I'm a bit surprised. Some of the ideas - ok, two of the ideas, dating and "the next craigslist" - don't seem that far off from the proverbial pie-in-the-sky "Facebook killer": the hard part is getting the critical mass, and everyone wants to make one. [edit] #9 and 10, photo/video sharing and auctions, are arguably in this category as well.
I also still don't get WebOS. There must be something to it, because a lot of smart people are getting excited about the field, but I just can't see it myself... can anyone help me "see the light"?
I don't see the need for any "Facebook Killer" proverb. Facebook seems to be doing a pretty good job of killing itself without any external assistance.
Yeah. Most people I know who were using it heavily last summer (including myself) only log on when they receive a personal message now - and they don't even know about the Beacon flop/privacy disaster. Facebook apps are for the most part spam.
I don't think they're going bankrupt yet, for sure - but they're a looong way down from that $15b valuation some months ago.
That maybe true, but you would have to make something better than all the currently available free ones. The best platforms seem to be worked on by the smartest people that were just trying to solve their own problems, and then give the solution away for free.
What do you expect? Demand is demand: There's not all that much difference between what humans want in 2008 and what they wanted in 1908. They want to listen to music, look at art and theatre, visit with their families, impress their friends, find meaning in their lives, and get laid.
Naturally, these are the waters where everybody goes fishing, year after year.
I think part of the secret, though, is to stop designing (e.g.) "the next dating site" and start designing a way to get compatible, single people into the same room. Focus on the problem, not the old solution. For example, the very word "WebOS" encourages bad habits of thought: It encourages you to look for something shaped like Windows or Linux, or for apps with a UI that reminds you of the desktop.
One reason those are broad is that our own filters are. We're interested in any dating site that also includes a solution to the chicken and egg problem.
BTW, by "Craigslist competitor" I don't mean a new Craigslist. I mean take one thing Craigslist does, and do it better. When you later expand outward from that, you don't have to expand into the rest of the stuff Craigslist does.
Personals shouldn't be a problem for investors. If the "erotic service" section is what I think it is, it probably wouldn't be a problem if you had enough other stuff so it didn't seem that was your whole business. That seems to be the strategy of indy papers like the Boston Phoenix, for example.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but YC's model is built around working with very early-stage, yet-to-incorporated businesses. A team that had already built a product to the point of beta, or that had been working on one of the ideas on the list for the past three years as someone has mentioned here, would probably not qualify, right?
hi pg - we are already on version 2.0 (already have a subscriber base through version 1.0) - the thing is the dev team is here in the Philippines - our founder is in suburban Detroit - any suggestions? we have a small time window of less than 45 days - to make this happen - I'd be happy to share the details via email.
We're working on a combination of 5 and 7. It's a good place to be, I reckon. A lot of existing enterprise software is indeed simply appalling - both internally developed and external products bought from companies that supposedly have evolved in the free market. Most of it seems to be stuck in the late 90's, when it was ok to have an awful unfriendly interface that makes user endure pain for every minute they have to use it.
Help. Help. I feel like that guy in the Sandman comics who gets cursed to have nothing but original ideas, as rapidly as possible, day and night, forever.
Seriously, this list is exhausting to read. It's like the topic sentence for an entire century. I'm going to have to take it a little piece at a time.
That's true, but I hear what mechanical_fish is saying, too. I suffer from much the same problem: many elements on the list are things which I have thought about to an extent that I've worked out every single step needed to make them work. The problem is, I haven't the time to pursue everything I would like to.
Let's take the "simplified browsing" problem, for example. I worked phone technical support for an internet service provider for a while, and it wasn't long before I saw the need for exactly such a thing. But, it runs deeper than just web browsing and email: there is a huge, absolutely massive number of people out there that need a simpler computer. They don't understand things like firewalls and security, and aren't inclined to ever understand them.
The solution? Take a Linux distribution and hack it heavily; simplify the desktop layout, hide all the settings, and set it up so that immediately after booting, a full-screen web browser appears. The web browser defaults to a very simplified portal page; the user logs in to their "computer" exactly once (on the portal page), and from there they have access to simplified email (which, for example, doesn't have things called "Reply to All"), chat, word processing, and other services.
Thing is, the previous services that have tried to create such a thing have done it wrong; they tried to release their own computer, hardware and all. That doesn't work, at least not now. This would work though because you could sell a CD which would make the installation process a breeze. You wouldn't have a huge initial development cost for the operating system; a good Linux hacker could probably make the necessary changes very quickly.
After, say, 6 months of development by a few people, and with the aid of a crack marketing team, you could start distributing copies of this thing for around $75. You'd be tapping in to an under-served market not just of senior citizens but of every average family that's frustrated at using their computer.
You could even build in a secure remote desktop protocol for the operating system, and make tech support -- if you wanted to offer it -- the easiest it's ever been.
So, there ya go. Probably a hundred-million-dollar idea, with most of the framework. Lots more details, too many to list here.
"there is a huge, absolutely massive number of people out there that need a simpler computer"
This is a good observation. Anyway, the issue here is, whether that massive number will have some common notion of what the simpler computer actually is.
They don't, nor do they have to. In fact, they generally don't have any idea of what to expect from a simpler computer, other than "it's not frustrating".
For those of us that are computer literate, it's hard to imagine that even basic abstract concepts like email are completely foreign to the majority of the population. I would guess that over half of people don't know how to answer the question, "what do you use for a web browser?".
So you have a blank slate, a free pass to design anything you can imagine. If you can deliver it to these people, and if they don't find it intimidating, or hard to learn, or unpredictable, then they'll like it.
I believe it is possible to start with a metaphor that everyone educated enough to want to use a computer understands: a book (my 1.5-year-old daughter qualifies: she would love to push the buttons on my laptop keyboard, were it allowed; she also loves to look at (picture) books). XO 2 is the right step in that direction: see http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006986.html for details. Once the hardware is in place, the software is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to design and build.
I think the problem with 'simpler' computers is similar to the problem with WYSIWYG development and database platforms: they are too simple for anyone whose job or interest it is to create a webpage or database and too complex for the ocassional user. This is why MySpace took off where all the many DIY webpage creation tools did not. MySpace redefined the goal with tools that leveraged the hidden desires of people to have a webpage. In the case of MySpace is was to socialize. Most people don't think of MySpace and Facebook as a web development tool but if you look at what the end result is, you'll see that people are creating online content using these social networks.
So the problem of "simpler browsers" will likely only be solved by solutions that redefine the experience and goal and it will likely be very close to what we now call a smartphone.
I wonder for how long the demand for simple browsers will exist. Today we still have old people and such who are afraid of computers. But they might go away and all the young ones that come after them might not have their problems.
Also, I wonder about the browsers that come with game consoles like the Wii, are they any good? They might be easier to use than full-fledged computers?
“Simple browsers” (#2), i think, has already been solved. Take http://Shiira.jp/en.php or Safari on the iPhone. The larger problem is how to make mass audiences aware without mass advertising, or to make it affordable to those without income. Seeing this problem under the lens of getting computer and media illiterates to open their minds, or employing the permanently unemployed, better reframes the challenge.
How is different from America Online in the 90's? It wouldn't be exactly the same, and the execution might be better, but wouldn't it be much the same?
Not putting down Einstein by any means, but many of the ideas he is famous for existed before him. His immense skill was to come up with a better way to arrange those ideas.
that's often pointed out regarding his Special theory of relativity, and in fact it seems like it's used as "proof" that original ideas can't exist. but while it may be true in the case of the Special theory, people conveniently stop short of the General, for which it isn't
e=mc^2 came out of special relativity; while Lorentz etc. essentially had most of the pieces, Einstein was the first to derive that beautiful little bit.
Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already.
Even if this were true (which seems extremely unlikely) someone had to think of it first. So there would have been a point when it was possible to have new ideas. How can you be sure the present is not such a point, when we know there were such points in the past?
Well an idea (such as a flying car) can differ so marginally from its ancestor idea that the two are almost impossible to distinguish. But while the idea can have several thousand iterations, it's usually measured externally only by its popular implementations, discretizing the process and making ideas like Google search seem "new."
Sort of like looking at each generation from chimpanzees to humans.
I did not say that people do not have new ideas. That is a blatantly ridiculous statement. I said that worthy ideas have already been had.
My argument comes from looking at literary and philosophical ideas, and my comment was a jest in response to another jest, but there's truth in it. There's a persistent quest for originality in literature, and after some years of chasing that particular ghost I came to the conclusion that it's an illusion. All the great subjects, all the great ideas, have been had already. That doesn't make a book written today less valuable, because what I would add to whichever idea I decide to write about is my own, unique perspective on it. But it means that trying to come up with some completely original idea for a book is pointless - if it's "completely original" it is probably worthless. If ten of thousand years of human civilisation have not yet produced that idea in any form, there's probably a good reason.
Hence my statement that ideas worth having have been had a thousand times already.
So, rather than chasing originality in writing, I think it's more worthwhile to enrich my perspective so that what I add to whatever ancient kernel I might pick is actually worth adding.
Now, extending this to start-up ideas, as you well know, if you have a brilliant idea for a start-up, chances are someone has already had that idea somewhere in the world. If no one has had it at all out of 6 billion people, chances are it's not brilliant, and probably not worth pursuing. Moreover, most great business ideas are not "original", but twists on existing ideas, putting an existing concept into a new perspective. So even the first person to come up with a new twist is still just coming up with a new twist. As with books, though, it doesn't matter whether your idea is original, what matters is what you put into it (the execution, basically). I think this is in agreement with your articles.
Businesses exist to fulfil human needs. The idea of fulfilling human needs is as old as human needs themselves. The ways of doing so are just as old. Social networking, for example, might be a new twist on the idea of helping people make and keep friends, but it's still fulfilling the human need for friendship, something which thousands of other businesses do too.
