PG mentioned this question in his most recent essay, so I am redirecting it to everyone on HN. What does your company (or you individually) need that you would play a lot of money for?
Take care of all my trivial stuff for me. Bills, taxes, money management, politics, corruption and other stupid distractions that stop me from focusing on people that matter.
This. I know the big-four of accounting/consultancy firms offer these services for e.g. expatriates but they don't take on single "puppets" for logistical reasons.
Small firms mostly lack the wide scale of knowledge required to do said things.
For prices: I know a certain B4-firm asks around EUR 450 (USD 550?) for a single tax return. Extrapolate from there ;-)
There's a company where I live that does some of these things regarding your bills and saving money. You go in for an interview and you show them all your expenses, incomes, etc. They will work out a budget for you, pay your bills, save money for your goals, send you a bit of spending money for groceries, etc. negotiate with your credit card companies, banks and what not if things are really bad. They set up a bank account which your income goes into, but you can't immediately access it to withdraw funds. Instead you have to call/email them and ask for it, which is good for preventing impulse purchases. Fees are a few hundred dollars for setting up, which is worked into your budget so you don't have to pay upfront, then around $25 a week ongoing.
They can even assign you a person who does all this for you and more. Usually she is called "wife" (or "husband", if it's a "he"). It is rumored that the costs are usually way higher in that case though (especially if you decide on a "wife" instead of "husband").
Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)
More seriously though: do you have a link? I find this concept seriously intriguing / weird / ... on many levels.
What kind taking care of politics do you have in mind? The answer depends on whether you mean "vote like I would have for me by still have election days and campaigners and whatnot" or "abolish voting and make everything just work"?
The only way to live without politics or corruption and have fully automated taxation is probably to establish a nation run by a Friendly AI. No such nation exists today but you may increase the likelihood of one existing in the future by supporting Friendly AI research.
People pay premium prices for stuff, that they want to do very much or that they do not want to do at all, but have to. Cyberjunkie described the second category as stuff that brings piece of mind. For the first category you get bonus points if you find something, that is highly visible to others (status symbols).
First category: Golf equipment, expensive knifes, barbecue stuff, wine, shoes etc.
Second category: Taxes, cleaning, medicine, everything which lets one appear to be a better parent (does not matter if it actually does) etc.
Photo storage /viewing that doesn't try to sync my photos to a computer (making me scared of losing them in a sync mishap) or share them. Electronic equivalent of a shoebox. Snapjoy did this but Dropbox bought them and shut it down. I haven't seen an alternative - maybe the new Amazon photos does this?
I had an idea a while back for this kind of thing, but never stuck with it. I wanted to make something with Amazon Glacier that would be for long-term storage of RAWs for all those people who don't want to ever really delete a RAW file, with small jpeg previews of your library. Maybe I should dig up my old notes and give it another go.
I've mentioned something along these lines before as well. I want it to be seamlessly integrated with Aperture (and likely Lightroom, given how things are going in Aperture-land) such that I can browse all of my photos at any time. The RAWs are securely backed up in some datacenter, and if I want to edit the photo, the RAW is cached locally so that it can be edited. If the photo hasn't been edited in some time now, it's evicted from the cache, and I still have the preview available for perusal.
I'd pay $10-$20/month for this. But I also currently have about 400GB of photos on my hard drive. Still, I think that with annual contracts, you should be able to achieve a 50% margin on my usage, and I think I'm something of an outlier(?) in terms of usage.
You Want everpix. They got shutdown but no product is coming close to what they had. Except maybe picturelife but they bloat their app with editing and social features unfortunately.
I use Google Drive and FolderSync [1] to sync my photos to a folder on Drive. I also just copy-paste pictures from my camera to Drive. Google Drive seems quite cheap in terms of storage for casual usage.
Hey, I'm currently working on keepallthethings.com. It's not specifically for photos but it does work well for that use case(wanting to tag my photos in a way without duplicating them all over the place was my original drive for creating the site). There is no autosyncing though I am planning on out of browser upload tools in the near future.
