HN Explorer

Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?

155 points by mtae ↗ HN
In the article, "Silicon Valley's Youth Problem" [1] the author mentions Meraki (now Cisco-Meraki) as an example of a startup working on advances in technology rather than the latest web app.

Do you know of other companies that fit the description?

Follow up: Are they (you?) hiring?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html

176 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] thread
inzim
Palantir and yes we are hiring.
adamnemecek
How do you justify to yourself working under a CEO who proposed making a smear campaign against Julian Assange?
chippy
Because it's part funded by the US Govt Intelligence agencies, and it's many clients are also in that sphere.
gojomo
A third party (HB Gary) — not Palantir and certainly not its CEO — suggested the 'offensive' campaign against Wikileaks.

Palantir — and specifically its CEO — immediately disclaimed involvement or interest in both that plan, or anything of its general type.

How do you justify to yourself slandering a company by claiming nearly the exact opposite of what happened?

mtae
That is not true. Palantir along with HBGary and Berico Technologies authored the report suggesting an 'offensive' campaign. [1]

They did apologize for this and as you say, disclaimed involvement or interest in such a plan. [2]

[1] https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...

gojomo
The slide deck provides no support for ~adamnemecek's claim that the Palantir CEO himself proposed the plan. And the CEO's unequivocal statements afterwards suggest that if there wasn't a bright-line inside Palantir against offensive operations before 2011, there has been since.

But also, the branding of the presentation does not reliably indicate the origin of the specifically offensive bullet points (most notably the "Potential Proactive Tactics" slide), nor whether the contents ever progressed past trial-balloon status.

In particular, coverage by Greenwald [1] (working from more email thread context for which I can't find a current online source) identifies HB Gary principal Aaron Barr as the verbatim source of some of the most-aggressive anti-Greenwald language.

So I can see that someone at Palantir was coordinating with the other entities and leading the document-prep. But they also cut-and-pasted material from the potential contract partners, including vague proposals outside Palantir's focus, that may never have been approved or presented.

I'd ascribe those bullets to Palantir itself if that deck was in fact ever presented to a client. We don't know if that's the case. If instead that text just bounced around as a discussion draft (including their more-aggro partners), but went nowhere, and was eventually categorically disavowed... then it's a stretch to say that the company or its leadership actually advocated those steps.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/

mtae
Have you read the entire Salon article you linked to?

"So apparently, if Palantir’s new version is to be believed, a 26-year-old engineer went off on his own and — without any supervision or direction — participated in the development of odious smear campaigns intended for two of the nation’s deepest-pocket organizations (Bank of America and the Chamber), potential clients which the emails repeatedly emphasize would be very lucrative. I’ll leave it to others to decide how credible that version is, but I will note that several facts undermine it: ..."

"The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice."

fapjacks
Nah. Palantir isn't a startup anymore. It's 100% Enterprise, and it "caught" that environment from its (enormous, bureaucratic, government) clients.
dgomez1092
I read this a few months ago. I agree with its interpretation over the current state of the entrepreneur culture amongst the youger cohort of emerging adults. I believe that I am working on a unique problem. One that involves being able to create a behavioral profile on an individual based off what their online behavior (i.e. their public timeline information) and connecting it to how the tend to spend. (categories or unusual trends) Not currently hiring, but open to talk to people interested in it.
gwulf
nvidia is doing amazing work, and many of their employees are in the bay area. 3072 cores for $999 - http://www.geforce.com/.../geforce-gtx.../specifications

The number of companies using this device to solve real problems is growing. Jeremy Howard just started an interesting one - http://www.enlitic.com

bshimmin
How is Nvidia a startup? They were founded in 1993 and have 8,800 employees and revenue over $4B.
higherpurpose
Nvidia has done great work with CUDA, but I wonder if AMD/ARM's HSA will make the work of the people using CUDA now much easier in the future - compute with a high-level language that you already know. That's got to be some kind of paradigm change there. I just hope they end up supporting Rust, too.
bjwbell
Compute on the GPU is unlikely to be unified in a meaningful way with the CPU in the near future. The GPU is a massive SIMD machine in contrast to the CPU.

