Instead of always looking for ideas, lets try and ask this:
What problem in your industry would be a successful startup if someone decided to solve it?
Logistics in India. If you solve this, Flipkart, Snapdeal and everyone else will buy your services. The reason for this varying state tax laws and shitty bureaucrat
Varying taxes issue is also something in the US. Wouldn't it be possible to solve it by creating a giant spreadsheet and just mapping it all out and then turning that into a service?
MTurk itself is not perfect and could use many improvements. Amazon has been absent from the project itself for a long time and provides minimal support and there is a lot of criticism over them changing their fee structure in a few weeks that may or may not lead to a decrease in tasks and/or pay. https://requester.mturk.com/pricing
How about advertising for small businesses? With the death of local newspapers and phone books, I'm not sure what effective ways to advertise are.
Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole. And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign.
This is a very interesting and real problem IMHO that SMBs are facing especially the mom and pop size shops.
I know Amazon tried to solve it but failed, I guess a few of those deal sites too are trying. Right now the only true contender i guess is something like graigslist?
The problem is, why would you build a startup for a business that can't afford to pay you for the value you create.
I have seen dozens of business start off this way and than eventually become enterprise only platforms or worse, programmatic advertising providers marking up CPMs by ridiculous ripoff margins.
That's the thing. Facebook and Google CAN work, but you hit the nail on the head: 'And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign'.
Thanks for the comment.
We feel that this problem is especially pertinent in the field of ecommerce - the folks who run small to midsized ecommerce stores on Shopify, Magento etc.
That's why we built Hits Analytics (http://hitsanalytics.com) specifically to tackle this problem. All you need to do is set the budget and pick a segment of product(s) you wish to promote, and we will automatically create and track Facebook ad campaigns for them (we do the "heavylifting" of optimizing the campaign behind the scenes based on the conversions we are tracking)
Knowing what certifications are required and optional for a given physical product and how much it is going to cost to get said product certified for sale in a given country (like FCC, CE, CCC, etc) and how much optional certifications cost (UL, ETL, etc).
Right now the process is pretty much that you (or someone you pay) have to do a ton of reading and become an expert in import/export and RF law for any given country which you wish to sell or distribute a physical product in. Then you have to get written quotes from a few vendors who you find that actually do said testing and generally the test houses are just test houses, they don't necessarily know the laws of each country they just know how to run the tests and issue you a report, which can take weeks, at best (or you just go to the local place and it costs what it costs). But you have to know what tests to ask for.
There should just be a simple one-stop online form that you fill in your product's information and get an instant quote back with each country in the world and what's required for your product along with instant quotes (price and lead time) for each of those certifications. Then, you can check box all the certifications you want right now (likely with discounts if you pick more than one, so a live-updating pricing matrix will be useful here, and a live world map highlighting countries which you can sell in) and pay via credit card for the certifications themselves. You get in return a mailing label to ship your prototype device to the testing company along with instructions on how the testing company uses your device so they can test it.
The actual testing can be contracted out to 3rd parties. This could just be a broker, but it would have to be a broker that knows the rules of the world and can express those rules in a straight forward way along with instant pricing. The prices don't need to be the best prices, they just need to be straight forward and competitive.
As an engineer & founder going through this process right now for our product https://www.pantelligent.com/ , I understand the pain acutely. (We'll be doing a blog post about our experiences; just waiting for the testing & certification to wrap up.) It feels a bit like incorporation lawyers before https://www.clerky.com/ existed -- something that should be a fairly standardized process for 10^2 dollars rather than a mostly custom process for 10^4 dollars.
However, my experience with the test house has been different: (1) they actually do provide the knowledge and experience with regards to your specific product and needs, (2) it takes a bunch of conversation and bi-directional education to get the manufacturer and the test house on the same page, and (3) it's still fairly unique to each product. For example, we had to build custom firmware and custom hardware just for the testing process. (Remember, this isn't dealing with an efficient marketplace; this is dealing with multi-country government regulations that are designed by big companies to erect barriers to entry for smaller competitors.) And the volumes and willingness-to-pay from small hardware startups are low, and the test houses make most of their money from bigger companies that do more product variations, more iterations, etc., which requires relationship building, rather than a one-stop online form.
So, while I'd really like your version to exist as a customer, unfortunately I don't believe it's a match for what most of the hardware testing market looks like.
In my experience, the hard part isn't contracting for testing to be done (so long as you know what tests you need, hence chicken and egg so providing what tests are usually needed is key), it's solving the problems which present themselves during testing. Just getting the right tests quoted for 80% of products out there can fit into a page or two of drop-downs and check boxes. Most things fit into some reasonable categories, but maybe another service this broker could provide would be that if you select something that could open a can of worms (like if you are making a radio transmitter in a non-ISM band) that it presents a big yellow warning with tons of info on the traps you're about to fall into.
