- a "Rap Genius" for crowd-translating doujin manga (kind of exists on danbooru but not quite)
- A collaborative gaming site for pen-and-paper RPG and boardgame players which would let you design and run your games as a virtual representation of the physical game (probably exists or else is a bad idea)
The RPG idea is, in fact, part of a very dense space. However, I think Tabletop Simulator[0] is an interesting approach that comes at the problem from a very different angle: just simulate a table with physics.
Adding the support systems around this type of table, like tracking stats for various RPGs, could be a way to dominate the market. Most of the other solutions focus on the stat-tracking externals, and only have a very simple table or rigid grid, not in keeping with how real games go.
[0] http://www.berserk-games.com/ts/ - this link shows board games but there's a user-created library of game pieces[1] and some built-in RPG figurines.
And also be able to implement the idea. Not that I'm saying that you couldn't. But in general, I think having a great idea is not really worth all that much on it's own.
What Dropbox did for storage, but for CPUs. The classic business example would be that you have to to process a large Excel doc and are willing to pay extra to speed it up. With fast internet connections and cheap online storage, it could be opened up to a growing number of tasks like video rendering.
Isn't what you're talking about really application-specific? You already have access to tons of CPUs with AWS.
The problem is that you need to reproduce the local Excel environment, or the local video rendering environment, in the cloud. That is either something you do on a per-vertical basis or perhaps with some very advanced system administration tricks.
Also, video is probably not a good candidate, because it's data heavy and relatively CPU light. The good candidates for cloud offloading are lots of computation on small data, which does not fit the class of things that most people do on their desktops these days.
There have been a couple attempts at this: and the general consensus is that the bandwidth issues tend to swamp the costs of what you'd pay to handle it internally.
I asked some commercial video friends about this once and they didn't seem too interested. Their company invested in a private network for their office and a lot of CPU muscle.
Hi, just a quick correction - the Berkeley RISC-V team are not one and the same with the lowRISC team. We collaborate with them, and we have Krste on our technical advisory board. We are of course also using Chisel though.
Still seems like a massive opportunity. $24 billion market in the US. Inconvenient locations (for many people). People have (collectively) a massive amount of under-utilized space. Not without its challenges but neither was AirBnB when it started.
AirBnB existed before AirBnB as well. People just called it Homeaway or VRBO. AirBnB did a few key things much better. I think there's the same opportunity in self-storage (although not sure what makes this model finally take off).
I've also had the idea of an AirBnB for 'toys' (i.e. sports equipment, motorcycles, bikes, instruments, etc).
There is already RelayRides for cars, and qraft is probably the closest existing site to my idea, but I think it could be executed much better than qraft.
Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap.
Sounds basically like TVO Kids which I used to watch many years ago when I got home from elementary school. Children's programming does seem to have changed significantly since then unfortunately.
A service for freelancers that automatically withdraws projected income tax and puts it into a safe money market fund so that they can make a little change on it (more in better times).
The problem I have with this is that I end up using the gross take on projects to float my receivables. In theory your idea has merit, but in practice we all have cash flow challenges and the money I owe uncle sam can bridge those challenges for me.
Love this thread idea, had been considering posting one myself.
- Tablets for seniors: when the elderly population sees an iPad ad, they're not captivated or entranced; they're intimidated and disappointed that they're left behind by technology. I envision the "jitterbug for tablets" -- built on Android with big, tactile buttons; a 'never get lost, take me home' feature; remotely controlled functionality (IE turn on/off apps); etc. They wouldn't use much bandwidth, so you could build 3G right into the device and charge a significant monthly premium -- after all, it's a dramatic quality-of-life improvement for someone sitting in a retirement home.
GE and a few other companies are doing similar projects, but no one is really executing all that well IMO. Problems: would be super hard to get off the ground / defend, and the market is becoming increasingly obsolete.
A lot. My parents and I recently bought my 93 yo Grandfather an iPad, and even though he's smart and has owned a desktop mac for 15 years he still struggles with things like email and photos on the iPad. Senior-oriented features/ui, and maybe family remote control help, would be neat. It's also possible that 93 is just too old for some people to learn new technology.
Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical senior citizen use an app I worked on was a humbling experience. Things that seemed obvious to me were disorienting and discouraging, even after patient explanation that could never be offered in production.
The problem is that to simplify an interface further after a certain point, you need to remove features. But the features you remove will be inessential to some people but absolutely essential to others. Even if you've reduced your target market to "the elderly who want to use email to send and receive pictures", you've still got a huge pile of features that you'll never reduce far enough to make it simple for everyone.
We bought a tactile desktop computer designed for elder people (www.ordimemo.com) for my grandmother 3 years ago. She loved it... at first. The idea of receiving emails and pictures from all of us and having access to "the internet" really pleased her.
But after a few months she kind of stopped using it because it had too many issues. I'm going to list some of them in case it gave ideas to people:
* based on IE7 so a lot of websites don't work/render properly. This does not seem important when the core of your users go on google/wikipedia and that's it. But my grandmother loves to order online but is limited to amazon because most of the other websites don't work properly. She would gladly pay more to be able to simplify most of the main websites UI for her and ease her order flow.
* Impossible to have more than one tab. This seems logical at first because it simplifies everything, but when she is ordering something as a gift and wants to look for an address she has to close the whole application and go in "notebook" and start over again. Same with the idea of having multiple tabs in IE.
* Email services really limited. Their idea is to avoid spam you have to whitelist every email address. But this is not negotiable, so when you order for the first time online you can't use your system's email because you'll never get the "confirm your email address". Or you use a gmail account for this which immediately make things too complicated for her.
* Most of the other features (games especially) are really limited/dumb such as having to recognize a banana. Creating games for her is something I'm planning to do but with the old browser inside the machine it makes things harder.
* Pictures management! We all send pictures to her by email but she can't organize them at all. I've been thinking of a UI for this but when I draw it/explain it I immediately see she would be completely lost. She needs a simple UI on top of explorer of something that would do "delete, crop, move, rename, add comments". And on top of that the main feature she needs is "print it for me and mail it to me". Websites already exist for this feature but she would have to understand how to upload photos and then use them which is clearly impossible.
* Keyboard! Another big issue for her is being able to raise her arms high enough for a long period of time to type an email on the screen with the tactile keyboard. At the same time, the keyboard delivered with the computer is not in alphabetical order. I've been trying to teach her but it takes her a long time to write so she mostly gives up and limit herself to a few words!
I was mostly thinking more in terms of getting people together in the "real world", rather than just an another online community for mountain biking, triathlon, etc.
Possibly a week-long summer camp, weekend hackathons/fitness outside major cities, weekly runs or bicycle rides.
Might be something here - the design of most fitness apps leaves something to be desired for the geek crowd. The only well done one I've ever found is Stronglifts.
I'm probably an edge case user but I don't save stuff to Pocket because I want summaries of stories. I save them because I want access to the actual content.
For example, I do save articles I can just read. For that, a summary service would be great BUT that is true with or without Pocket. On the flipside, if I saw stuff like a blog post on technical code someone wrote about for something, more than likely I want to save that reference for later (true for a huge chunk of stuff I save or the type of things I save).
That said, I came across several people who have either worked on summarizers or talked about it but nothing seemed to have ever took off on those. I can't speak for others but in general I prefer to read content for myself.
Start it in Colorado and Washington, of course. Go into any Weedbucks and the "O.G. Kush" (or any strain) is just as good (e.g. THC concentration constant) as at any other. Special sales on April 20th, and at 4:20pm everyday.
An online-only bank (with ATM support of course) that lets you have as many "virtual" accounts as you want, and lets you set up programmatic rules for transferring money in between accounts on certain days/times, or triggered by events ("transfer $100 from B to A if account A goes below $100, and notify me by email"; "on overdraft from A, withdraw from B instead"). Then have a debit card that you can use to charge to any of your accounts, and an app that lets you configure which account it's drawing from.