So, again, rather than striving to come up with a truly original start-up idea, I think it's more worthwhile to hone my ability to take whatever idea I do decide to run with and make it into a working business.
Chasing originality is a self-defeating thing to do, but not because all worthy ideas are unoriginal. It's because it points in the wrong direction, away from the wellsprings of creativity. It's like trying to be funny. The most striking thing about all those "persistent quest[s] for originality in literature" is how utterly samey they are. Ditto for music. But then someone like Bob Dylan or Kurt Cobain does do something original, and people wake up.
The way I hear what you're saying, you found a way out of a trap for yourself (the trap of trying to be original, which just leads round in circles) by deciding that nothing's really original. That sounds like a valuable insight under the circumstances. It doesn't mean that the generalization holds universally, though (which is why you're getting objections to it here). In fact the opposite generalization might be equally true: every great idea has never exactly occurred before.
Oh, for sure, and to be fair, my response was not meant to be a rigorous logical statement, since it was in response to a jest about Sandman comics :-) However, I felt there was some truth to it so I defended it anyway.
I'm quite comfortable with the idea (original or not) that opposing concepts can both be true simultaneously. Your opposite generalisation does sound very interesting too. I'm going to write it down in my little idea notebook for further thought some day :-) Thanks!
(Thinking about it now, putting both these statements together appears like it could well need to a very interesting Borges-like story)
Then I disagree. I don't think there are any new worthy ideas being come up with these days. I think pretty much everything we do is a refinement on existing ideas, and different approaches of implementation. All the really interesting ideas are already out there, and have been for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The process of their evolution has been one of evolution, variation and refinement - not of creation, not for a long time.
You fund many start-ups. How many have come up with a truly original idea? How many have, instead, taken an existing idea and given a new spin to it, or even just taken an existing idea and applied it to a new market? In fact, if you can't express your idea in a few words, is probably not a great start-up idea. And if you can, then it's probably fairly close to an existing idea. "Search engine for parts" (Octoparts). "Job site for start-ups" (Startuply). "Automatic time-management tracking" (RescueTime). "Configurable, hosted e-commerce platform" (Viaweb). "Social news for hackers" (YCNews). All potentially great businesses or worthwhile endeavours, but not because of any originality.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all intellectual fields equally well. It very much depends on your definition of "idea", too. But I think for a definition of idea that maps fairly closely to "start-up ideas" as well as "book/story ideas" or even "wise ideas" - all the good ones are out there for the picking, and have been for eons.
> it's an illusion. All the great subjects, all the great ideas, have been had already.
Arriving at this feeling is an unmistakable symptom of being physiologically incapable of creativity. My condolences. On the plus side, most of humanity is in the same boat as you.
Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long, familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what distinguishes truly original minds. The first discoverer is ordinarily that wholly common creature, devoid of spirit and addicted to fantasy - accident. (Nietzsche)
See, even the idea that original ideas are not original is not original. If only Borges was around to help guide us, we'd probably found that Nietzsche got this idea, in slightly different form, from an 18th century academician, who in turn was able to lift it from the writings of a Russian monk, who in turn found it in a little-known greek play.
From André Maurois' preface to Borges' Labyrinths (about Borges):
His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: 'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.' Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): 'We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.' But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'
I would argue that this is true in one sense only--before anyone had invented the wheel, the wheel still existed. The idea of the wheel had existed the moment matter was created lending the possibility of the wheel to come about. Arguably even before this. However the idea of the wheel was not realized until someone captured that idea. This is the same with any idea, every idea already exists, out there, somewhere.
However, to rearrange the words of the proposed idea, that is to say that "no one has ever had an original", new idea, cannot be true mathematically simply because there are an infinite number of ideas.
The question now becomes two parts
1) Definition of "new ideas", and
2) Whether or not there are any new WORTHY ideas
Response to 1). Interpretation of a new idea greatly limits the concept of having a "new idea". For example, is a walkman the same idea as an iPod? Both are ways to carry music around with you portably and conveniently. Same with a horse and buggy and an automobile. HOWEVER, I would argue that both of these show that an iPod and a car are distinctly new ideas.
Response to 2) This idea greatly underestimates the intellectual power of people. Throughout history there have been worthy, new ideas (air travel, concept of the atom, big bang theory, the internet), how can it possibly be that there are none left?
Overall I really hope that what I believe is true, that there are new worthy ideas to be had. For example there has to be some brilliant man or woman somewhere that will come up with a new idea, or a dumb man or woman that will stumble across one, that will undoubtedly arise from a problem or crisis that arises (ie energy crisis...COME ON PEOPLE, PROVE ME RIGHT!!).
If anything, that's demotivation, at least for real hackers. Plenty of Fish is popular because of marketing/SEO techniques and throwing successively larger iron at traffic, not because Markus Frind was a technical genius with a clever idea. Very different path to profitability than most of us want to take, I think.
I'm torn...It's nice to have that much money because then you can take it and create other better things. But you first have to build something sleazy :-/
If you want to be a technical genius get a grant and grow a beard. I want to use the skills I have to support my family and enjoy life at the same time.
The idea I submitted and worked on for three years when I applied in 2007 had three of those in one... I don't think anybody has executed on it yet, if you want to read my Spring 2007 application again. (Though if I apply again, it would be with another, more time-sensitive idea, which can also be split up into several of your categories.) I'm not trying to brag, but I did outline the exact way to beat eBay.
One, there's already plenty of competition: Etsy and Amazon are just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole ecosystem of blogs out there on this. Start with Randy Smythe and AuctionBytes.
I'm not going to outline our strategy to expand beyond gaming, but I think our plan is one (of many possible) that will work.
If you know how to beat ebay, why are you not doing it? I You could become a millionaire. I take it the thing you are working on right now could make you even more money than ebay?
>I'm not trying to brag, but I did outline the exact way to beat eBay.
And somehow missing out on a $20,000 investment stopped you?!? That is total bullshit; you would have just taken out $20,000 on a credit card, because beating ebay is literally worth billions of dollars.
Thanks for your feedback. From being rejected as a single founder, I decided instead it would be better to get some work experience in order to save money while continuing my college education in order to meet cofounders at work or school for another idea that wouldn't compete against eBay, and apply to YCombinator with a new idea, as stated (and with multiple founders). I think that is an excellent plan, and far more realistic than putting myself $20,000 into debt at credit card interest levels. I would highly advise others against doing what you describe.
Really a great list on what is broken and why it needs to be fixed. Pretty much everything on the internet is broken to a certain extent, that gives an opportunity for early and existing Entrepreneurs. I really want to do something with music and news, those two are totally broken which will eventually destroy the industry.
Basically, the creator applies metadata to their media, and lets it circulate (P2P, fansites, internet radio - anything) wherever it needs to go from the outset. A Creative Commons Attribution license is used.
Browsers, media players, or a special app tracks whatever is played locally and a special app regularly prompts for voluntary payment at regular times. Only 5% may pay - but in a global world with low production costs, that might be enough.
http://Musicbrainz.org can be used to retag the files if the metadata is corrupted along the way.
News can also be 'solved' the same way - track what's being consumed and let the consumer voluntarily pay later. Few will pay, but in paying, other benefits can be obtained, like the content creator being able to give previews or special releases to their known audiences.
A monthly email with playback history would be better: and the option for a voluntary payment to be dispersed proportionally to whom you listened, with the option of being listed on artists' or creators' audience list.
To do that, one's web browser and media player would each have a plugin that updates the central website's playback repository. Maybe an OS level app that integrates with many possible playback apps without the user worrying about specific plugins. Spyware free of course.
Yes, the development of the web is definitely not over! Lots of great ideas there. At swirrl.com we're working on something like Paul's item 22, with a bit of 5 thrown in.
Hmmm... wasn't planning on applying for Winter, but we're working on the auctions one. (Although I think auctions is the wrong way to look at - looking at marketplaces in general makes more sense.)
1) A way to ensure that each person can only create one account on a website, without having to sacrifice anonymity.
2) A day planner that plans my day for me; based on my to-do list, what my friends are doing, and also what's going on in the local area. Also, populate the bulk of my to-do list automatically based on what my friends in the same classes are adding to theirs. Plan social dates for me based on when my friends and I are free. Introduce me to people I don't know but should know.
3) A way to get more people involved in Internet-mediated locally social stuff.
4) A semi-standardized way for people to build up a reputation without needing a college degree.
5) An IMDB for people who have won awards. I want to a quick way to find the professors with the most citations in any given subject, the chefs in the area with the best zagats reviews, the local high school football players with the most touchdowns, etc.
6) An academic search engine targeting people who are college educated but who don't necessarily have extensive experience with the inner workings of academia. Right now there are really good ways of accessing journal articles online, but really poor ways of learning what academic journals to look in. There's no way to know which journals are respected and which aren't. No easy way to translate plain English questions into the keywords that are used by academics.
7) A way to turn recipes on the web into peapod orders. A way to turn the customized diets that Weight Watchers or WebMD create into a peapod order.
For number (6), I've been thinking about something in a similar area but a different take. The whole journal system itself is broken. My university's Math & CS library dropped its subscriptions to several journals a few years ago because they cost too much. Even though they picked the least important/prestigious journals, at one of the top CS departments in the country, this should not happen. And this is to say nothing of a lone individual who wants to benefit from research and teach himself some of it. They can hardly pay to subscribe to any of these journals.
And think about what a journal provides: a forum for researchers to submit the results of their research and a mechanism for selecting which of the submissions are worthwhile for folks in the field to know about.