I should warn it is very early days and there is still a lot to do and a long list of todos to complete but if you want to try it out send me an email(in my profile) and I'll set you up with a free account.
Thank you for the note. I've tried in a few browsers and tried a few online screenshot services to make sure its not just me and they all work without the www so I'm honestly at a loss as to why its not working for you. Hopefully it isn't too widespread a problem though!
I had been looking for this too. Amazon CloudDrive (Prime Photos) does a pretty good job (at least on iOS). Free for Prime members. My only complaint is that the uploading choices are either automatically uploading all photos (which I don't want it doing) or selecting photos one by one. I would like an album level option to upload all photos in an album.
I used an attorney, because I wanted to make sure we did everything we needed. But you don't need an attorney, you can do all the paperwork yourself. There are instructions on the government website on how to fill the firms out.
knowledge, i want a website that i tell that i want to have the knowledge of someone about certain domain. then the site give me a path(books, articles, exercises) that lead me to this. this could be simply done by letting people write about their knowledge and give the path by themselves
just as fyi, I had this in mind while doing ramenapp.net, but then it quickly turned out that people don't like to share very much. those who do, they already share, but the majority is happy otherwise. imo
Tax evasion as a service. Target the same legal loopholes that big corporations use to avoid paying taxes like "transfer pricing". You set up the offices and shell corporations in Ireland and the Netherlands for a Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. You then share those resources (offices, staff, lawyers, accountants, etc) between your clients & charge a percentage of the tax savings as your fee.
This won't work. Tax authority will simply not accept tax deductible expenses which allow you to transfer profits to Ireland and will issue you new tax bill.
Why big corporations can get away with this? It comes down to people. Little guy working at tax office doesn't have enough confidence to oppose Apple or Google but will have world of confidence to scrutinize unknown small businesses.
I see companies like this popping up all the time offering services that allow profits to be concealed under some bullshit scheme. It might take a few years before tax authority will catch up but they will eventually find every single client of such company, they will conduct detailed audits and will issue new tax bills with penalties to all involved.
I specifically said, tax authority won't accept tax deductions they don't like. They will simply issue you new tax bill and couldn't care less whether what you are doing is legal or not.
It's up to you to challenge their interpretation of law through legal system if you think what you are doing is legal.
By the way, EU’s executive Commission is currently looking into Ireland and says what Apple is doing could be illegal under EU law. If confirmed, Apple will get a huge repayment bill.
the irs would hit any partners you use to transfer funds very quickly with deep audits at the very minimum if this gets even a little traction, i'd think
The goal is to get shut down. Best case, you draw enough attention to the issue to create some real reform in our tax system and bring awareness to the fact that we're hurting innovation by giving big companies far better tax rates than startups.
I'm not trying to be "provocative", but do you have any examples of this ever happening? And by that I mean any examples where a company has purposefully broken a law, was shut down and then laws were changed as a direct result? I've seen it happen the other way (technically no laws against it, shut the company down anyway then passed laws against it) but what you're proposing sounds improbable.
In fact, a french website published an app called "Defiscalisator" (http://www.finansemble.fr/defiscalisator). It aims to optimize things for you in order to pay less taxes.
Please make my brain work better. I need a way to organize information that I come across online, get control of my schedule and find a way to manage my general learning process. Maybe a mix of bookmarking, google calendar and anki, with some event discovery thrown in. Then add some Tinder style social functionality so I can get a date or meet new friends.
I wouldn't be able to throw money at you fast enough.
What is it about the current solutions that leave you cold? It sounds like google calendar, anki, evernote and Tinder could all work together to do exactly what you suggest. I'm curious what you think is missing, the X factor that another solution would be able to address?
None of those things are integrated, they don't fit into my daily routine and they're overkill for my versions of the problems that they solve. I want a toothbrush solution, something I check 3 or 4 times a day and benefit from using. I don't need four toothbrushes, and I don't want to have to learn to use four different products.