Even if you use the same language for both, the style of code & algorithms are very different.

lmeyerov
Check out the AMD APU. We've had good experiences with recent Intel integrated as well due to embedded RAM. You are right though in that we write our code with data parallel and sometimes manycore SIMT in mind.
bjwbell
I worked on the Intel integrated embedded RAM a couple years ago (before release)! It was tough getting the h/w bugs out. Are you using it in Windows or Linux?
lmeyerov
Frustratingly, only when we do the client-only demos on our macbooks (iris). Our 'real' version is AWS or dedicated nvidia boxes, where we don't get it. OTOH, this sort of thing makes me excited that we can expect significant HW-driven speedups for our approach for years to come.
[dead] lmeyerov
Check out the AMD APU. We've had good experiences with recent Intel integrated as well due to embedded RAM. You are right though in that we write our code with data parallel and sometimes manycore SIMT in mind.
fivre
Yo.
mtae
Could you explain what advance in technology they're working on at Yo? (as opposed to "advances" in social media)
damnusername
I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined:

"For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken.

I am not going to name any specific startup, but I would like to ask the readers of Slashdot a question.

I know this is not how the world works, but I am still curious to know what kind of ideas would prosper if the primary aim of a startup was not to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. So, if your startup idea would be judged by the amount of good it would to mankind, what would it be?"

zeit_geist
In Berlin, there is the 'Social Impact Hub'

http://socialimpact.eu/

of which I am not affiliated with nor won't endorse here in any way. Sadly, in Germany at least, startups that aim for maximum positive impact and less so profit, are called 'social startups' which outside of Germany probably has a completely different connotation.

The news websites I usually frequent, are not very full of news; they are rather SV & VC company theory megaphones. Avoiding those websites sometimes leads one to people with a bit different entrepreneurial mindset.

This having said, would you work for such a company? And which compromises would you accept (on the ethics-, but also wage-scale)?

damnusername
If you are asking me, my answer is yes. I do not care very much for money. If I make enough so that I can eat and not have to live in complete misery, I am ok.

Ethics, that is harder. I guess if you look hard enough you can find problems with anything, but that's probably just the way the world is. If it does more good than harm, it's ok in my book.

IsaacL
A few ideas below. You mention startups trying "to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible" - I personally quite strongly believe that companies that focus on long-term profitability also happen to do a lot of good for mankind.

- cure for cancer

- cure for malaria

- cure for aging

- cheap fossil fuel extraction from low-quality deposits

- safer nuclear fission

- nuclear fusion

- lower-cost space travel

- space elevator

- space colonisation

- intelligence augmentation

- safe artificial intelligence

- desktop nanofactories

- nano-machines

XorNot
Of these, fission/fusion/fossil fuels are the only ones start ups might touch. And even there, it depends on a lot of physics turning out favorably.
quaunaut
I feel like at least in this thread, you're forcing a square peg in a round hole. It's asking for technically challenging startups- there are plenty of startups doing amazing, world-changing work that isn't technically challenging, but more socially challenging.
damnusername
You are probably correct. I just get a little frustrated sometimes. Sorry :)
quaunaut
No worries. It's easy to get disillusioned when the tools to surround yourself with better options aren't very well developed.
hoodoof
Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business?

Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company?

Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me.

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to change the world and "do something incredibly important for mankind", despite what the message might have become in later years. They all set out to do things they were interested in, pursuing technology for its own sake, as most people were back in the 1970's.

These days startups seem to need to feel that to justify their existence they need to be "changing the world" or "doing something important for mankind" or "giving back to the community". There's no need to justify the existence of a business. Do it for the cash, do it for fun, do it to scratch your sense of ambition, do it because you think it's a good idea, even if some pompous git stands on a high horse and looks to the sky and proclaims "this business is not changing mankind for the better, I am dismayed at the trivial nature of this endeavour, I deem it of little value".

damnusername
Well, that's ok, we all see things differently. And I guess, I don't have a problem with that. If that is what you want to do, go for it. But I would rather not be called some pompous git, I really think that is as far from what I am as possibly can be. Ok, I can be an asshole sometimes, but I try not to be.
hoodoof
It's pompous to judge the startups you see against some measure of "importance to mankind". Sadly many startups seem to judge themselves against the same standard and seem to have some sense of guilt if they aren't creating clean water for millions in the desert.

Perhaps you should rejoice in the fucking incredible explosion of energy and creativity and effort that the entire world is putting into trying to find uses for the Internet.

Just relax with your hippy ideals. Have fun.

damnusername
Trying to find uses for the internet? Oh well. If you think it is pompous to "judge the startups you see against some measure of "importance to mankind"" I think there is a problem, and you are probably part of it. I don't want to argue. Just go make lots of money and find some use for the internet and all is well.
matt4077
It's exactly because all these startups pretend to be "changing the world" that they become measured by these promises. And obviously most come up short.