What I just described is essentially just a karma system, albeit you would have to find a way to take the credibility of the rater into serious consideration. Assuming you solved the chicken-and-egg problem of getting enough credible people from academia to be raters and to submit their best work to your site (quite a tough problem considering many large universities are much more like big companies, or worse government bureaucracies, than startups), you could totally replace the entire system of academic journals.
Think of all the other free extras you would get by having a web app host all journal articles: at minimum, the process of citing references and looking at the background of a paper could be improved: you could visually trace the findings of the paper you're looking at all the way back to the founding of the field by what each of it's references used as references. Search would be a lot better, as would recommendation engines (lots of professors have grad students waste time simply scanning journals for articles that are relevant for their work). If you're into NLP than you would have a much better dataset and a clear application for doing summarization. And think about the possibilities of social networking or productivity-app type features enabling all sorts of new possibilities for collaboration among people at different universities!
But the real big play is that once you do all this, you're well on your way to replacing universities themselves, which any undergraduate can tell you are bloated enterprises which spend large amounts of money and pass the costs onto their customers, who accept it because the university system has a monopoly on giving out credentials for people going into the working world.
One of universities main products is research, and in many fields (biology, physics) you need the big backing of university (and government) dollars to support research. In many other fields (math, Computer Science, philosophy) you don't. Researchers in these fields usually need to somehow pay their living expenses, and the actual equipment expenses are minimal. They mainly need:
-a place to find like-minded collaborators
-credibility for their work (ie, ability to publish in journals).
You could give them both of those things. Now people in these fields wouldn't even need to choose the career path of grad school and then professorship (in other words, staying their entire life in the university monopoly) in order to contribute their research to humanity's body of knowledge.
So in other words, what you need is to build a HN/Reddit style voting/peer review system that weights the credibility of the voter heavily. Then you need to find some early adopters who are credible enough to lend your own site credibility. Then you could be well on your way to reinventing the academy in a way that is much more democratic and makes its results much more widely available and usable by the public.
Anyone want to build this? My email address is in my profile. Or just go ahead and use this idea yourself - I just really want to be able to use this service somehow, though probably more as a consumer than a producer of research. Maybe someone who actually went to grad school and had lots of papers published themselves would ...
great comment, mlinsey. i've been thinking about this problem a bit too and your points essentially sum up what needs to be built - a HN for academia. citeseerx, though more of a search engine, kind of does this on an annual basis by tabulating citations; ditto for ssrn.com in the social sciences world. but i think one of the problems is that the conversations and feedback around these papers doesn't yet happen in a more public forum, and that alone would be a pretty useful feature.
btw, i don't think your email address is public, but my contact info should be listed; feel free to shoot me a message.
Great comment. One consideration is that the credibility isn't global or transferable across fields. It's constrained to each niche. So you really want a slinkset for academia more than an HN.
You mention classes so I guess you are on a campus. I am working on a project with a large colledge cafeteria mgt company. Where we are building specific diets (weight loss, strength building etc) from their daily menu and then letting students access the diet/menu selection in a number of cool ways //Hard to explain in a comment
If you have ideas, my email is in my profile. Cheers/mike
Interesting concept. I actually interned briefly at CBORD a couple summers ago. One interesting thing I discovered was that small community colleges with cafeteria management systems took great pride in them. For example, several schools featured their systems on the school’s homepage. It's almost as if they believe that giving students a card to swipe to get into the dining halls is what makes one a real college. I don't really have any specific ideas, other than that you should play off the social status aspect at the lower end of the market. I know people selling software to colleges normally think first about the Ivies, but realize that your product is going to be one of the things that the smaller colleges get really excited about. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them actually started talking your product up on their campus tours.
I totally agree with the outsourcing of IT. My father owns a minor distribution company. That deals with spa, pool, and bath parts. No piece of software has ever come to make their life easier. I have been involved with every major software purchase and I am constantly thinking to myself, I know these people I could probably make something that would work.
The biggest problem I see is that hosted apps are great, but these guys need the software to be up all the time. They may even have bad internet connections. So I was thinking the best model would be to have a hosted application, and then if the company wanted greater up time they could by a box and put it at their location and it would take care of syncing with the online counterpart. That way they could continue business while offline.
As long as you are taking care of integration, and migration you could probably open source the underlying software and still make money on support services. You could also make money selling monthly low cost licenses per user like 10 or 15 dollars per person.
I've sometimes wondered whether IT isn't becoming the 'core' part of a business. I.e. the one that's most complex and drives the competitive edge and success of a business. I have worked in IT in many different industries and often enough found the 'business' part of the business to be easy to pick up while it sometimes took ages and a lot of brainpower to get on top of the technology. In other words, IT people can understand 'businesss' but business people can't understand IT. So, in the future, instead of having a bank with an IT department, we'd have an IT company with a bank department. They'd probably switch sooner from banking to insurance than from one IT infrastructure to another.
I think amazon is a good prototype for this. It's a tech company that also sells books. They later added all sorts of other crap like electronics, then stuff that they don't even deliver but where they just act as a front for other retailers and finally they are now offering their IT services purely by themselves (S3, EC2).
I don't think IT will ever become that important. IT will just take its rightful place next to Law Firms and Accounting Firms as a necessary part of the business but not the core.
It is kind of surprising that IT, with its self references as fast-paced and innovative has taken so long to realize its own inefficiencies. IT (in the sense of internal computer systems for businesses) was greatly over invested starting in the 90s because the executives of the time were so scared. I remember stories of Hollywood executives who would ask their assistants to surf websites they were going to invest in and videotape it. They would take these video tapes home for 'research' the same way they would research actors, directors and movies to invest in. They completely didn't get it. So what did they do? They did what most people do when they are scared, they try to buy insurance. This insurance came in over-investment in all things technology both externally and internally, leading to huge IT departments that then used their bulk to buy more technology and increase their internal political might until all this over investment corrected itself in the legendary bubble pop.
I think when all is said and done, IT will be just like Payroll. When was the last time you met a person who works 40 hours a week processing payroll? They used to exist at every company - now everyone's checks come from ADP or PayChex. IT will be done by an outside company and will part of the budget for each person on the payroll. But of course I am a little biased...
Hmm, payroll - There is an industry to be disrupted...
I have a vague idea what you mean by the 'inefficiencies'. I am wondering whether these would have manifested in the first place if IT had been given a more central role. It's a lot about motivation too, the 'central' people in a business are usually motivated by being shareholders as well as employees at the same time. If you treat IT as just another accountant they will find endless means and ways to drag their feet and just generally pursue their own interests which are generally opposed to that of the business. Being linked into the flow of information, i.e. high level senior management decisions, is important too for efficiency.
I totally agree that things could always be better and that incentives are the key to this. There is a business concept from the 80s called 'open book management' where everyone in the company sees where all the money goes. This is more transparency than even public companies have.
I think it could be a technique that would get everyone from accounting to IT more involved in the business. I also think there needs to be much shorter expectations of how long someone will work for a company. Hollywood is on to something with the way they bring together small teams to make a film that then disband and reform in a new configuration for the next film. I wonder what would happen if every person in the company had to choose each year whether they want to continue with the company. They would in effect have a one year job. This might make their sense of urgency and priority for the 52 weeks within that year much more focused. It might also form a company with much more dedicated people who really want to be there.
"The biggest problem I see is that hosted apps are great, but these guys need the software to be up all the time."
I was the Director of IT for a $250mm startup, a little under 5 years old. We started, as almost all valley startups do, using quick books for our financials. Very quickly issues like Purchase Orders, Expense Reports, became more important so we looked to move to an online SAAS financials system - we chose Netsuite. Our internet connectivity grew as the number of our employees grew, until today, at 120 employees, we have a finance/procurement department of 10 people, and a 3 Mbit connection to the internet. Our Financial software has been on the Internet somewhere for the last 4+ years, and has never gone down. I used to be impressed that our DSL link was as reliable as our T1, until an ISP explained to me that they were probably both landing on the same equipment on the back end - just one of them was coming at me with T1 Framing.
This is just a long way of saying that Internet connectivity can be assumed now. Large (very large) companies don't think twice of oursourcing their business critical functions, and, in fact, as we transition from Netsuite to Oracle Financials, we didn't even consider hosting it ourselves - found a third party and paid them $5500/month to host it for us - access over a L2L IPSEC link.
Anybody want to form a YC company - don't worry about the Internet Part - unless you are building a real-time/nuclear/medical/navigation/flight safety product/etc..., hosted apps are the way of the future.
its depressing, i've had some ideas that i think are good that touch on some of those areas but i'm not applying to YC because i don't have the time to make it up there for a few months. :(
actually, i have a few ideas i can't take action on. i'd be willing to spread the love if someone has the time and drive and wants an idea that might fly for a YC app.
Weird. The problem we're tackling at Pikluk is exactly what #2 is about, yet we weren't even invited for an interview in 07 cycle. Something tells me we should have polished our application more.
I agree, what I offered up hit several points on the list. I think it more comes down to who you are. Like the people behind YouOS.com (http://www.youos.com/html/static/team.html) are from MIT, CalTech, Stanford. I can't compete with that, only they gave up and I haven't.
> are from MIT, CalTech, Stanford. I can't compete with that
It isn't hard to compete with pompous twits riding on pure cached prestige, when competing on merit. Though I understand that the YC application process may not be entirely merit-based.
Yeah, I think you guys have something good in that area, I was surprised you didn't get an interview. Also, an open source product has come out in the last free months that unintentionally solves #2.
My startup adresses several of the points in the article, and I didn't get invited to an interview either. Maybe it's the single founder issue? Or maybe my ideas just suck ;-)
It is pretty focused - I've made the mistake of not focusing enough in a previous startup, and won't make the same mistake twice (hopefully...)