This would make "budgeting" very easy. Have a "food" account, an "entertainment" account, etc. Do weekly or monthly budgets by transferring money into your mini-accounts, and denying transactions for each account when it goes over budget. (Or let the transaction go through from a backup account, but notify you that you went over budget.)
Also, have an API that anyone can write apps for.
Of course, I'll never do this because starting a bank is really hard.
I'd like to see a not for profit bank in the sense that the profit the bank does make, goes directly back into the local community surrounding the bank. The bank would have a physical presence but strong and modern on-line support.
They do and it's very helpful, however, since they are technically "savings" accounts and CapitalOne 360 (like all banks) makes more money the longer we keep our cash in one place, they limit the number of transactions out of any of those accounts to 6 per month.
For that and other reasons, I think the proposed system is worth exploring.
Order while you wait infrastructure at restaurants. Basically pull up the menu via wifi while waiting for your table to clear. Take the order, and maybe even pay ahead. Orchestrate the order so that the food is available shortly after you sit down.
This lets the restaurant increase their profits by serving more parties through their tables at peak times - maybe 10-15 min per table that uses the order system.
Some variant of this might also work for busy bars too.
The restaurant chain Chili's does something close to this at least where I live. There's a wireless device at each table where you can order as soon as you sit down. You can pay your check also so there's no waiting for the waiter to bring a paper check and you never have to give up posession of your credit card.
They don't do while you wait ordering AFAIK. Well maybe they do if you "wait" in the bar!
I've always had a funny lower-tech idea along the same lines. It's an airplane themed restaurant where each table has one of the service buttons that airplanes have. When you want a server to come by, hit the button. It lights up at the table and at the server station.
The Yo! Sushi chain in the UK does this. When you press the button, something on your table lights up and a cute (usually)Japanese-ish soundbite rings around the restaurant.
Well, part of the thought was provide a no-internet-required embedded box, just wifi with no app to load, for the many restaurants that don't want to mess with more complexity.
I am fed up with all those warranty cards I am getting with every equipment I buy like juicer,external HDD,etc. so thought what if I can make a smartphone app with open API which other manufacturers can use to link their warranty info.
Through the app, you can apply for warranty , see when it is expiring etc.
Those cards are more for the purpose of giving the company your contact info in case they need to notify you of a product recall. Still, the idea makes sense.
A store-to-kitchen cart. I carry it in store, checkout items from within the cart - mos t current carts are clunky, heavy - one that you can push onto your car trunk and carry out into your pantry/kitchen. Basically the iPod of shopping carts. Would save billion of shopping bags, no more "paper or plastic?"
In Europe (I think Amsterdam?), beer bottles are often sold in plastic cartons that are then refunded when returned and reused. Could be handled like that.
Hahaha, I love it. I had this exact idea this morning! Never expected to see it posted, and so soon after. Great minds... ;)
Was thinking more along the lines of direct to fridge and freezer options. Ideally with cooling or refrigeration properties so cold food can stay cool on the ride home, and the whole thing can pop into the fridge.
It doesn't let you check out from within the cart itself (is that really necessary? If that is what you need, why not just create an app like the Apple Store has?), but it does let you use the same cart both in and outside the store. I bought mine since it makes it a lot easier to walk my groceries home.
I too have used that, but it's clunky & unwieldy. Need something more senior-friendly, better ergonomics e.g. something that folds up into your car trunk like a stretcher for ambulances. Make it fashionable to bring your cart to store.
Something with the Oculus VR tech. I think there's massive, exciting options opening up with the Gear VR or similar, and anyone starting now will have a substantial first mover advantage.
I have two specific applications for VR: the metaverse, and really good porn. (These do not need to be combined though I suppose they could.)
I would argue that Second Life failed mostly due to execution issues. I'd love to see a virtual world where I can socialize, and where I can build cool spaces to hang out with my friends / hold meetings / work.
Phillip Rosedale, the guy behind Second Life, is working on a next-gen equivalent. Janus VR, meanwhile, is busy working at turning the Web into a metaverse, and getting some rave reviews.