I just threw those examples together in order to illustrate the idea that I have too much information for my puny brain to keep track of. I'm sure that there are apps to solve every information management problem that a person could have, but using all of them would create the new problem of learning to use and maintain N different apps.
In regards to "bookmarks", I know guys working on a new tool called "Marvelogs" http://marvelogs.com - They're keeping all your likes, favorites, follows etc from various web services (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, GitHub, BitBucket etc) and putting them in a single place. Really like the concept.
Tool to constantly monitor domains I'm interested in keeping an eye on (competitors, etc). Crawl their site every day and email me smart diffs (ignore timestamps, randomized content, etc) of every page that changed.
I like this one. Normalized data, with all changes timestamped, realtime pushed directly to my own server where I can use along with my own internal datasets. It'll be very labor intensive though.
I'm a hang glider pilot, but this applies to all wind sports – windsurfing, kiteboarding, paragliding, sailplanes, possibly even surfing and skydiving.
These sports require weather analysis. Is the wind blowing from the right direction? Is the cloudbase high enough?
Some weather analysis tools exist like http://www.xcskies.com/ for hang gliding and paragliding, but they're not perfect to say the least.
I still spend too much time looking at various charts and forecasts in the summer, and then waiting on site once I arrive and the weather conditions aren't right. If you can make me wait less on my precious weekend time, you have my money.
Participants of these sports pretty much accept the current level of technology to be as good as it gets, because there are very few meteorologists who could create new, better weather models, and at the same time be either interested in doing that for free or have the technical and business acumen to make it a business. So pretty much everyone uses the RASP model and weather data off many disparate websites.
---
2) flight instruments
Hang gliders, paragliders and sailpane pilots use special devices that combine a variometer with GPS and some stored map data to record flight paths, show airspeed, descent rate, etc. These are small, like a fat iPhone 6+ with a calculator-style screen.
The company producing the most popular ones is Flytec. I'm not sure how they get away with selling a simple device that runs on two AA batteries for $400-$1000. Maybe they have some key patents... though they are not a monopolist, there's FlyMaster for example. Flytec's devices are pretty much the same as those they were selling 10 years ago, they are cheap to make and should not cost that much.
There's room in the market for a significantly cheaper and/or more magical device. By magical I mean stuff like "go this way to get into the lifting air you've just lost", or "fly faster/slower to maximize glide ratio".
---
3) weather mapping drone
When the wind hits the mountain / ridge at a certain angle, hang gliders, paragliders and sailplanes can easily soar next to that mountain. The wind also needs to be in a certain speed range etc.
Sometime we pilots want to check if that mountain over there could be flyable. It looks like it might be soarable, but to verify this, we need to drive up the mountain and launch a live person in a glider from there. That's a huge waste of time, and because often such roads are privately owned, there's a lot of hassle in getting permission to do that. Landowners are afraid of the liability (which we legally waive but it takes time to explain and verify), and we don't even know if the mountain is soarable at all, we can only guess.
It would be nice if we could just launch a drone which would fly around and record wind direction and speeds at various locations and altitudes.
The same technique could also be used to better understand existing flying sites, OR to find thermals (invisible pockets of uprising air which gliders need to stay up in the air for long period of time). And this is #1 thing we want – more found thermals, more airtime.
So maybe it can be a sort of follow-drone that flies in your general area, telling you where the thermals are. You can tell you're in a thermal once you actually fly into it, but you're descending at 3 ft per second, so the amount of time you can fly searching for thermals is limited.
Because you're flying a glider, the follow-drone can be a glider too with just a small auxiliary engine, you don't need too much battery power.
---
So there you have it. Wind sports are technologically underserved because the market size isn't very big, but the pain is real, and it's #1 reason preventing more people from participating. Maybe some of the weather / h...