It just happens to cover several of the points in the article in a coherent manner. I'm looking forward to posting here in a few months when I'm ready for launch to see what this community thinks of it. That'll be a good test of whether I'm onto something.
I disagree. It is meta, but not too meta. You're right, startups helping startups that help startups will fail. I think there are still enough startups for ONE round of meta. There's nothing that says it will go beyond that.
It's not scalable because the market isn't that big. Too far up the food chain.
Succesful startups: thousands, if not millions.
Startups for startups: B2B, or YCombinator, or Techcrunch.
Startups for startups for startups: can't think of any. These needs are already served by the B2B companies. At this stage, the ecosystem is small and covers itself.
The market just gets too small at a certain point, but going meta can work.
Sometimes you see posting on HN people saying they don't have a technical background but have a brilliant idea. You can create a company that creates prototype for startups. If you look at http://buglabs.net, they are giving you a tool to create your own product.
About two years ago I wanted tot make a craigslist competitor for my area... But it was just me alone so I never kicked it off. I've been wanting to revive it though. I made some preliminary designs. (the design tests are oooold and in spanish though).
I'm not sure I buy the SWOT that Graham's proposing for Craigslist or EBay. There are ways that both suck, but there's an absolutely enormous network effect they're riding on.
I agree, although when you're funding 20 startups at a time, I bet you start thinking about throwing some scratch-ticket ideas into the mix. It's unlikely they can pull it off, but with a basket of longshot, astronomical payoff startups, if one pays off, you're in great shape.
If you're young enough to try several times, this also pays off for individual founders. I think one reason Sam Altman had no second thoughts about taking on such an ambitious project was that he was only 19.
Thats because .com is the king of the internet. The users know dot coms, the term is a mainstream one. And frankly the whole company name doesn't really matter, what does yahoo have to do with search? What does eBay have to do with auctions? Just get some creativity and come up with a word that sounds like a real word and you'll be fine.
Saying .com is the king of the internet sounds like a response from marketing/management. I suspect it isn't all that important and that this will probably be dropped in favor of a practical solution in the future.
# of .com websites making at least $1mm/yr? 9999999999999999
# of .us/.info/.me/.biz sites making at least $1mm/yr? 8
Yes its marketing, but that's because consumers pretty much got taught that one of the major ways to see if a business is legitimate is to see if it has the .com extension. Blame all the affiliate spammers who put up the crappy sites on the .info etc domain names to try to make a few bucks by using the bulk method
Google already fixed this. No one directly navigates to domains anymore. The SERP is a popularity-ranked page of everything that should be at the domain for the keywords you searched on.
I do. Sure, I use google and bookmarks a lot of the time, but sometimes the shortest mental route to a site is its domain name. Ironically, GMail is one of these.
An interesting thought experiment would be what would happen if you removed all domain names. You own a random series of letters that you keep even if your IP address changes, but the sequence is totally non-mnemonic. Google and del.icio.us would be very important. But how would we get there?
I agree. Also, most browsers now have a search bar in house. in my experience, many people use the search features more often than the address features, even if they are going directly to the main page of a web site.
It's just easier to remember the name of a site than it's literal/direct address. Even if they are one and the same 90% of the time, it turns out to be faster using google.
I'm passionate about online learning. I like James Burke's knowledge web idea [http://www.k-web.org/], but I'm not terribly optimistic about their approach/implementation.
The idea is to make a network of knowledge which enables self-directed learning. Could incorporate tests/games, dependencies (to learn x, you need to learn y, or even complete a subgame), external references for further reading, and possibly a lot more. A great feature would be systems to allow collaboration or lightweight teaching among learners (chat/forums/etc).
With a bit of thought it may be possible to make a framework into which volunteers add a lot of the content, though editors/quality control would likely be necessary.
If I built it, I'd be inclined to ignore existing public educational systems and start from scratch, but if it hooked into them it may help growth.
I think the open source textbook projects in the works might be something that could propel an idea like this forward.
Personally, I find the lack of high quality videos about physics, mathematics, and computer science quite irritating. When I do manage to have some free time, I like to watch videos, such as those from Nova. Unfortunately, one can't find many free versions on the internet.
Here's a concept: Make an online system that makes it easier to assemble a team of geographically and temporally separate volunteers to upload video clips, edit them into a sensible sequence, do voiceovers, and publish the result. Like a Wikipedia for techie videos, though perhaps with a slightly higher barrier to entry to prevent griefing. (Nobody wants to watch the James Burke video that suddenly becomes NSFW in minute three... I mean, show that to a kid accidentally and you could literally go to prison.)
UPDATE: Hey, wait a minute, have I just invented Youtube's "This video is a response to video X" discussion system?! Only with more geeks and fewer cats on pianos?
That's sort of what we're aiming to do at http://www.dojolearning.com/ - longer term anyway. We're starting off by hitting the business market first, which is more open to change and not as tied to the existing learning systems, but we do plan to branch out in lots of ways to make a better online learning experience for everyone.
Anyway, if you're passionate about online learning, I'd love to chat about it with you if you're interested...
Sure, email in profile. But I should stress that I use the word passionate to mean enthusiastic, not to indicate I have any special skills or expertise!
>With a bit of thought it may be possible to make a framework into which volunteers add a lot of the content, though editors/quality control would likely be necessary.
I like the idea of students up or downvoting stuff based on how clear it is. Even a diagram or a one-sentence description could have up and down votes associated with it.
We would have to take two factors into account, I think, those are; (1) clarity (2) accuracy. An “entry” can be very easy to understand but completely inaccurate, or completely accurate and horribly difficult to understand, and so forth. So one could vote on clarity and/or accuracy, depending on whether you are competent or incompetent.
I envisage going onto this site and thinking “I want to learn something new about the Fibonacci sequence”, or: “how does Quicksort work?” and so: “show me results tagged ‘quicksort’”.
One could shrug this idea off as a “Wikipedia clone-- with voting”, but Wikipedia is just an encyclopaedia; it does not aim to teach you things. But, we can take some ideas from Wikipedia...
If entries -- which would essentially be factoids, as I am hypothesising -- contain a few paragraphs and cover one very narrow topic, that would necessitate cross-linking of entries. Just as you read Wikipedia and follow hundreds of links because you just “have to!” know more about this topic, this could be applied to entries. Perhaps even “related entries” or “series” (an ordered set of related entries) could be created.
This is a very exciting idea to me. Does anyone know of anything like it? I may implement it if I see nothing like it. Let me condense the criteria:
1) A web site for learning things, however popular or esoteric
2) Learning is done by reading entries, submitted anonymously or otherwise.
3) Entries are short, to the point, and very narrow. (“What is polymorphism?”, “How do I implement RAII in C++?”)
4) Entries are voted upon by two factors indicating overall quality; (1) clarity (2) accuray.
5) Cross-linking, like a wiki.
Anyway, I got very excited about a very similar set of ideas. I'm not much for programming (yet) though. But go for it!
Here is an idea for dealing with prerequisite knowledge:
Let's say I want to learn about quicksort. For quicksort, let's say I need to know about arrays and recursion. For recursion, I need to know about functions.
If I search for quicksort, the program should analyze my user profile to see which prerequisites I need. Then it should generate a page with all the prerequisites and quicksort.
Now let's say I'm reading about recursion. At the end of the page it should ask me a few questions about recursion, for which I will type in the answers. Getting the questions correct should be a very good indication that I understand the section. If I get them wrong, the program should try to give me a hint. If this has not been implemented for a particular section, I should just get a generic extended explanation. Either way, I should have another question to answer.
Thinking about this is making me become mildly excited about my idea again. Maybe I will beef up my programming skillz and attempt an implementation.
Anyway, I emailed the author of <a href="http://eloquentjavascript.net/">Eloquent Javascript</a>, and here's what he had to say about computer-assisted learning:
>There is a lot of great
stuff that can be done with 'hyper-text', but it is tricky. My initial
plans for Eloquent JavaScript were way more extravagant, but going
away from the old style of text turns out to be rather hard -- that
form has been evolving for three thousand years, and is much enriched
by the fact that we are all used to it and know its conventions. When
a text is no longer continuous, you can not refer back, which somehow
makes it a lot less personal -- I liked that fact that, in writing
chapter 4, I could keep talking about stuff mentioned in chapter 2. A
radically 'active' text is bound to be either a disconnedted cloud of
snippets, or some carefully crafted non-linear experience that would
take years to get right.
This is a big part of why I like the idea of an interconnected web of knowledge - as opposed to the silos most students are forced into today.
As long as the learner is interested in one small area of knowledge, they can easily follow links to related areas they didn't know they cared about. Because the system shows how knowledge interrelates, motivation in one area can spread naturally around the system. This way, learners work with their interests, instead of being forced to think about things they don't know why they should care about.
Maths is a great example. A lot of kids dislike maths because it seems boring and irrelevent to them. But since maths underpins so much of knowledge, many learners would find themselves needing to understand a mathematical concept to advance in their primary interests - and because they can then see the benefit of learning maths they become self-motivated, and perhaps even gain an appreciation for maths in its own right.
So much of education today goes against the individual's grain - relying on a factory-mentality, where each child/product must move along a variety of production lines in a pre-ordained manner. With a system like the one I imagine, the learning process works with the learner's natural motivations, rather than against it.
Related to that, I think one of the major problems is to motivate kids to do their damn homework, as one of the biggest hindrances to motivation is lack of comprehension. That sets in very quickly if kids only think about the material during class. Once a student drops behind, they are all but lost to you unless you're doing one on one tutoring where you can backtrack without wasting a whole lot of people's time.
I spent a while as a tutor, and I was always amazed that parents were more than happy to spend $100/hr for private tutoring, which most of the time just amounted to overpaying an over-educated person to babysit your kid while they do simple homework that they could very easily have worked through themselves, but just didn't. Yeah, I was also available to answer questions, and clarify things, and I was very good at it, but fundamentally, the most helpful thing was just that the kid was forced to be there mentally.