But that doesn't need to be a bad thing. Paying lip service to "real" progress, especially when it concerns poverty/environment/democracy etc, may actually lead to actual progress down the road.

hoodoof
Where has this need come from for startups to feel illegitimate unless they are changing the world, giving back to the community, bringing world peace blah blah
pas
Well, if you start pitching this to everybody and their mom too, people will start to measure you up based on this.

At first it was pretty rational to present yourself in a way that gets you that 15 minutes. Now, I don't know, but HN is full of startups trying to revolutionize something instead of incrementally "disrupting" a set of incumbents.

chippy
Interesting. I don't think there is such an explicit need. I blame Google and their "Don't be Evil" tagline.

On the other hand, two other popular startup mantras "making products that people love" or "fixing a problem that people have" are quite easy to spin to be worthy and good.

araes
Take heart, and don't lose too much cynicism. People feel like they have to include all this "hippy shit" because of the exact reason this question was asked - "if only I could find a good company who's mission I believe in!"

Too many companies making incremental BS apps or IT pipeline tech that delivers cat pictures 0.1 ms faster. And both groups ("we're bringing Utopia to Earth", "we'd mug you for cash") are still doin it cause it looks like it makes money, or people advise them they need to say these things to make money, or it'll get chicks / dudes, whatever - no matter what they say out loud. "Silicon Valley" is pretty spot on in that regard.

It's just a pendelum swing. In a little while we'll be back to "greed is good" while we help people 'connect' with high school friends they never actually liked.

ZenoArrow
> Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business?

I don't give a shit about how world-changing a business is, but I do care that companies should be driven for more than just making money. Most companies aim to be profitable, but if that's the only goal then they're primed for corruption (even on a minor scale). Who cares so long as profits keep growing, dog eat dog, right?

There's a difference between 'Can I do something?' and 'Should I do something?', I see no harm in wanting companies that consider the latter.

auganov
Wasn't putting "a computer on every desk and in every home" Microsoft's mission?
volaski
This is because startups are not supposed to be working on these "seemingly big" problems. If a problem looks big and looks like it potentially has a huge market, every other large company in the field would be already working on this. As a startup, it is stupid to try to tackle something that obviously big. That's why most successful startups start out as something that doesn't look threatening. Of course, there are genuinely ridiculous ones like "uber for clowns", "kickstarter for baristas", "airbnb for prostitutes", etc. but I can guarantee if you look back in a decade, what actually changed the world will have been what you now consider ridiculous.
joelrunyon
I think a lot of startups are solving important problems that might not be obvious.

Any Musk startup - Tesla (electric vs. oil consumption), SpaceX (building space "colonies"), SolarCity (alternate energy), Paypal (payments).

You also have Uber (limiting cars on the street & oil consumption), AirBnb (better utilization of current buildings rather than building additional hotels). Even stuff like meerkat, etc could potentially be used in lieu of expensive meetings across country (further travel & ancillary costs).

I do agree that "change the world" is an overprevalent mission statement & too broad to be useful, but many are solving problems in a way that might not be obvious at first.

pavlov
If Meerkat is a productivity enhancer, then surely Yo is one as well - when people don't have to write text messages, it saves time for something else.
joelrunyon
Live streaming tech can certainly use push forwards.

Communication methods that people laugh at (AIM instant messaging) can be reappropriated into something useful (hipchat, slack) years later.

MichaelGG
AirBnB is more about exploiting cost differentials by avoiding regulation, isn't it? When i use it, and the people I know making money on it, are exactly taking advantage of this versus "better utilization". In fact, it's actually the opposite, at least in places like SF, because units that would otherwise house residents are now being used to house hotel guests.
joelrunyon
> AirBnB is more about exploiting cost differentials by avoiding regulation, isn't it?

That's a story one-side uses and in SF that can certainly be the case.

But, in some cases, I think people would rather stay in places that are less "developed" or taken over by hotels and stay at local BnBs.

monort
For the purpose of "better utilization" there is no difference between residents and tourists. Airbnb puts more people into the same space.
semi-extrinsic
Oh, FFS. Tesla has done a fine job at showing electric cars are feasible, for sure. But without real innovation and progress in emission-free baseload electricity generation (i.e. fission or fusion) it has negligible effect on reducing GHG emissions.
semi-extrinsic
Anyone care to explain why I get downvoted for stating an accepted fact? Take e.g. the IEA Blue Map scenario (50% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050), which depends heavily on electric vehicles. It also requires a 320% increase in nuclear power generation.
lmeyerov
See my post above about what we're trying yo achieve with Graphistry. Unlocking 20 years of infoviz research by letting anyone run on 1000 real-time GPUs helps move some of the most important sectors forward, eg, biology, security, and finance.
semi-extrinsic
What do you mean, real-time GPUs? And: what interconnect are you running on? How does your scaling look? Is this just for embarrasingly parallel stuff? Just curious; I'm running multi-GPUs myself for molecular dynamics.
lmeyerov
Imagine moving a slider in your viz to change a filter, physics setting, etc. and have cluster start to immediately feed back new results.