Seabreaze weather site in Australia is something like this for sailing related sports. They have built a solid business on it so I can only imagine a bigger market like the US would be very viable.
1. Possibly, but iPhone's screen is pathetic in sunlight, and it's speaker is probably not loud enough for variometer beeping. Also, not sure if it has enough battery power for 4 hours of such workload.
2. AoA is too low-level for me personally. I'd rather see my airspeed and glide ratio relative to the air. Hang gliders stabilize themselves at an optimal AoA if you stop providing inputs, but sometimes when I'm desperately trying to reach the landing field I want to know if I should increase or decrease the speed to get there (tradeoff between headwind penetration and sink rate).
Also, personally I'm not going to install anything requiring long wires. There's just too much hassle already in setting up a hang glider... I just want to put the whole device with any sensors in clean airflow and forget about it.
Oh, one more thing I would like is a G-force meter. I'm not supposed to exceed 4G positive on my glider, but I have no idea how it feels like. I'm not going to reach it with normal flying but once I start doing wingovers and loops, I would like to know the numbers I'm getting.
I'm also a (newbie) hang glider pilot. This idea is a little further out there, but if anybody experienced with aircraft design could build a hang glider that folded into a backpack, it would be huge. Lots of R&D and tiny market, but they would pay tons for it. That convenience is one of the big reasons paragliding is more popular right now.
Dammit, how did I forget that. This is more important than anything I've written above. Make a hang glider that packs to 2.5 meters max and doesn't take an eternity to setup and break down (15 minutes max). The performance needs to be somewhere between a modern paraglider and an intermediate hang glider. It would be revolutionary to the sport.
Lack of such hang glider is #1 reason preventing willing people from hang gliding. The popularity of paragliding is proof of that (a paraglider packs into a big backpack). You can't store a hang glider in an apartment because normally it packs into a 5 meter long sausage bag. And I can't even go travel with my hang glider because where do I leave it when I sleep in the hotel? Too risky to leave it on top of car. A small package also allows flying at some ski resorts and other perks.
Designing this hang glider would be primarily solving a configuration problem – how to arrange all required components so that they are foldable and yet strong enough. You have 40 years of HG designs to get inspired from, and don't forget Princeton sailwing, that's an old, under-recognized concept imho.
By the way, hang gliders are small enough that you can truck-test them on the ground to make sure they're strong enough and have proper stability attributes. Unmanned flight testing should also be possible, though not done currently. HGMA even has a list of certification criteria online that you can use as a baseline. What I'm saying is that designing hang glider is easier than designing a Boeing. You do need to know what you're doing, but you don't need a team of PhDs in fluid dynamics and materials science. All important hang glider components are free to use, not covered by current patents.
A bit off-topic, but not much: I always wondered why paragliders don't have inflatable compartments like kitesurfing kites do... My theory is that it would help with wing stability.
I have no experience with hang gliders, but as long as you have rigid skeleton you have problems with trasport and storage. Could this skeleton be replaced with an inflatable one?
I've actually researched this option. Using compressed air as a structural component is a valid construction technique and could be applied to hang gliders.
It won't work on paragliders because as ram-air wings, they need to collapse when they get unloaded. Otherwise once unloaded the wing will fall over in front of the pilot and probably get entangled with the pilot.
The only heavier-than-air inflatable aircraft currently in production is the Woopy – http://fly.woopyjump.com/ – its design is very unconventional, with continuously running pumps and some weird flight control mechanism. It never passed certification because it's probably not as strong as other hang gliders.
Some potential problems of inflatable hang gliders:
* Ambient air pressure differences at varying altitudes, temperatures, etc.
* Bird attack – sometimes eagles and other birds can get aggressive and try to claw a hang glider. What is a minor annoyance now could be a dangerous flaw if your glider is inflatable.
* A failed inflatable wing can potentially gift-wrap around the pilot preventing them from throwing the reserve parachute in time.
* Less rigidity than metal tubes – danger of buckling at higher speeds / wing-loading.