Crazy idea alert: why not save some money and pay your kid $10 or $20/hr to do their homework rather than paying me $100/hr to watch them do it? I'm sure dollar-for-dollar this would be far more effective. If need be, pay me the $100 a fifth as often - while I love the money, I honestly feel like most of the time I spend tutoring is wasted since the kids see it as a substitute for their own personal work, not as a supplement to it. I've often wondered if setting up an automated, pre-funded allowance system based on online homework time (or productivity, or some combination) might help this situation. I know that the idea of paying (bribing) kids to do what they "should" be doing anyways seems wrong philosophically, but I really think it might be more cost effective in the end. And if the old line that "school is your job" holds true, then perhaps kids _should_ receive a little money up front for work, especially if they won't do it otherwise. Yeah, rewards come later and all, but how many rational adults would really be willing to work at 100% effort for twelve years with only an assurance that they will be compensated for their labours with some unspecified and uncertain amount later? (no offense intended to anyone that took tech jobs for stock options during the dot-com bubble, of course :) )
I'm interested in online education too -- if interested, check out my blog at betterexplained.com.
One problem I see with education in general is that there's plenty of content (like Wikipedia), but not enough focus on the delta that takes you from "huh" to "aha!". Feel free to message me with ideas if you'd like to chat.
Hi
These are really interesting ideas. Would you be interested in following up the idea in more details with me. Please contact me at khurram@geniteam.com
Start with the reddit concept: users submit and vote on links to articles, blog posts and so forth.
Then, allow users to tag each link (or otherwise add metadata), and vote on the relevence of the story to the tag. Also allow users to vote on the trustworthiness of each link and/or each source or author. Could also allow users to vote on other users, to get networks of trust.
Then you just take all that data and use it to generate personalised news, or whatever else you want.
Already implemented a few times, we have an implementation that is below critical mass after months of running. Some key aspect of it is still missing :(
Jaanix isn't really what I have in mind, though it is hard to explain why. The problem I think may be a combination of interface, the basic conceptual decisions, and the chicken-and-egg problem. To get a site like this to work may require a big initial splash of publicity, as well as a very strong, subtle design.
True, it would need a nice interface which makes the benefit to the user very clear. Of course you wouldn't need all users to vote all the time, as long you have enough users voting occasionally.
I do agree, this sort of approach would require significantly more engagement/interaction from users than news readers are accustomed to. But there is a lot of people who want news, if some small fraction were convinced they benefit from a bit of input they could get much better news, and it would also help give better news to people who do little or no explicit inputting.
You can get rid of a lot of those buttons too. Have it be instant-on so you don't need a power button. Just snap the photo. Get rid of the zoom. You can move yourself in / out physically if you need to be closer. Forget the delete button too. Flash memory is expansive enough that you shouldn't have to worry about it on the hardware.
Make the camera have a shutter button, some simple way to view the pictures you have taken so far, and do all the rest in software in some sort of picasa/itunes-quality app.
i debated on keeping the zoom feature or not. yes. you can really strip that sucker down and have an iphone-like interface (i.e. touch w/o real buttons).
What you describe is something like 90% (if not more) design and software (including embedded software). The hardware part mostly consists in integrating a few existing high-level components, most of them dealing with digital signals,
What I meant by image processing, as an example, is face detection. They already do that for some cameras, but that’s just the tip of an iceberg. You can attach a digital camera to a microscope (or a telescope) and detect cells (or stars). Or consider home security...
I don't know. I was just saying that if you want to beat Google, that's their weak spot. Or at least a big one.
Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.
As much as it pains me to say this, I think Google's lack of design sense might be their strong point in search. There's no extra crap to get in the way of search results. (Although I should say that in their other non-search products, it is most certainly a weakness.)
There are of course new ways to view results, but with arguable advantage. A new startup I found recently, Viewzi (http://www.viewzi.com/) does a pretty good job. But it's not better at finding stuff than Google.
searchme.com has an amazing UI. Not only thats cool, but very useful.
i believe the next gen of search engines will be directly answering your search query, rather than simply finding appropriate links.
For many noncontroversial, unambiguous queries(1), Google already directly answers the search query. For ambiguous or controversial queries, you're gonna want the references and context of the original source.
I feel like Google's user experience across many products is consistently good, and never great. The spartan ethic definitely puts a lower bound on it, but I feel like there's still some upside there.
I wonder, what % of their overall hits are the homepage? It must be low, considering almost every hit there lands on a results page, but there are lots of other ways to get to a results page (Firefox, the input box at the top of a results page, etc.)
The way to approach the Google problem is to ask, when have I been dissatisfied with google search?
And you're right, there are very few weaknesses.
One of the startup approaches to the Google problem is to join forces with them instead of competing with them. Provide a page that wraps google search, but adds additional searchable items into the searchbar (search emails, todo lists, events, facebook, google all through one searchbar).
A slightly better question would be: when have I not found what I was looking for in a Google search? Or even, when was the thing I was looking for not the first search result?
If you use satisfaction as the test, you may be letting the present state of things influence your thinking too much. E.g. I bet a lot of people were satisfied with pre-Google search engines, and just took their limitations for granted.
I have often searched google looking for recent articles, but the most highly ranked are always first which are often really old and outdated ... maybe there is something in the advanced search to tweak the ordering, I am not sure ...
The fact that a user couldn't figure that out indicates a potential improvement: detecting whether a given search is time-sensitive and automatically choosing the correct search ordering.
To make a go of that kind of thing in a startup though, you'd have to make sure that it's something Google won't or can't execute on, something I'm not sure I would bet on.
Part of the idea of 'disruptive technologies' is that they aren't incremental improvements that the current leaders will just copy, but big changes that get ignored by the current leaders.
I certainly agree with that. The way to displace Google is to work on something they despise as inconsequential, the way the "portals" in the late 90s did search.
There are lots of things they despise as inconsequential: stupid consumerish stuff like celebrity gossip, cool design, things that aren't technically demanding, etc...
Sounds like you're suggesting tackling verticals that Google is ignoring.
The celebrity gossip industry is huge as anyone living in LA or who has bought a Star/People/Enquirer can attest. I think that might fall under the category of news, however.
I think that there might be a strength in ranking sites that have great design as opposed to crappy design. All things being equal, I'd rather read an article on a well designed page rather than on a page whose design is non-existent.
One thing that has irked me about Google AdSense ads is when they present an ad based on faulty disamboguation: e.g., I'm reading an email from cello-dev(Cello is a Lisp package), and I get an ad for a re-hairing service[they put new hair on bows for stringed instruments].
The next big search engine will answer queries you wouldn't bother giving google. Things like "what mid-priced chinese restaurant near downtown SF would my mother like?" Its not about design, or about patching holes in google's relevance. It's a paradigm shift. Tough problem, btw ;)
I have thought before about judging the actual design of a web site (the way it renders, layout, fonts,...), I don't think it is impossible to do (with a learning system that learns from human users input), and might at least provide another factor for the final search result ranking.
Edit: is there already software for spotting fake art? That might be a starting point, as well as another market for that kind of image processing.
Seems like you're looking for something like Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com/). The way they present results indicates that design is a major part of their users' experience.
The only thing that's going to beat Google is a superfast, high-res, 3-D virtual world (kinda like Asimov's imperial planet Trantor) where people can browse by using approved and licensed vehicles to cruise the virtual streets, alleys and hidden corners of their favorite neighborhoods. The system makes money by convincing advertisers and vendors to compete for virtual property and goods. Private and/or secret enclaves can be set up so as to require an entrance fee or a subscription from prospective customers and interested parties. As the system gets larger, new businesses can start selling maps, transportation and information on how to get around and find what you're looking for. Above all, it should be fun and there should always be something new to discover and explore. It's should be much more intense and interactive than what's already out there (e.g., Linden Lab's Second Life) and give the user powerful tools with which to create their own enclaves, avatars and anonymous corporations.
But then again, Google is already moving into the virtual world business and, besides, the kind of immersive virtual 3-D world I envision will require a much faster and distributed internet, at least 2 orders of magnitude faster. Oh well, it's nice to dream.
Or: the "weak spot" might simply be that people inherently differ in their display preferences. _I_ happen to like Google's clean design, but if even 5% of the population actively dislikes it, someone could make some money. Google's "weakness" then becomes the fact that they can only present one face to the world. The beauty of this approach is that it will be tricky for Google to counterattack since they won't want to confuse their brand.
In short, Google may not have weaknesses, but their market does.
I think this merely shows a difference of opinion about what "design" means in this context. I'm absolutely certain that pg does not mean merely "appearance" when he says "design".
No, I think that Google's lack of crap is their strong spot. When I want to search, a text box to type stuff into is exactly the design that I need. Any more than that, and you're sliding into irrelevant fluff.
A good design means I get to the best possible search results with as little extra cruft as possible. Results are key. Google's design gives me just that -- no clutter, no confusion, no extraneous elements.
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[ 0.94 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadI also still don't get WebOS. There must be something to it, because a lot of smart people are getting excited about the field, but I just can't see it myself... can anyone help me "see the light"?
I don't think they're going bankrupt yet, for sure - but they're a looong way down from that $15b valuation some months ago.
Naturally, these are the waters where everybody goes fishing, year after year.
I think part of the secret, though, is to stop designing (e.g.) "the next dating site" and start designing a way to get compatible, single people into the same room. Focus on the problem, not the old solution. For example, the very word "WebOS" encourages bad habits of thought: It encourages you to look for something shaped like Windows or Linux, or for apps with a UI that reminds you of the desktop.