We started on building fast-start multitenant access to single GPUs and approaching peak on those (full-GPU barnes hut, 10X over Keshav's work). We're now focusing on distributing, and as we are more interested on running on many GPUs for scale out, focusing on communication avoiding. This makes a path to giving companies time on 1000 GPUs (think Pixar-levels of compute) rather than shipping small 8 GPU boxes with infiniband. Via elasticity and time sharing, the analyst hour pricing is unprecedented.

The titan guys run on 20,000 GPUs for similar astronomy codes, so doable. We're making it in more accessible, big-team, and analyst-focused ways. E.g., load, interactively analyze with smart defaults & streamlined common paths, export/report, and share.

semi-extrinsic
Ok, I see, so your approach makes sense for problems where throwing some GPUs at it gives you a solution in O(10) seconds? Sounds nice if you know you hav problems that fit into that category.

I found the Graphistry webpage lacking in answering the question "which specific problem does this solve?" Infoviz is too broad/vague.

lmeyerov
Yep, except think magnitudes bigger & faster. Right now, we're applying this to visual graph analytics problems in a few key industries. If you do infoviz, email us and I'm happy to share more!
pelhage
Value is ultimately a subjective term. Your perception of value is different than my perception of value, which is different than millions if not billions of other people's perception of value.

There are countless startups which were perceived as having little value only to be praised and hugely successful years later, yet nothing changed– only people's perceptions.

I guess my point is that before asking a question like that, we would have to define what you constitute as "doing anything of real value to mankind". And who's to say your definition of value is the right one anyway?

zeit_geist
A super incomplete list:

Databases:

- PipelineDB

- Snowflake (Computing)

Internet of Things / Communications:

- Helium

Robotics:

- Pneubotics

- Kuka, namely the research department

Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.:

- Kiva

- Anki

Computer-Vision / VR based:

- Jaunt

- Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department)

Agriculture:

- Blueriver http://www.bluerivert.com

(there are many more super-interesting companies in this area!)

Computing:

- Mill Computing; though quite dubious

- D-Wave

and than there is Microsoft Research working on super interesting stuff in programming languages, computer architecture (FPGAs).

Additionally, I believe really challenging problems will alwyas be coming from creative people, companies in that area; such as Pixar, architecture, and design (keywords, just to give a start: generative {design, art, ...}).

Hope this helps!

yen223
Is Kuka really a 'startup'? They are very well established among the industrial robotics scene.
IgorPartola
What a name!..
semi-extrinsic
Yes, they're obviously not Scandinavian (where the name means male genitalia, plural).

Funfact: in the northern parts of Norway, calling a policeman a "horses penis" is not illegal, as that is a somewhat common thing to call another person. Yes, this was tested in court in 2008.

yen223
I have a theory that if a word is less than 5 letters long, it probably means male genitalia in a foreign language.
semi-extrinsic
Interestingly enough, the number of <5 letter words in English is of the order of 10-15 000 [1], while the number of languages is 7000. Since most languages (I guess) have more than one word for male genitals, it is technically possible for all English <5 letter words to mean precisely that.

[1] http://norvig.com/mayzner.html

rune5
Funny coincidence, in some Spanish speaking countries kuka refers to the female genitalia. I have never heard kuka used in Swedish though. It does mean who in Finnish.
sspiff
I'd say D-wave is at least as dubious as Mill Computing.
zeit_geist
I agree but only due to my lack of knowledge in both areas -- and I only have second knowledge by attending a talk of a former D-Wave user and "programmer". That is, and contrasting Mill Computing, D-Wave has implementations in the field.
wsha
I'd put in Rigetti Computing in the same category as D-Wave (I'll let you decide how dubious it is).
higherpurpose
Oculus isn't a start-up anymore. It's a division of a $100 billion company.
bresc
Any hints on where I would be able to find more in the Agriculture category?
ninetax
A few off the top of my head:

  - Trimble
  - Granular
  - Farm Logs
  - The Climate Corporation
I work at Climate, and we work on some pretty cool science based projects to help farmers make better decisions.