* There's a certain stigma among HG pilots regarding the concept of inflatable aircraft due to controversy around Woopy and the general idea of riskiness.
However, inflatable aircraft IS a practical strategy. The shortcomings listed above can be overcome given enough effort.
Lastly, in all likeliness the only advantage of an inflatable hang glider would be portability. I don't think it will end up lighter than a tube+fabric construction. The guys from Prospective Concepts seem to believe that they will achieve better glide performance with an inflatable design, but to be honest I doubt that. But then again, they know much more about their technology than I do.
About the paragliders: you mean when they land? It is true that the landing becomes more challenging, especially in case of wind (kitesurfers often help each other when entering / exiting). But I guess this could be solved - if nothing else, only the central area could be "reinforced". Let's wait a few years, I'm sure someone will try it. :)
No, I mean when the angle of attack of the wing gets too low in flight. This can and does happen due to gusts and thermal activity in the air.
Normally a ram-air paraglider wing would collapse at low angle of attack due to lack of pressure inside the wing (it only works in a certain range of angles of attack), causing both the wing and the pilot to start falling, picking up speed and restoring angle of attack, and re-inflating again. It's kinda hard to explain concisely in more detail.
With a rigid inflated paraglider wing however, if the angle of attack becomes too low, the wing might get unloaded (falls faster than the pilot) and will pitch down even further because that's what a plank wing does in the absence of pendulum weight provided by the pilot. So the wing dives down and gets entangled with either the pilot, the lines or both.
I'm a bit rusty on the exact aerodynamics of paragliders because I only fly hang gliders, but this is roughly what happens.
If you want to know more about how ram-air paraglider wings stay inflated, check out this doc – http://downloads.flyozone.com/pdf/PG/ozone_shark_nose_en.pdf – it talks about a new ram-air intake technology and explains how ram air wings work.
I kiteboard, so I can relate to (1), but the problem I see is that there isn't much of a marketplace effect.
eg - If I am in OBX, NC, I don't need a site that has weather data in CA or FL. There may be slight benefits to this, but I can't think of anything big enough that would make it easy to take over a site that is already popular with the locals of a region.
Am I missing some benefits that come from being larger?
Well, basically, weather models are not region-specific, only the actual computations/forecasts are. So it wouldn't make sense to develop an incredibly complex weather model and then only use it in your local region – it would work anywhere, properly configured.
Well, it's pretty, but its resolution is not very high. If you zoom in enough you'll see that it doesn't take into account particular mountains and valleys, such terrain features are too small for it. Compare it to http://www.canadarasp.com/RASPtable.html for example (Vancouver area).
Health. When you make a list of what people will (gladly) pay a lot of
money for, health will always be at the top of the list, since without
good health, you suffer from a constant impediment. Unfortunately,
providing solutions to health problems is probably well beyond scope for
already struggling startups.
PG asked, "What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?" in relation to
changing sales discussions with the hope of bringing in some revenue for
struggling startups. The problem with taking this a bit too literally is
it's essentially the same thing as asking a customer what they want. The
classic statement from Henry Ford is, "If I asked my customers what they
wanted, they'd tell me a faster horse." Often, the customer may not know
what they want.
Instead of asking "What you'd pay a lot for?" you could ask "Where are
you spending lots?" or "What costs you a lot?" One of my favorites is,
"What regular task in your job annoys the ever living snot out of you?
Yeah, what's that thing you absolutely dead doing?"
What annoys you?
What do you dread doing?
What infuriates you?
What upsets you?
...
The funny thing about human beings is, if you ask people where it hurts,
they'll often tell you. If you take the time to learn where they hurt,
you might be able to help.
You are correct that phrasing the question different ways can often get better results, but I just wanted to hear from HN users and it seemed simpler to just ask the question verbatim.
A work/travel-program for knowledge professionals to travel the world and work a set number of hours a week on projects to pay their way. Air tickets, budget, airbnbs/apartments all paid for. Then you resell services to clients.