A specialst book store or lending library or archive in hard to find new and seconhand books. For some subjects, amazon and its secondhand book site Abe books (?) sucks if you delve into narrow neiches. They are enthuaists out there who crave a book which will teach them something. These books are published in areas which may not be as commercial as they once were.
The neiches are small. One for example is model engineering and related subjects. Books with plans, drawings etc. Construction methods.
213 comments
[ 930 ms ] story [ 3674 ms ] threadPercona has a remote DBA service that gives us 24/7 access to a team of proficient DBAs for a fraction of the cost of hiring one.
I'd like to see the same product for cloud sysadmins.
It's kind of like a parking lot for business opportunities I didn't go through with.
- a "Rap Genius" for crowd-translating doujin manga (kind of exists on danbooru but not quite)
- A collaborative gaming site for pen-and-paper RPG and boardgame players which would let you design and run your games as a virtual representation of the physical game (probably exists or else is a bad idea)
Adding the support systems around this type of table, like tracking stats for various RPGs, could be a way to dominate the market. Most of the other solutions focus on the stat-tracking externals, and only have a very simple table or rigid grid, not in keeping with how real games go.
[0] http://www.berserk-games.com/ts/ - this link shows board games but there's a user-created library of game pieces[1] and some built-in RPG figurines.
[1] http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=286160
I have heard Roll20 is pretty popular and fun to use. I have never done it myself but it seems like a really cool way to play.
http://roll20.net/
Now I just need to be able to not be the last to have it.
Fully automated and fully mobile.
The problem is that you need to reproduce the local Excel environment, or the local video rendering environment, in the cloud. That is either something you do on a per-vertical basis or perhaps with some very advanced system administration tricks.
Also, video is probably not a good candidate, because it's data heavy and relatively CPU light. The good candidates for cloud offloading are lots of computation on small data, which does not fit the class of things that most people do on their desktops these days.
[1] http://www.picloud.com/
[2] http://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox-piclou/
I asked some commercial video friends about this once and they didn't seem too interested. Their company invested in a private network for their office and a lot of CPU muscle.
1. http://raintown.org/lava/ 2. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~singhsu/
[1] http://www.bluespec.com/high-level-synthesis-tools.html
There's also PSHDL from Karsten Becker[2] at TUHH. It's immature and seems to be focused on teaching at the moment.
[1] https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/ [2] http://blog.pshdl.org/
[0] http://myhdl.org/
Still seems like a massive opportunity. $24 billion market in the US. Inconvenient locations (for many people). People have (collectively) a massive amount of under-utilized space. Not without its challenges but neither was AirBnB when it started.
I've also had the idea of an AirBnB for 'toys' (i.e. sports equipment, motorcycles, bikes, instruments, etc).
There is already RelayRides for cars, and qraft is probably the closest existing site to my idea, but I think it could be executed much better than qraft.
Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap.
- Tablets for seniors: when the elderly population sees an iPad ad, they're not captivated or entranced; they're intimidated and disappointed that they're left behind by technology. I envision the "jitterbug for tablets" -- built on Android with big, tactile buttons; a 'never get lost, take me home' feature; remotely controlled functionality (IE turn on/off apps); etc. They wouldn't use much bandwidth, so you could build 3G right into the device and charge a significant monthly premium -- after all, it's a dramatic quality-of-life improvement for someone sitting in a retirement home.
GE and a few other companies are doing similar projects, but no one is really executing all that well IMO. Problems: would be super hard to get off the ground / defend, and the market is becoming increasingly obsolete.
Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical senior citizen use an app I worked on was a humbling experience. Things that seemed obvious to me were disorienting and discouraging, even after patient explanation that could never be offered in production.
Some awesome friends of mine at Chapman University have been building exactly that: a tablet for seniors.
* based on IE7 so a lot of websites don't work/render properly. This does not seem important when the core of your users go on google/wikipedia and that's it. But my grandmother loves to order online but is limited to amazon because most of the other websites don't work properly. She would gladly pay more to be able to simplify most of the main websites UI for her and ease her order flow.
* Impossible to have more than one tab. This seems logical at first because it simplifies everything, but when she is ordering something as a gift and wants to look for an address she has to close the whole application and go in "notebook" and start over again. Same with the idea of having multiple tabs in IE.