BTW, by "Craigslist competitor" I don't mean a new Craigslist. I mean take one thing Craigslist does, and do it better. When you later expand outward from that, you don't have to expand into the rest of the stuff Craigslist does.
When I was a kid, the biggest indie newspaper against government in Taiwan had to support itself with those ads.
Freedom, democracy and smut can go hand in hand.
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
Seriously, this list is exhausting to read. It's like the topic sentence for an entire century. I'm going to have to take it a little piece at a time.
There is such a thing as being the first to give a real physical (or commercial) form to an idea, though.
Let's take the "simplified browsing" problem, for example. I worked phone technical support for an internet service provider for a while, and it wasn't long before I saw the need for exactly such a thing. But, it runs deeper than just web browsing and email: there is a huge, absolutely massive number of people out there that need a simpler computer. They don't understand things like firewalls and security, and aren't inclined to ever understand them.
The solution? Take a Linux distribution and hack it heavily; simplify the desktop layout, hide all the settings, and set it up so that immediately after booting, a full-screen web browser appears. The web browser defaults to a very simplified portal page; the user logs in to their "computer" exactly once (on the portal page), and from there they have access to simplified email (which, for example, doesn't have things called "Reply to All"), chat, word processing, and other services.
Thing is, the previous services that have tried to create such a thing have done it wrong; they tried to release their own computer, hardware and all. That doesn't work, at least not now. This would work though because you could sell a CD which would make the installation process a breeze. You wouldn't have a huge initial development cost for the operating system; a good Linux hacker could probably make the necessary changes very quickly.
After, say, 6 months of development by a few people, and with the aid of a crack marketing team, you could start distributing copies of this thing for around $75. You'd be tapping in to an under-served market not just of senior citizens but of every average family that's frustrated at using their computer.
You could even build in a secure remote desktop protocol for the operating system, and make tech support -- if you wanted to offer it -- the easiest it's ever been.
So, there ya go. Probably a hundred-million-dollar idea, with most of the framework. Lots more details, too many to list here.
Got time to build it?
This is a good observation. Anyway, the issue here is, whether that massive number will have some common notion of what the simpler computer actually is.
For those of us that are computer literate, it's hard to imagine that even basic abstract concepts like email are completely foreign to the majority of the population. I would guess that over half of people don't know how to answer the question, "what do you use for a web browser?".
So you have a blank slate, a free pass to design anything you can imagine. If you can deliver it to these people, and if they don't find it intimidating, or hard to learn, or unpredictable, then they'll like it.
So the problem of "simpler browsers" will likely only be solved by solutions that redefine the experience and goal and it will likely be very close to what we now call a smartphone.
Also, I wonder about the browsers that come with game consoles like the Wii, are they any good? They might be easier to use than full-fledged computers?
Even if this were true (which seems extremely unlikely) someone had to think of it first. So there would have been a point when it was possible to have new ideas. How can you be sure the present is not such a point, when we know there were such points in the past?
Sort of like looking at each generation from chimpanzees to humans.
I did not say that people do not have new ideas. That is a blatantly ridiculous statement. I said that worthy ideas have already been had.
My argument comes from looking at literary and philosophical ideas, and my comment was a jest in response to another jest, but there's truth in it. There's a persistent quest for originality in literature, and after some years of chasing that particular ghost I came to the conclusion that it's an illusion. All the great subjects, all the great ideas, have been had already. That doesn't make a book written today less valuable, because what I would add to whichever idea I decide to write about is my own, unique perspective on it. But it means that trying to come up with some completely original idea for a book is pointless - if it's "completely original" it is probably worthless. If ten of thousand years of human civilisation have not yet produced that idea in any form, there's probably a good reason.
Hence my statement that ideas worth having have been had a thousand times already.
So, rather than chasing originality in writing, I think it's more worthwhile to enrich my perspective so that what I add to whatever ancient kernel I might pick is actually worth adding.
Now, extending this to start-up ideas, as you well know, if you have a brilliant idea for a start-up, chances are someone has already had that idea somewhere in the world. If no one has had it at all out of 6 billion people, chances are it's not brilliant, and probably not worth pursuing. Moreover, most great business ideas are not "original", but twists on existing ideas, putting an existing concept into a new perspective. So even the first person to come up with a new twist is still just coming up with a new twist. As with books, though, it doesn't matter whether your idea is original, what matters is what you put into it (the execution, basically). I think this is in agreement with your articles.
Businesses exist to fulfil human needs. The idea of fulfilling human needs is as old as human needs themselves. The ways of doing so are just as old. Social networking, for example, might be a new twist on the idea of helping people make and keep friends, but it's still fulfilling the human need for friendship, something which thousands of other businesses do too.
So, again, rather than striving to come up with a truly original start-up idea, I think it's more worthwhile to hone my ability to take whatever idea I do decide to run with and make it into a working business.
Are you saying that all the proofs to be discovered have been?
The way I hear what you're saying, you found a way out of a trap for yourself (the trap of trying to be original, which just leads round in circles) by deciding that nothing's really original. That sounds like a valuable insight under the circumstances. It doesn't mean that the generalization holds universally, though (which is why you're getting objections to it here). In fact the opposite generalization might be equally true: every great idea has never exactly occurred before.
I'm quite comfortable with the idea (original or not) that opposing concepts can both be true simultaneously. Your opposite generalisation does sound very interesting too. I'm going to write it down in my little idea notebook for further thought some day :-) Thanks!
(Thinking about it now, putting both these statements together appears like it could well need to a very interesting Borges-like story)
You fund many start-ups. How many have come up with a truly original idea? How many have, instead, taken an existing idea and given a new spin to it, or even just taken an existing idea and applied it to a new market? In fact, if you can't express your idea in a few words, is probably not a great start-up idea. And if you can, then it's probably fairly close to an existing idea. "Search engine for parts" (Octoparts). "Job site for start-ups" (Startuply). "Automatic time-management tracking" (RescueTime). "Configurable, hosted e-commerce platform" (Viaweb). "Social news for hackers" (YCNews). All potentially great businesses or worthwhile endeavours, but not because of any originality.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all intellectual fields equally well. It very much depends on your definition of "idea", too. But I think for a definition of idea that maps fairly closely to "start-up ideas" as well as "book/story ideas" or even "wise ideas" - all the good ones are out there for the picking, and have been for eons.
Arriving at this feeling is an unmistakable symptom of being physiologically incapable of creativity. My condolences. On the plus side, most of humanity is in the same boat as you.
Perhaps, but not by me, and not all at the same time. ;)
From André Maurois' preface to Borges' Labyrinths (about Borges):
His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: 'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.' Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): 'We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.' But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'
I would argue that this is true in one sense only--before anyone had invented the wheel, the wheel still existed. The idea of the wheel had existed the moment matter was created lending the possibility of the wheel to come about. Arguably even before this. However the idea of the wheel was not realized until someone captured that idea. This is the same with any idea, every idea already exists, out there, somewhere.
However, to rearrange the words of the proposed idea, that is to say that "no one has ever had an original", new idea, cannot be true mathematically simply because there are an infinite number of ideas.
The question now becomes two parts
1) Definition of "new ideas", and 2) Whether or not there are any new WORTHY ideas
Response to 1). Interpretation of a new idea greatly limits the concept of having a "new idea". For example, is a walkman the same idea as an iPod? Both are ways to carry music around with you portably and conveniently. Same with a horse and buggy and an automobile. HOWEVER, I would argue that both of these show that an iPod and a car are distinctly new ideas.
Response to 2) This idea greatly underestimates the intellectual power of people. Throughout history there have been worthy, new ideas (air travel, concept of the atom, big bang theory, the internet), how can it possibly be that there are none left?
Overall I really hope that what I believe is true, that there are new worthy ideas to be had. For example there has to be some brilliant man or woman somewhere that will come up with a new idea, or a dumb man or woman that will stumble across one, that will undoubtedly arise from a problem or crisis that arises (ie energy crisis...COME ON PEOPLE, PROVE ME RIGHT!!).
If you want to be a technical genius get a grant and grow a beard. I want to use the skills I have to support my family and enjoy life at the same time.
I'm not going to outline our strategy to expand beyond gaming, but I think our plan is one (of many possible) that will work.
And somehow missing out on a $20,000 investment stopped you?!? That is total bullshit; you would have just taken out $20,000 on a credit card, because beating ebay is literally worth billions of dollars.
"Using a solution of microformats, browser and OS media tracking, and direct-to-creator payments, a new Web model is quite possible."
http://cleanzap.com/grabbing-music-from-the-net/
Basically, the creator applies metadata to their media, and lets it circulate (P2P, fansites, internet radio - anything) wherever it needs to go from the outset. A Creative Commons Attribution license is used.
Browsers, media players, or a special app tracks whatever is played locally and a special app regularly prompts for voluntary payment at regular times. Only 5% may pay - but in a global world with low production costs, that might be enough.
http://Musicbrainz.org can be used to retag the files if the metadata is corrupted along the way.
News can also be 'solved' the same way - track what's being consumed and let the consumer voluntarily pay later. Few will pay, but in paying, other benefits can be obtained, like the content creator being able to give previews or special releases to their known audiences.
To do that, one's web browser and media player would each have a plugin that updates the central website's playback repository. Maybe an OS level app that integrates with many possible playback apps without the user worrying about specific plugins. Spyware free of course.
See this: http://www.oddsock.org/tools/gen_fairtunes/
edit: wikilink - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems
1) A way to ensure that each person can only create one account on a website, without having to sacrifice anonymity.
2) A day planner that plans my day for me; based on my to-do list, what my friends are doing, and also what's going on in the local area. Also, populate the bulk of my to-do list automatically based on what my friends in the same classes are adding to theirs. Plan social dates for me based on when my friends and I are free. Introduce me to people I don't know but should know.