You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example).
I make money to pay my bills when I get someone a job. Help me do that better. It's much harder than it sounds. None of the software products I have heard of help.
100 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadTake care of all my trivial stuff for me. Bills, taxes, money management, politics, corruption and other stupid distractions that stop me from focusing on people that matter.
How much do you want?
Small firms mostly lack the wide scale of knowledge required to do said things.
For prices: I know a certain B4-firm asks around EUR 450 (USD 550?) for a single tax return. Extrapolate from there ;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)
More seriously though: do you have a link? I find this concept seriously intriguing / weird / ... on many levels.
The only way to live without politics or corruption and have fully automated taxation is probably to establish a nation run by a Friendly AI. No such nation exists today but you may increase the likelihood of one existing in the future by supporting Friendly AI research.
First category: Golf equipment, expensive knifes, barbecue stuff, wine, shoes etc.
Second category: Taxes, cleaning, medicine, everything which lets one appear to be a better parent (does not matter if it actually does) etc.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...
I should warn it is very early days and there is still a lot to do and a long list of todos to complete but if you want to try it out send me an email(in my profile) and I'll set you up with a free account.
Why big corporations can get away with this? It comes down to people. Little guy working at tax office doesn't have enough confidence to oppose Apple or Google but will have world of confidence to scrutinize unknown small businesses.
I see companies like this popping up all the time offering services that allow profits to be concealed under some bullshit scheme. It might take a few years before tax authority will catch up but they will eventually find every single client of such company, they will conduct detailed audits and will issue new tax bills with penalties to all involved.
I specifically said, tax authority won't accept tax deductions they don't like. They will simply issue you new tax bill and couldn't care less whether what you are doing is legal or not.
It's up to you to challenge their interpretation of law through legal system if you think what you are doing is legal.
By the way, EU’s executive Commission is currently looking into Ireland and says what Apple is doing could be illegal under EU law. If confirmed, Apple will get a huge repayment bill.
source: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dod...
I wouldn't be able to throw money at you fast enough.
I just threw those examples together in order to illustrate the idea that I have too much information for my puny brain to keep track of. I'm sure that there are apps to solve every information management problem that a person could have, but using all of them would create the new problem of learning to use and maintain N different apps.
Is there anything specific that you need that current services don't provide?
1) weather analysis
I'm a hang glider pilot, but this applies to all wind sports – windsurfing, kiteboarding, paragliding, sailplanes, possibly even surfing and skydiving.
These sports require weather analysis. Is the wind blowing from the right direction? Is the cloudbase high enough?
Some weather analysis tools exist like http://www.xcskies.com/ for hang gliding and paragliding, but they're not perfect to say the least.
I still spend too much time looking at various charts and forecasts in the summer, and then waiting on site once I arrive and the weather conditions aren't right. If you can make me wait less on my precious weekend time, you have my money.
Participants of these sports pretty much accept the current level of technology to be as good as it gets, because there are very few meteorologists who could create new, better weather models, and at the same time be either interested in doing that for free or have the technical and business acumen to make it a business. So pretty much everyone uses the RASP model and weather data off many disparate websites.
---
2) flight instruments
Hang gliders, paragliders and sailpane pilots use special devices that combine a variometer with GPS and some stored map data to record flight paths, show airspeed, descent rate, etc. These are small, like a fat iPhone 6+ with a calculator-style screen.
The company producing the most popular ones is Flytec. I'm not sure how they get away with selling a simple device that runs on two AA batteries for $400-$1000. Maybe they have some key patents... though they are not a monopolist, there's FlyMaster for example. Flytec's devices are pretty much the same as those they were selling 10 years ago, they are cheap to make and should not cost that much.
There's room in the market for a significantly cheaper and/or more magical device. By magical I mean stuff like "go this way to get into the lifting air you've just lost", or "fly faster/slower to maximize glide ratio".
