Tell HN: I would pay for that..

21 points by weakwire ↗ HN
Have you ever said "I would pay for that" ? If so share it here. You never know in 2-4 months a startup can do that and you can pay for it at last :)

32 comments

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When I write an article,

1. I write it in Microsoft Word 2. Copy into notepad to strip away the formatting an extra mark-up that comes with word 3. Paste into word-press and re-format the article before publishing.

I would pay for an app that will allow me do draft my article and format it, then just copy directly into wordpress and publish the article without having to reformat it in wordpress.

If you want something like iA Writer, check out Byword[1]. It's a markdown and rich text editor which allows you to publish directly to Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, Scriptogram, and Evernote directly from the app. And it has an iOS app for editing (and publishing) on the go.

[1] http://bywordapp.com/

Is your Word formatting complicated enough that WordPress' "Paste as Word" button wouldn't take care of it?
Why do you even do step 1? Start at 2.
I'd pay for a saas to manage all my (similar) iphone apps from one central location. Something that would replace the things I currently do with a plist file on my server.
Web mail hosted in a relatively "safe" European country (privacy laws vary a lot in Europe).

Also, a web-based calendar.

google calendar doesn't work for you?
No, it's US based. We want an European calendar.
It's not just the location, it's the fact that everything entered into Google Calendar is used to build a profile of you used for advertising. I'd rather pay $1 a month.
try web.de , it's however mostly in german, it comes with an office suite
One backup solution that 'just works'. Maybe the technology doesn't yet exist or is not just being applied correctly. I must be fast, easily expandable, easily accessed, secure, future proof.

Also a storage company which follows 'moores law', ie like a dropbox that automatically expands your storage size as time goes by.

An organic, non-toxic solid ball that I can put down a drain/garbage disposal. The ball would then dissolve and eliminate odors in the sink/drain.
IMAP support from Hotmail (err Outlook).
If you're willing to pay, then Microsoft Office 365's Hosted Exchange ($3/month for email only) is a good alternate with a similar (yet more powerful) web app (assuming you're wanting to stay in the same ecosystem — otherwise, just move away from Hotmail/Outlook).
Every day I have a list of ~500k images hosted on CraigsList that I want copied to Amazon S3. Once a day my service would send IWouldPayForThat the list of urls, and IWouldPayForThat would download then upload all of the images to my S3 bucket as well as delete the images from the day before. If CraigsList banned the IP range used by IWouldPayForThat, moving to a new IP would not be a problem thus continuous service could be counted upon.

I would pay $40/day for that.

May I ask what do you use it for?
Dating for awkward and unattractive male nerds that is guaranteed to work. :)
I think there is a HUGE market for this ;)
I don't think cold dating one-on-one is rarely a good idea: try the group dating options so people can get to know you by conversation and interests. Something like https://www.joingrouper.com maybe (not affiliated nor have I tried it)
"Drawer Liners for Men" - tumble dryer sheets suggest that you place them in drawers of clothes to give the clothes a nice fresh smell. That's a good idea, except all the tumble dryer sheets I've tried smell a bit horrible. I want something like that (doesn't need to be a tumble dryer sheet) but which has manly scents. I don't mean Woodsmoke and Whiskey, but maybe some kind of sandal wood or cedar wood or somesuch.

"Aircon will stop working if you open the windows" stickers. Or, if I'm grumpy "Close the fucking windows if you want the aircon to work". - I see many people who open windows instead of waiting for the aircon to start working.

"A Better, Nicer Wikipedia" - WP is great. Except, it's full of crud and some of it is thoroughly toxic. The meta stuff is bizarre and hateful. Pick an arbitrary limit (10,000? 100,000 most important articles? The 10 MB most important articles?) and fork those off. Pay experts to review the articles, and pay writers to re-write them. Make sure every article has an introductory sentence that defines the topic, or at least gives it enough context for people to know what it is. I'd pay to be part of that community. I'd pay to subscribe to downloads of it, updated every month.

"Price Comparison Website for UK Broadband that Compares Total Cost of Ownership" - the UK has a bunch of price comparison websites. Unfortunately, for broadband, they only compare the bullshit offers that broadband providers offer. I'd pay for a website that compares that actual cost of each provider over the time of the contract. With maybe some margins each side, to allow for comparison over different contract lengths. As an example: (http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/packages/) Virgin Media is shown as being 18 months, at £4 per month. But it's actually £4 for 8 months, and then £14.50 per month, which is bad enough, but you also need to get Virgin Media phone for £14.99 per month.

1) API for classifying article into topics, or alternatively extracting the entities from a piece of text. Basically NLP as a service.

2) Twitter automation: Sort of like IFTTT. Let me specify rules on when to automatically retweet an user.

I'm working on a comprehensive scraping tool for this. See: http://agibsonccc.github.io/blog/apidocs.html

for the baseline functionality.

The service will work as follows: Select some urls Pick what you want: (People,Organizations,Locations,Books,Intervals,Dates,Emails ,phone numbers, among lots of other ones)

Hit go and download the data to a spreadsheet (each column is based on the types you specify).

The system is fairly accurate not only due to Machine Learning, backed by a huge type mapped search index based on dbpedia/freebase (other data sources are added later)

The core right now is to focus on making web based information retrieval simple (export to a spreadsheet)

I'm open to other parts of the system as well.

For example, I did experiments with the API to do sentiment analysis based on a comment thread or picking out reviews.

Note: backend is done. I'm mainly working on refinements and a bit of tuning of the NER engine (web pages suck compared to normal articles)

Get at me if you're interested, I'd love to get some feedback. Email is in my profile.

that's nice! best of luck with finding a solution to that!
I have a webapp that suffers from the chicken and the egg problem, people may not know they need it until they discover what it does. I know it's a bit off topic, but I would like to know if anyone 'would pay for that' ... the webapp is http://www.organizemysearch.com
I want a good late night map app. I want to know what's open at the current time, where I can find a bathroom after the bars close, which gas stations are 24 hours, where there is a 24 hour drivethru, etc. Other related things would be good, like letting me know if parking in a certain place will require me to move my car for street sweeping before midnight.

Data could be crowd sourced, as well as gotten from location check-ins.

Call it InsomniMaps or something. I would pay for that.

I would pay for anything that saves money for me and my company. More corporate solutions in various industries would do the trick.
A new calendar visualization desktop app or browser extension that will pull your calendar API (i.e. Google Calendar) and show it in a different way that makes sense for those of us who use the Calendar to track tasks and personal stuff in one screen.

It came to me when I saw what instagantt.com does for asana.com

What I miss is:

- a nice overview of the month without restrictions, I may want to see the next half-day, 2 days, 3 days, or tasks between 10.00 - 12.00 only...etc.

- a clear view of each day's tasks & meetings regardless how many they are, with more rich information about each task/meeting