3) A way to get more people involved in Internet-mediated locally social stuff.
4) A semi-standardized way for people to build up a reputation without needing a college degree.
5) An IMDB for people who have won awards. I want to a quick way to find the professors with the most citations in any given subject, the chefs in the area with the best zagats reviews, the local high school football players with the most touchdowns, etc.
6) An academic search engine targeting people who are college educated but who don't necessarily have extensive experience with the inner workings of academia. Right now there are really good ways of accessing journal articles online, but really poor ways of learning what academic journals to look in. There's no way to know which journals are respected and which aren't. No easy way to translate plain English questions into the keywords that are used by academics.
7) A way to turn recipes on the web into peapod orders. A way to turn the customized diets that Weight Watchers or WebMD create into a peapod order.
I use peapod every other week. It probably saves me an hour and a half each time--it's pretty cool.
And think about what a journal provides: a forum for researchers to submit the results of their research and a mechanism for selecting which of the submissions are worthwhile for folks in the field to know about.
What I just described is essentially just a karma system, albeit you would have to find a way to take the credibility of the rater into serious consideration. Assuming you solved the chicken-and-egg problem of getting enough credible people from academia to be raters and to submit their best work to your site (quite a tough problem considering many large universities are much more like big companies, or worse government bureaucracies, than startups), you could totally replace the entire system of academic journals.
Think of all the other free extras you would get by having a web app host all journal articles: at minimum, the process of citing references and looking at the background of a paper could be improved: you could visually trace the findings of the paper you're looking at all the way back to the founding of the field by what each of it's references used as references. Search would be a lot better, as would recommendation engines (lots of professors have grad students waste time simply scanning journals for articles that are relevant for their work). If you're into NLP than you would have a much better dataset and a clear application for doing summarization. And think about the possibilities of social networking or productivity-app type features enabling all sorts of new possibilities for collaboration among people at different universities!
But the real big play is that once you do all this, you're well on your way to replacing universities themselves, which any undergraduate can tell you are bloated enterprises which spend large amounts of money and pass the costs onto their customers, who accept it because the university system has a monopoly on giving out credentials for people going into the working world.
One of universities main products is research, and in many fields (biology, physics) you need the big backing of university (and government) dollars to support research. In many other fields (math, Computer Science, philosophy) you don't. Researchers in these fields usually need to somehow pay their living expenses, and the actual equipment expenses are minimal. They mainly need: -a place to find like-minded collaborators -credibility for their work (ie, ability to publish in journals). You could give them both of those things. Now people in these fields wouldn't even need to choose the career path of grad school and then professorship (in other words, staying their entire life in the university monopoly) in order to contribute their research to humanity's body of knowledge.
So in other words, what you need is to build a HN/Reddit style voting/peer review system that weights the credibility of the voter heavily. Then you need to find some early adopters who are credible enough to lend your own site credibility. Then you could be well on your way to reinventing the academy in a way that is much more democratic and makes its results much more widely available and usable by the public.
Anyone want to build this? My email address is in my profile. Or just go ahead and use this idea yourself - I just really want to be able to use this service somehow, though probably more as a consumer than a producer of research. Maybe someone who actually went to grad school and had lots of papers published themselves would ...
btw, i don't think your email address is public, but my contact info should be listed; feel free to shoot me a message.
You mention classes so I guess you are on a campus. I am working on a project with a large colledge cafeteria mgt company. Where we are building specific diets (weight loss, strength building etc) from their daily menu and then letting students access the diet/menu selection in a number of cool ways //Hard to explain in a comment
If you have ideas, my email is in my profile. Cheers/mike
The biggest problem I see is that hosted apps are great, but these guys need the software to be up all the time. They may even have bad internet connections. So I was thinking the best model would be to have a hosted application, and then if the company wanted greater up time they could by a box and put it at their location and it would take care of syncing with the online counterpart. That way they could continue business while offline.
As long as you are taking care of integration, and migration you could probably open source the underlying software and still make money on support services. You could also make money selling monthly low cost licenses per user like 10 or 15 dollars per person.
I think amazon is a good prototype for this. It's a tech company that also sells books. They later added all sorts of other crap like electronics, then stuff that they don't even deliver but where they just act as a front for other retailers and finally they are now offering their IT services purely by themselves (S3, EC2).
It is kind of surprising that IT, with its self references as fast-paced and innovative has taken so long to realize its own inefficiencies. IT (in the sense of internal computer systems for businesses) was greatly over invested starting in the 90s because the executives of the time were so scared. I remember stories of Hollywood executives who would ask their assistants to surf websites they were going to invest in and videotape it. They would take these video tapes home for 'research' the same way they would research actors, directors and movies to invest in. They completely didn't get it. So what did they do? They did what most people do when they are scared, they try to buy insurance. This insurance came in over-investment in all things technology both externally and internally, leading to huge IT departments that then used their bulk to buy more technology and increase their internal political might until all this over investment corrected itself in the legendary bubble pop.
I think when all is said and done, IT will be just like Payroll. When was the last time you met a person who works 40 hours a week processing payroll? They used to exist at every company - now everyone's checks come from ADP or PayChex. IT will be done by an outside company and will part of the budget for each person on the payroll. But of course I am a little biased...
Hmm, payroll - There is an industry to be disrupted...
I totally agree that things could always be better and that incentives are the key to this. There is a business concept from the 80s called 'open book management' where everyone in the company sees where all the money goes. This is more transparency than even public companies have.
I think it could be a technique that would get everyone from accounting to IT more involved in the business. I also think there needs to be much shorter expectations of how long someone will work for a company. Hollywood is on to something with the way they bring together small teams to make a film that then disband and reform in a new configuration for the next film. I wonder what would happen if every person in the company had to choose each year whether they want to continue with the company. They would in effect have a one year job. This might make their sense of urgency and priority for the 52 weeks within that year much more focused. It might also form a company with much more dedicated people who really want to be there.
I was the Director of IT for a $250mm startup, a little under 5 years old. We started, as almost all valley startups do, using quick books for our financials. Very quickly issues like Purchase Orders, Expense Reports, became more important so we looked to move to an online SAAS financials system - we chose Netsuite. Our internet connectivity grew as the number of our employees grew, until today, at 120 employees, we have a finance/procurement department of 10 people, and a 3 Mbit connection to the internet. Our Financial software has been on the Internet somewhere for the last 4+ years, and has never gone down. I used to be impressed that our DSL link was as reliable as our T1, until an ISP explained to me that they were probably both landing on the same equipment on the back end - just one of them was coming at me with T1 Framing.
This is just a long way of saying that Internet connectivity can be assumed now. Large (very large) companies don't think twice of oursourcing their business critical functions, and, in fact, as we transition from Netsuite to Oracle Financials, we didn't even consider hosting it ourselves - found a third party and paid them $5500/month to host it for us - access over a L2L IPSEC link.
Anybody want to form a YC company - don't worry about the Internet Part - unless you are building a real-time/nuclear/medical/navigation/flight safety product/etc..., hosted apps are the way of the future.
Time = Money...
It isn't hard to compete with pompous twits riding on pure cached prestige, when competing on merit. Though I understand that the YC application process may not be entirely merit-based.
Even one of those is a massive undertaking. Perhaps your start up idea requires more focus?
It just happens to cover several of the points in the article in a coherent manner. I'm looking forward to posting here in a few months when I'm ready for launch to see what this community thinks of it. That'll be a good test of whether I'm onto something.
Priceless.
It's just not scalable.
Succesful startups: thousands, if not millions.
Startups for startups: B2B, or YCombinator, or Techcrunch.
Startups for startups for startups: can't think of any. These needs are already served by the B2B companies. At this stage, the ecosystem is small and covers itself.
The market just gets too small at a certain point, but going meta can work.
Also, such a startup would be guaranteed to have an intimate understanding of the problems they are trying to solve!
http://nsovocal.com/lalista/ http://nsovocal.com/lalista/login.htm http://nsovocal.com/lalista/registro.htm http://nsovocal.com/lalista/list.htm http://nsovocal.com/lalista/ad.htm
Maybe it's good time to pick up the project again with a proper business plan and design :P
Most of these ideas will end up with stupid names like lulzdatr.com or bizzwarezz.com
# of .us/.info/.me/.biz sites making at least $1mm/yr? 8
Yes its marketing, but that's because consumers pretty much got taught that one of the major ways to see if a business is legitimate is to see if it has the .com extension. Blame all the affiliate spammers who put up the crappy sites on the .info etc domain names to try to make a few bucks by using the bulk method
An interesting thought experiment would be what would happen if you removed all domain names. You own a random series of letters that you keep even if your IP address changes, but the sequence is totally non-mnemonic. Google and del.icio.us would be very important. But how would we get there?
I personally would like to get rid of http, www and com all along
Just type a name and presto!
It's just easier to remember the name of a site than it's literal/direct address. Even if they are one and the same 90% of the time, it turns out to be faster using google.
The idea is to make a network of knowledge which enables self-directed learning. Could incorporate tests/games, dependencies (to learn x, you need to learn y, or even complete a subgame), external references for further reading, and possibly a lot more. A great feature would be systems to allow collaboration or lightweight teaching among learners (chat/forums/etc).
With a bit of thought it may be possible to make a framework into which volunteers add a lot of the content, though editors/quality control would likely be necessary.
If I built it, I'd be inclined to ignore existing public educational systems and start from scratch, but if it hooked into them it may help growth.
Personally, I find the lack of high quality videos about physics, mathematics, and computer science quite irritating. When I do manage to have some free time, I like to watch videos, such as those from Nova. Unfortunately, one can't find many free versions on the internet.