---
3) weather mapping drone
When the wind hits the mountain / ridge at a certain angle, hang gliders, paragliders and sailplanes can easily soar next to that mountain. The wind also needs to be in a certain speed range etc.
Sometime we pilots want to check if that mountain over there could be flyable. It looks like it might be soarable, but to verify this, we need to drive up the mountain and launch a live person in a glider from there. That's a huge waste of time, and because often such roads are privately owned, there's a lot of hassle in getting permission to do that. Landowners are afraid of the liability (which we legally waive but it takes time to explain and verify), and we don't even know if the mountain is soarable at all, we can only guess.
It would be nice if we could just launch a drone which would fly around and record wind direction and speeds at various locations and altitudes.
The same technique could also be used to better understand existing flying sites, OR to find thermals (invisible pockets of uprising air which gliders need to stay up in the air for long period of time). And this is #1 thing we want – more found thermals, more airtime.
So maybe it can be a sort of follow-drone that flies in your general area, telling you where the thermals are. You can tell you're in a thermal once you actually fly into it, but you're descending at 3 ft per second, so the amount of time you can fly searching for thermals is limited.
Because you're flying a glider, the follow-drone can be a glider too with just a small auxiliary engine, you don't need too much battery power.
---
So there you have it. Wind sports are technologically underserved because the market size isn't very big, but the pain is real, and it's #1 reason preventing more people from participating. Maybe some of the weather / h...
Here's the site story (in cartoon form):-
http://www.seabreeze.com.au/Members/Welcome/Cartoon.aspx
And a sample page:-
http://www.seabreeze.com.au/graphs/nsw.asp
A couple serious questions though:
1. Would glider-pilot software running on a smart phone, possibly with an attached sensor, be a viable replacement for the Flytec devices?
2. How do you feel about angle-of-attack indicators? Do hang gliders have a good place to mount them, and then wire them back to a display?
2. AoA is too low-level for me personally. I'd rather see my airspeed and glide ratio relative to the air. Hang gliders stabilize themselves at an optimal AoA if you stop providing inputs, but sometimes when I'm desperately trying to reach the landing field I want to know if I should increase or decrease the speed to get there (tradeoff between headwind penetration and sink rate).
Also, personally I'm not going to install anything requiring long wires. There's just too much hassle already in setting up a hang glider... I just want to put the whole device with any sensors in clean airflow and forget about it.
Oh, one more thing I would like is a G-force meter. I'm not supposed to exceed 4G positive on my glider, but I have no idea how it feels like. I'm not going to reach it with normal flying but once I start doing wingovers and loops, I would like to know the numbers I'm getting.
Lack of such hang glider is #1 reason preventing willing people from hang gliding. The popularity of paragliding is proof of that (a paraglider packs into a big backpack). You can't store a hang glider in an apartment because normally it packs into a 5 meter long sausage bag. And I can't even go travel with my hang glider because where do I leave it when I sleep in the hotel? Too risky to leave it on top of car. A small package also allows flying at some ski resorts and other perks.
Designing this hang glider would be primarily solving a configuration problem – how to arrange all required components so that they are foldable and yet strong enough. You have 40 years of HG designs to get inspired from, and don't forget Princeton sailwing, that's an old, under-recognized concept imho.
By the way, hang gliders are small enough that you can truck-test them on the ground to make sure they're strong enough and have proper stability attributes. Unmanned flight testing should also be possible, though not done currently. HGMA even has a list of certification criteria online that you can use as a baseline. What I'm saying is that designing hang glider is easier than designing a Boeing. You do need to know what you're doing, but you don't need a team of PhDs in fluid dynamics and materials science. All important hang glider components are free to use, not covered by current patents.
I have no experience with hang gliders, but as long as you have rigid skeleton you have problems with trasport and storage. Could this skeleton be replaced with an inflatable one?
It won't work on paragliders because as ram-air wings, they need to collapse when they get unloaded. Otherwise once unloaded the wing will fall over in front of the pilot and probably get entangled with the pilot.