* Email services really limited. Their idea is to avoid spam you have to whitelist every email address. But this is not negotiable, so when you order for the first time online you can't use your system's email because you'll never get the "confirm your email address". Or you use a gmail account for this which immediately make things too complicated for her.
* Most of the other features (games especially) are really limited/dumb such as having to recognize a banana. Creating games for her is something I'm planning to do but with the old browser inside the machine it makes things harder.
* Pictures management! We all send pictures to her by email but she can't organize them at all. I've been thinking of a UI for this but when I draw it/explain it I immediately see she would be completely lost. She needs a simple UI on top of explorer of something that would do "delete, crop, move, rename, add comments". And on top of that the main feature she needs is "print it for me and mail it to me". Websites already exist for this feature but she would have to understand how to upload photos and then use them which is clearly impossible.
* Keyboard! Another big issue for her is being able to raise her arms high enough for a long period of time to type an email on the screen with the tactile keyboard. At the same time, the keyboard delivered with the computer is not in alphabetical order. I've been trying to teach her but it takes her a long time to write so she mostly gives up and limit herself to a few words!
Hope this helps!
Possibly a week-long summer camp, weekend hackathons/fitness outside major cities, weekly runs or bicycle rides.
I've made a naive summarizer that seems to get the job done for the summaries part: http://breue.com/summarizer
I'm just not sure what the final product would look like or if there would be enough of a reason for people to prefer it over Pocket.
For example, I do save articles I can just read. For that, a summary service would be great BUT that is true with or without Pocket. On the flipside, if I saw stuff like a blog post on technical code someone wrote about for something, more than likely I want to save that reference for later (true for a huge chunk of stuff I save or the type of things I save).
That said, I came across several people who have either worked on summarizers or talked about it but nothing seemed to have ever took off on those. I can't speak for others but in general I prefer to read content for myself.
You'd make a killing.
This would make "budgeting" very easy. Have a "food" account, an "entertainment" account, etc. Do weekly or monthly budgets by transferring money into your mini-accounts, and denying transactions for each account when it goes over budget. (Or let the transaction go through from a backup account, but notify you that you went over budget.)
Also, have an API that anyone can write apps for.
Of course, I'll never do this because starting a bank is really hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_union
Many of them around today pre-date the bigger banks by some years.
Anecdotally, I do much of what you describe and such a system is nearly my most valuable financial asset.
For that and other reasons, I think the proposed system is worth exploring.
I will say though, I'm a very happy 360 customer.
This lets the restaurant increase their profits by serving more parties through their tables at peak times - maybe 10-15 min per table that uses the order system.
Some variant of this might also work for busy bars too.
They don't do while you wait ordering AFAIK. Well maybe they do if you "wait" in the bar!
http://www.paywithcover.com/ New York
http://www.tabbedout.com/ Austin
Open table is also doing it in select markets.
Through the app, you can apply for warranty , see when it is expiring etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_...
Was thinking more along the lines of direct to fridge and freezer options. Ideally with cooling or refrigeration properties so cold food can stay cool on the ride home, and the whole thing can pop into the fridge.
It doesn't let you check out from within the cart itself (is that really necessary? If that is what you need, why not just create an app like the Apple Store has?), but it does let you use the same cart both in and outside the store. I bought mine since it makes it a lot easier to walk my groceries home.
I have two specific applications for VR: the metaverse, and really good porn. (These do not need to be combined though I suppose they could.)
I would argue that Second Life failed mostly due to execution issues. I'd love to see a virtual world where I can socialize, and where I can build cool spaces to hang out with my friends / hold meetings / work.
Phillip Rosedale, the guy behind Second Life, is working on a next-gen equivalent. Janus VR, meanwhile, is busy working at turning the Web into a metaverse, and getting some rave reviews.
As for porn, http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw/ is your source there... "Really good" porn is, of course, highly taste-dependent.
The neiches are small. One for example is model engineering and related subjects. Books with plans, drawings etc. Construction methods.