We are hiring for a variety of positions you can check out here: http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobL...

If you (or anyone) is interested in a role on the remote sensing team (satellite/drone suff) or the Climatology team, you can reach out to me directly at skhalsa@climate.com

joezydeco
Climate is owned by Monsanto (market cap USD 56 billion).
philippnagel
According to basically every career page of every startup, every startup ;)
mtae
You're right, I should have been more specific in the title. Although I do think the description gives a better idea of the kind of startup I was looking for.
higherpurpose
Kryptnostic seems to be working on bringing usable fully homomorphic encryption to market. If they actually have something real there, that could be game-changing for cloud privacy:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/kryptnostic/

It's a shame Google isn't focused more on this, too. They should be having a Google X lab just for that, and invest at least as much as they currently invest in quantum computing. They have a lot to gain from it. Infringing on people's privacy is currently Google's biggest PR issue, and it's not going to go away. It will only become a bigger issue in the future. Without this, Google could perhaps return to being almost as liked as it used to be (there's still the issue of bullying others in the search engine, of course).

bostik
The first company that can crack the full operational cycle of homomorphic crypto will get a license to print money. As long as they don't squander the first-mover advantage, it will take quite a long time for the eventual second-mover to take over.

It's not just doing the computations in an untrusted cloud environment, although that's a big promise. I would say that an even bigger part will be the eventual ability to run computations on multi-party data sets. If you can provide a provably secure zero-knowledge service that still manages to compute results from multiple sources of opaque data, you will have every single financial institution and insurance giant banging on your door.

spiritplumber
We were working on autonomous stuff, but had to move onto simpler things because people weren't buying.

http://robots-everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/ (2007)

cipher0
This reflects your current status I presume? http://robots-everywhere.com/re_site/
spiritplumber
Yeah. Was trying to not link that coz I don't want to spamvertise.
cipher0
I see. Nitpicks: - The twitter icon on the top right points to @spiritplumber which has the name of a "Linda Camezon", a standard issue avatar and only 1 tweet which doesn't signify anything. - The text at the bottom of the website (in green) is unreadable given the background. - I couldn't find a careers section or the location of the company. - The videos are not professionally produced which gives the feel of an amateur effort not an established company.
kevinmobrien
We're using a combined data pool from multiple companies (i.e., customers) to predict security breaches before they occur, and provide a usable set of notifications rather than the long list of "possible alerts" that so many infosec apps drop on users' laps.
multiklout
Oscar Health in NYC is fixing the health insurance industry by building a tech and data driven insurance company from the ground up. It's an extremely complex, highly regulated industry that is in need of fixing. There are many startups that try to address pieces of the broken health care system, but Oscar is the only startup trying to solve it by doing it all. Engineering talent from Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Spotify, Apple, and more.: https://www.hioscar.com

The USA shouldn't have such a terrible health care system. Let's fix it. They are hiring all sorts of talent: https://www.hioscar.com/jobs

Fully cloud based, heavy aurora/mesos shop, kafka, hbase, redshift, mysql, python, flask, and an abundance of data analytics.

kzhahou
No doubt health insurance is hard problem, but it's not technically hard. OP asked for examples of company's pushing the limits of advanced technology, and Oscar is not one.
multiklout
It's not? Why do you feel that way?
kzhahou
It's not solving difficult problems in algorithms, systems engineering, hardware, ML, AI, etc.

Nothing wrong with that. But using today's technology in web and mobile to build a highly-usable customer experience, is not what OP meant by hard technical problems.

multiklout
I'd like to correct you on that, Oscar is not just a pretty design smacked on-top of an insurance company. It's the entire insurance stack redesigned from the ground up.

Algorithms and ML are all heavily used in analyzing member data to improve the lives of people.

We're engineering systems that give us real-time feedback on the insurance system as a whole, rather than the usual "30-60 days". Building a claims system from scratch is not an easy feat.

If you'd like to learn more about what we're doing i'd be happy to demo it for you.

Don't be fooled by our pretty and simplified website. It's all of the hard engineering efforts that you don't see that make the simplified experience possible. :)

kzhahou
Good luck! I hope you guys do well and deliver an awesome product :-)
fh973
Quobyte. We're building a fault-tolerant scalable distributed storage system for POSIX files, block and object storage. Lots of challenges around distributed systems, architecture and concurrency.