The only heavier-than-air inflatable aircraft currently in production is the Woopy – http://fly.woopyjump.com/ – its design is very unconventional, with continuously running pumps and some weird flight control mechanism. It never passed certification because it's probably not as strong as other hang gliders.
Some potential problems of inflatable hang gliders:
* Ambient air pressure differences at varying altitudes, temperatures, etc.
* Bird attack – sometimes eagles and other birds can get aggressive and try to claw a hang glider. What is a minor annoyance now could be a dangerous flaw if your glider is inflatable.
* A failed inflatable wing can potentially gift-wrap around the pilot preventing them from throwing the reserve parachute in time.
* Less rigidity than metal tubes – danger of buckling at higher speeds / wing-loading.
* There's a certain stigma among HG pilots regarding the concept of inflatable aircraft due to controversy around Woopy and the general idea of riskiness.
However, inflatable aircraft IS a practical strategy. The shortcomings listed above can be overcome given enough effort.
For example, see http://www.prospective-concepts.ch/html/site_en.htm – click on Projects / Air / Pneuwing (and other projects).
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodyear_Inflatoplane
Lastly, in all likeliness the only advantage of an inflatable hang glider would be portability. I don't think it will end up lighter than a tube+fabric construction. The guys from Prospective Concepts seem to believe that they will achieve better glide performance with an inflatable design, but to be honest I doubt that. But then again, they know much more about their technology than I do.
About the paragliders: you mean when they land? It is true that the landing becomes more challenging, especially in case of wind (kitesurfers often help each other when entering / exiting). But I guess this could be solved - if nothing else, only the central area could be "reinforced". Let's wait a few years, I'm sure someone will try it. :)
Normally a ram-air paraglider wing would collapse at low angle of attack due to lack of pressure inside the wing (it only works in a certain range of angles of attack), causing both the wing and the pilot to start falling, picking up speed and restoring angle of attack, and re-inflating again. It's kinda hard to explain concisely in more detail.
With a rigid inflated paraglider wing however, if the angle of attack becomes too low, the wing might get unloaded (falls faster than the pilot) and will pitch down even further because that's what a plank wing does in the absence of pendulum weight provided by the pilot. So the wing dives down and gets entangled with either the pilot, the lines or both.
I'm a bit rusty on the exact aerodynamics of paragliders because I only fly hang gliders, but this is roughly what happens.
If you want to know more about how ram-air paraglider wings stay inflated, check out this doc – http://downloads.flyozone.com/pdf/PG/ozone_shark_nose_en.pdf – it talks about a new ram-air intake technology and explains how ram air wings work.
Why I am doing this at 5 AM..? I'm insane.
eg - If I am in OBX, NC, I don't need a site that has weather data in CA or FL. There may be slight benefits to this, but I can't think of anything big enough that would make it easy to take over a site that is already popular with the locals of a region.
Am I missing some benefits that come from being larger?
Example of a weather model I'm talking about – RASP http://www.drjack.info/DRJACK/RASP/index.html – many hang gliding clubs run this model on local weather data, e.g. http://www.canadarasp.com/RASPtable.html. That's the best forecasts we can have. Well, that and http://xcskies.com.
PG asked, "What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?" in relation to changing sales discussions with the hope of bringing in some revenue for struggling startups. The problem with taking this a bit too literally is it's essentially the same thing as asking a customer what they want. The classic statement from Henry Ford is, "If I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd tell me a faster horse." Often, the customer may not know what they want.
Instead of asking "What you'd pay a lot for?" you could ask "Where are you spending lots?" or "What costs you a lot?" One of my favorites is, "What regular task in your job annoys the ever living snot out of you? Yeah, what's that thing you absolutely dead doing?"
The funny thing about human beings is, if you ask people where it hurts, they'll often tell you. If you take the time to learn where they hurt, you might be able to help.You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example).
a business of lifestyle, if you will.