Here's a concept: Make an online system that makes it easier to assemble a team of geographically and temporally separate volunteers to upload video clips, edit them into a sensible sequence, do voiceovers, and publish the result. Like a Wikipedia for techie videos, though perhaps with a slightly higher barrier to entry to prevent griefing. (Nobody wants to watch the James Burke video that suddenly becomes NSFW in minute three... I mean, show that to a kid accidentally and you could literally go to prison.)
UPDATE: Hey, wait a minute, have I just invented Youtube's "This video is a response to video X" discussion system?! Only with more geeks and fewer cats on pianos?
Part of the problem is that such videos are hard to find, and not usefully aggregated anywhere (a problem I am indirectly trying to solve ;).
Anyway, if you're passionate about online learning, I'd love to chat about it with you if you're interested...
I like the idea of students up or downvoting stuff based on how clear it is. Even a diagram or a one-sentence description could have up and down votes associated with it.
We would have to take two factors into account, I think, those are; (1) clarity (2) accuracy. An “entry” can be very easy to understand but completely inaccurate, or completely accurate and horribly difficult to understand, and so forth. So one could vote on clarity and/or accuracy, depending on whether you are competent or incompetent.
I envisage going onto this site and thinking “I want to learn something new about the Fibonacci sequence”, or: “how does Quicksort work?” and so: “show me results tagged ‘quicksort’”.
One could shrug this idea off as a “Wikipedia clone-- with voting”, but Wikipedia is just an encyclopaedia; it does not aim to teach you things. But, we can take some ideas from Wikipedia...
If entries -- which would essentially be factoids, as I am hypothesising -- contain a few paragraphs and cover one very narrow topic, that would necessitate cross-linking of entries. Just as you read Wikipedia and follow hundreds of links because you just “have to!” know more about this topic, this could be applied to entries. Perhaps even “related entries” or “series” (an ordered set of related entries) could be created.
This is a very exciting idea to me. Does anyone know of anything like it? I may implement it if I see nothing like it. Let me condense the criteria:
1) A web site for learning things, however popular or esoteric 2) Learning is done by reading entries, submitted anonymously or otherwise. 3) Entries are short, to the point, and very narrow. (“What is polymorphism?”, “How do I implement RAII in C++?”) 4) Entries are voted upon by two factors indicating overall quality; (1) clarity (2) accuray. 5) Cross-linking, like a wiki.
Damn you, Hacker News!
Anyway, I got very excited about a very similar set of ideas. I'm not much for programming (yet) though. But go for it!
Here is an idea for dealing with prerequisite knowledge:
Let's say I want to learn about quicksort. For quicksort, let's say I need to know about arrays and recursion. For recursion, I need to know about functions.
If I search for quicksort, the program should analyze my user profile to see which prerequisites I need. Then it should generate a page with all the prerequisites and quicksort.
Now let's say I'm reading about recursion. At the end of the page it should ask me a few questions about recursion, for which I will type in the answers. Getting the questions correct should be a very good indication that I understand the section. If I get them wrong, the program should try to give me a hint. If this has not been implemented for a particular section, I should just get a generic extended explanation. Either way, I should have another question to answer.
Thinking about this is making me become mildly excited about my idea again. Maybe I will beef up my programming skillz and attempt an implementation.
Anyway, I emailed the author of <a href="http://eloquentjavascript.net/">Eloquent Javascript</a>, and here's what he had to say about computer-assisted learning:
>There is a lot of great stuff that can be done with 'hyper-text', but it is tricky. My initial plans for Eloquent JavaScript were way more extravagant, but going away from the old style of text turns out to be rather hard -- that form has been evolving for three thousand years, and is much enriched by the fact that we are all used to it and know its conventions. When a text is no longer continuous, you can not refer back, which somehow makes it a lot less personal -- I liked that fact that, in writing chapter 4, I could keep talking about stuff mentioned in chapter 2. A radically 'active' text is bound to be either a disconnedted cloud of snippets, or some carefully crafted non-linear experience that would take years to get right.
As long as the learner is interested in one small area of knowledge, they can easily follow links to related areas they didn't know they cared about. Because the system shows how knowledge interrelates, motivation in one area can spread naturally around the system. This way, learners work with their interests, instead of being forced to think about things they don't know why they should care about.
Maths is a great example. A lot of kids dislike maths because it seems boring and irrelevent to them. But since maths underpins so much of knowledge, many learners would find themselves needing to understand a mathematical concept to advance in their primary interests - and because they can then see the benefit of learning maths they become self-motivated, and perhaps even gain an appreciation for maths in its own right.
So much of education today goes against the individual's grain - relying on a factory-mentality, where each child/product must move along a variety of production lines in a pre-ordained manner. With a system like the one I imagine, the learning process works with the learner's natural motivations, rather than against it.
I spent a while as a tutor, and I was always amazed that parents were more than happy to spend $100/hr for private tutoring, which most of the time just amounted to overpaying an over-educated person to babysit your kid while they do simple homework that they could very easily have worked through themselves, but just didn't. Yeah, I was also available to answer questions, and clarify things, and I was very good at it, but fundamentally, the most helpful thing was just that the kid was forced to be there mentally.
Crazy idea alert: why not save some money and pay your kid $10 or $20/hr to do their homework rather than paying me $100/hr to watch them do it? I'm sure dollar-for-dollar this would be far more effective. If need be, pay me the $100 a fifth as often - while I love the money, I honestly feel like most of the time I spend tutoring is wasted since the kids see it as a substitute for their own personal work, not as a supplement to it. I've often wondered if setting up an automated, pre-funded allowance system based on online homework time (or productivity, or some combination) might help this situation. I know that the idea of paying (bribing) kids to do what they "should" be doing anyways seems wrong philosophically, but I really think it might be more cost effective in the end. And if the old line that "school is your job" holds true, then perhaps kids _should_ receive a little money up front for work, especially if they won't do it otherwise. Yeah, rewards come later and all, but how many rational adults would really be willing to work at 100% effort for twelve years with only an assurance that they will be compensated for their labours with some unspecified and uncertain amount later? (no offense intended to anyone that took tech jobs for stock options during the dot-com bubble, of course :) )
One problem I see with education in general is that there's plenty of content (like Wikipedia), but not enough focus on the delta that takes you from "huh" to "aha!". Feel free to message me with ideas if you'd like to chat.
Start with the reddit concept: users submit and vote on links to articles, blog posts and so forth.
Then, allow users to tag each link (or otherwise add metadata), and vote on the relevence of the story to the tag. Also allow users to vote on the trustworthiness of each link and/or each source or author. Could also allow users to vote on other users, to get networks of trust.
Then you just take all that data and use it to generate personalised news, or whatever else you want.
I also like Adrian Holovaty's ideas about a data-oriented approach to news: [http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307/] [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/_future_o...]
I do agree, this sort of approach would require significantly more engagement/interaction from users than news readers are accustomed to. But there is a lot of people who want news, if some small fraction were convinced they benefit from a bit of input they could get much better news, and it would also help give better news to people who do little or no explicit inputting.
I bought my parents a digital camera a few years ago and it might as well have a plutonium core the way my parents deal with it.
Primarily they hand it to me on social occasions and say, "take some pictures...I don't know how to use this thing"
Just a simple camera with these features and nothing more:
1. on/off button
2. zoom in /out
3. take picture
4. review pictures
5. delete picture
6. transfer all pictures to walmart via wifi (you walk into the store, press a button and walmart slurps them up).
I'd do it, but as pg says, hardware scares me.
Make the camera have a shutter button, some simple way to view the pictures you have taken so far, and do all the rest in software in some sort of picasa/itunes-quality app.
What you describe is something like 90% (if not more) design and software (including embedded software). The hardware part mostly consists in integrating a few existing high-level components, most of them dealing with digital signals,
Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.
There are of course new ways to view results, but with arguable advantage. A new startup I found recently, Viewzi (http://www.viewzi.com/) does a pretty good job. But it's not better at finding stuff than Google.
(1) http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&client...
I wonder, what % of their overall hits are the homepage? It must be low, considering almost every hit there lands on a results page, but there are lots of other ways to get to a results page (Firefox, the input box at the top of a results page, etc.)
And you're right, there are very few weaknesses.
One of the startup approaches to the Google problem is to join forces with them instead of competing with them. Provide a page that wraps google search, but adds additional searchable items into the searchbar (search emails, todo lists, events, facebook, google all through one searchbar).
If you use satisfaction as the test, you may be letting the present state of things influence your thinking too much. E.g. I bet a lot of people were satisfied with pre-Google search engines, and just took their limitations for granted.
Part of the idea of 'disruptive technologies' is that they aren't incremental improvements that the current leaders will just copy, but big changes that get ignored by the current leaders.
There are lots of things they despise as inconsequential: stupid consumerish stuff like celebrity gossip, cool design, things that aren't technically demanding, etc...
The celebrity gossip industry is huge as anyone living in LA or who has bought a Star/People/Enquirer can attest. I think that might fall under the category of news, however.
I think that there might be a strength in ranking sites that have great design as opposed to crappy design. All things being equal, I'd rather read an article on a well designed page rather than on a page whose design is non-existent.
http://zendo.arvixe.com/
Edit: is there already software for spotting fake art? That might be a starting point, as well as another market for that kind of image processing.
But then again, Google is already moving into the virtual world business and, besides, the kind of immersive virtual 3-D world I envision will require a much faster and distributed internet, at least 2 orders of magnitude faster. Oh well, it's nice to dream.
In short, Google may not have weaknesses, but their market does.
A good design means I get to the best possible search results with as little extra cruft as possible. Results are key. Google's design gives me just that -- no clutter, no confusion, no extraneous elements.
Look for an email from me within the next two weeks. You'll know it from the subject line....