Development is in Berlin, Germany, and we're hiring.

http://www.quobyte.com

hoodoof
What's the revenue plan for a business like that?
fh973
Software licenses.
zerr
Any plans for considering remote workers?
jacques_chester
I work for Pivotal, which is working on a bunch of problems. We're a startup in that we were founded on investment capital (EMC and GE) and we're growing very fast.

Probably the biggest effort we're making is on Cloud Foundry, an opensource PaaS. Developing scalable production-grade systems for managing and running 12 factor apps is hard. Superficially it looks easy. Once you do anything at scale, it stops being easy, which is where we come in.

We also have teams working on Hadoop, GemFire, antirez is on Redis and Disque, the Spring team works for us and I've kinda lost track of the rest.

I work for Pivotal Labs, the agile development wing founded in 1989 from which the whole company takes its name.

We're hiring across all divisions. Email me: jchester@pivotal.io.

josh2600
Terminal.com is writing next generation virtualization. This includes live-migration without hypervisors (already in production) and live-resizing (also in production).

I think we'd like to think we're working on the ugly bits of infrastructure people don't care about.

This includes a distributed file system optimized for speed and storing machine state like Github, software defined networking for IP migration across metal, and other abstractions for making devops easier.

We're looking for people who want to think about hard computer science problems like managing stateful systems more intelligently (think auto-failure detection and recovery and less I/O intensive WAN replication strategies).

fsniper
This is really interesting. I have never heard of Terminal.com before and I'm now deeply interested. Do you hire remote or sponsor visa?
josh2600
Feel free to ping me on the email address in my profile. Be forewarned, we have a pretty serious technical interview for all candidates. I would say it's not easy to get a technical job at Terminal.
fsniper
Thank you. I pinged you ;)
andycjw
I just heard of Terminal.com right here, and trying it out for a spin, but it looks like the disk performance is really low, is this expected for lower tier or trial instances?
AndrewKemendo
Visidraft is working on making Augmented Reality actually deliver on the promises of presence on mobile devices at the consumer level and give 6 degrees of freedom around virtual objects in the real world context.

We have to make Large scale Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) easily computable across existing mobile devices to bring consumers hyper-precise (cm precision) geo-reference. This is actually super hard but also pretty awesome.

Yes we are hiring. Specifically CV experts.

[1]http://www.visidraft.com

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom

MKais
uBeam: Wireless electricity
capkutay
WebAction is working on some complex problems from a data management aspect (continuous queries on streaming, distributed in-memory data). From a front-end dev aspect, we're working on efficient rendering, modular and re-usable UI components and frameworks.
hglaser
Periscope (https://www.periscope.io/) is a data visualization tool that automatically and transparently syncs customer data into a huge multitenant data cache that runs queries ~ 150X faster than customers' own databases.

In the long run, it is a data tool that will eliminate the need for data warehouses.

It turns out the hard problem is not running the queries fast, but keeping the cache accurate and up-to-date. Our cache coherence service is probably the piece of code we're most proud of.

And, yes, we're hiring in SF. :) Reach out to me, harry@periscope.io

joelrunyon
For a second, I thought this was the streaming video platform that Twitter just bought.
clockwork_189
MetricWire (https://metricwire.com/).

We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they are occurring at present.

politegoose
can you expand on the technical r&d involved? Sounds like a pretty normal user interface & data sharing problem.
clockwork_189
In a way it is. So basically our platform allows users to create studies and structure the entire workflow of a trial(in a lot of these they are multi-staged so there are multiple steps that need to be designed). Now after this done, they can follow this workflow on our platform when they are conducting their trial in house. Now for parts where a doctor/researcher is not present(like drug/medication/treatment application), we have a mobile and web app that lets users answer questions/file serious adverse events if they face any, etc.

Now here is the cool part, the above is just the surface. Our team is really passionate about data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence and its applications in real world. So we do something called adaptive clinical trials where we run analytical models on the data that comes in and can forecast when the trajectory of a trial needs to be altered. This means you can catch any serious reactions to drugs, faster.

All in all, to answer the main question, our solution helps keep the costs of clinical trials low and reduces error rate. Being able to run these trials fast and keeping the costs low, allows not only for drugs to get out to the market faster, but also helps reduce the costs of drugs(due to the reduction of costs to process).

I also only explained the application of our tech in clinical trials, but our software is so flexible that it can be applied to any industry such as Consumer Insights, Depression analysis studies, etc.

Not sure if I adequately answered your question.