- a marketplace that uses Facebook as a vehicle for engagement/promotion but which operates independently.
- Secure SMS for 2FA tokens
- Android w/out Play Services
- Schema-based email
- Stripe for the rest of the World
Also, it'll take a few seconds to pay via credit card, whereas converting the money on your account to bitcoins in the sellers account can easily take several hours.
this is China
This is easy, I've done this for years. Install LineageOS without Google Apps, use F-Droid.
Check out CopperheadOS
While it's easy to say IoT, cryptocurrency, or whatever the latest buzzwords happen to be—there's ideas that have been floating around for years which are still viable, it's just that they're hard and require exceptional execution. In that sense, they are almost timeless until implemented correctly.
For example, another comment suggested marketplace/content discovery. That's been an unsolved problem for almost a decade now. Ads are another great example: they've been dishing out human misery for about the same length of time. People hate them, so they use ad blockers, and everyone loses. These aren't new problems or opportunities.
http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-antib...
Genius!
There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including "lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive (due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the current presidency) being the first two which come to mind.
If you can find some way to give non-San-Francisco startups the same advantages that San Francisco startups have -- better tools for remote workers, for example, so that companies can easily hire from anywhere rather than needing to be where the largest number of potential employees are found; or something to make VCs interested in investing in companies which aren't within a narrow radius of Sand Hill (since I've never dealt with VCs, I have no idea what such a solution would look like) -- then you'll create a huge amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to transfer some of that value into your pockets.
Corollary: It's probably time for a much wider adoption of bitcoin in tech. To transfer that value from halfway around the world to personal pockets capitalism style, we need crypto to become a primitive member of apps, markets and tech deals, and no longer a big deal.
In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper. Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :)
I feel that it is something else, culture issue, that still makes teams that are physically in the same location, to perform more effectively. Fixing work culture to support remote work better is likely the key instead of tech and tools.
And money will follow: when VCs believe that remote teams and remote networking are as effective, they will invest everywhere.
I have no idea. The answer might turn out to be a social question of redefining the concept of a "job", for all I know. If the answer was obvious, I'm sure it wouldn't be an untapped opportunity. ;-)
There's a long, long way to go before video conferencing feels more like an actual face-to-face conversation, and it hasn't really changed much in the past 10 years.
I mean, the main complaint against remote work seems to be that there's still no substitute for an actual face-to-face conversation. That IS a tech problem that CAN be solved with tech. The current tech is woefully inadequate.
You just have to draw a schema to understand.
3 to 5 meters is a good distance for a video conference.
Also, I'd like to be (or feel like I am) much closer than 5 meters when talking with someone.
[1] http://tachilab.org/content/files/publication/tp/imai200604P...
To take it even further, is work culture even broken? It seems to me like there's already quite a lot of remote work (at least in tech) for those who make it a top priority. I wonder if the fact that it isn't the default is because most people would rather not work that way? Aside from the obvious social benefit of face to face contact with your coworkers, I find the second order effects very valuable as well - the energy in the office helps keep my excitement about the projects we're working on so I enjoy my work more (and conversely the shared commiseration when the company hits a pitfall is nice too).
Plus the scalability of remote work is dependent on living somewhere where a lot fewer people want to live - if you live in, say, Manhattan and work remotely for an SF company, you're still taking up housing someone at a NY company could be living in. Some people value being near family or nature or something above all else, but generally (by definition) most people want to live where a lot of other people want to live.
So I wonder if the underlying solution is improving cities - something like the city project YC is running, or beating the NIMBYs in places like SF so the city can actually grow to support the startups it has and more, or maybe improving transit so people from further out can commute at least some of the time into cities, etc.
1) bandwidth in many parts of the world is still not nearly good enough for high quality video
2) need good inexpensive remote whiteboarding tech. The MS surface TV looks good but too expensive to fit in everyone's remote office
3) initiating remote video should (either for screen sharing or video chat) be immediate, like 3 secs max, zero friction, not something you have to schedule or spend minutes setting up - just like turning your chair to talk to someone sitting next to you in an office
There are a ton of online whiteboard apps, but it's hard to find a good one (know of any?).
Then there's the problem that drawing with a mouse is difficult. It's hard to quickly express ideas as boxes-and-lines without something like a drawing tablet. Wacom makes some low-end ones that are pretty affordable though (like this one[0] for ~$80). Maybe that'd be a good solution, though it does require some practice to get proficient.
[0] http://a.co/du45rQr
Whiteboarding specifically - don't know of any good ones. It should ideally be a collaborative multi user real time web app (websockets?), support drawing on top of uploaded images, have very large canvases you can zoom/pan, and run together with hangouts/Skype or have VoIP built in. Want to collab on building one? :)
I've used many Wacom tablets - even the cheap ones are good and pretty intuitive - no real learning curve after setup.
Solution to "frictionless" remote work / collaboration among teams (not just engineers) seems similar to interview problem. The target market may also be distinct (teams don't remote work, but remote interviews are common).
moocs might benefit too?
Solution to "frictionless" remote work / collaboration among teams (not just engineers) seems similar to interview problem. The target market may also be distinct (teams don't remote work, but remote interviews are common).
moocs might benefit too?
Successful businesses are built on the backs of relationships. Your product is important, your tech is somewhat important, but THE most important part of a building what many would call a "successful" business is the relationships you create.
It doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve -- convince people to buy your product, convince people to work for your company, convince VCs to give you money, convince Google to buy you -- all of these things may begin on the premise of merit, price, features, value, but they end up based on the relationships built between the people involved.
Deals are closed over drinks. People work for people they enjoy spending time with. VCs invest money in people they trust. Yes, all things in life have exceptions, but the longer you stay in business, the more you realize that businesses are run by people -- they are not opaque fact-driven entities -- and people are social creatures. The actual reason that people in San Francisco still cling to an age-old culture of doing business together in person instead of over Slack is because humans enjoy spending physical time around other humans. Maybe it's communication bandwidth, maybe it's something else, but until VR replaces physical intimacy, there is no perfect substitute.
If you want to succeed outside of San Francisco, begin building the relationships you need to do so. People can claim that Slack, Hangouts, and the phone match the effectiveness of physical presence, but try switching to a permanent long-distance relationship with your significant other. Good luck.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-organ...