Obviously the broker I describe can't know everything about your product and market segment and customers and said laws that would apply, but 80% of the time, there's nothing unique to a product from a regulatory point of view, someone already has a product which falls under very similar guidelines. For example, if you don't have a radio transmitter, the types of tests you have to do for FCC are pretty straight forward. And if you do have a radio transmitter in an ISM band, again the tests are pretty cookie cutter. And if you aren't AC mains connected and don't have any voltages above X VDC then UL low voltage testing is easy. Lots of products would fall into these categories.
It's when you venture out into niche market segments with radio transmitters that you really need to know what you're doing and not rely on a test house or broker (besides, your company is liable no matter how much info the test house or broker can provide you with).
Yeah, if you're making a cell phone or fancy internet of things radio device, this isn't a necessarily a service for you. But if you're taking an arduino-like prototype and turning it into a real product or making a new USB charger or a keyboard or computer input device or ..., then it could fit quite well I think.
Why are smaller boutiques family friendlier? I assumed the big all-inclusive resorts were more family friendly because you can just let the kids roam around in a contained environment.
I have stayed on many expensive hotels but that is not what we are looking for. We are looking for hotels that are family friendly so other families go there but without it being a family hotel.
We will pay whatever it cost but it's not so easy to find that the balance.
I like these sorts of ideas because they come down to trust. One thought I had was to begin curating lists of the best airbnb/homeaway listings to help people find places to stay if they are overwhelmed by the sheer number of available listings.
Any suggestions on family friendly places you've found?
LOL. I just paid for an all inclusive which came out to be an additional $25/day/person over the hotel room rate. The food was shit but the drinks were okay and unlimlite. And thus we found out that all-inclusive can mean different things.
I would say the Atlantis, Bahamas resort does a good all-inclusive. It has activities for kids and adults. The resort I stayed in Malta was clearly for young adults. The kid and I were practically chased out the pool once the sun set.
Exactly. Places like TripAdvisor simply isn't going to cut it. I have a friend who tried to tackle the problem a couple of times but still haven't succeeded.
My guess is that the solution is something simple, something that isn't algorithmic but rather a platform for travel agents who can listen to and understand the individual needs.
This is on the high end, but have you checked out the relatively new "destination clubs" like Inspirato or Exclusive Resorts? Family-friendly and extremely vetted, to the point of having on-site personnel in most locations. We're a member of Inspirato, and it's been great. Private residences and hotels.
Trustworthy "clued up" onsite engineer callouts.
One of the hard things to do is manage hardware that is in the field. Quite a few companies have awesomely great ideas but need in-field engineers to go and fix / replace / repair.
If something is going to be plugged into the wall, it will be badly fitted, upside down, unplugged by the night cleaners for her Hoover and when you are on the phone to the engineer he won't know his arse from his elbow.
Get good young people in a dozen countries - give them decent wages, half decent travel options and a training and upgrade path.
The above may have been tongue in cheek, alluding to the many startups seeking to classify software as malicious or benign. At the theoretical limit, it is difficult to say what a program will do. But that has not prevented many from selling products to that effect, some of which have been successful to a degree. If the comment was in fact serious, then the problem is "securing computation". Can you tell by looking at a program in its binary format whether it would do you harm to run it or not? Can you ensure that a given program has not been taken over by malicious input? How can you detect malicious activity by software? How do you create a baseline for "normal"?
It is a shameless plug for the non-existent startup that creates computers with ternary architectures for the benefit of all beings...and of course would render malicious binaries obsolete.
I am working on something where users will be given revenue from whatever I earn due to their efforts.
But problem I am facing is my users are from all over the world and every country has different taxation law. And there is no proper service to pay my users except paypal (whose credibility is getting worse day by day).
This is a question of scale. a few bucks for writing ehow articles or squidoo lenses, not many people motivated or interested, but $1000 week driving for Uber, and suddenly you have a business.
3 off-the-cuff: Ordering and Provisioning of large telecom product catalogs, converting BMC Remedy apps to modern stacks and reliable fast address validation. In IT telecom, where you dig, you find.
Advertizing -
Everyone is trying to get more and more information about the users without their permission by building free services or hacking it with cookies etc. So users can be better targeted with useless ads.
On the other side, its very hard to find good products online since the search results are full of SEO optimized junk.
If only there was a way to combine these two together. e.g Users could enter what they are looking for in an app and they only get very targeted advertising from business big or small inside that app. Matchmaking algorithms help make the initial connection. Think of a combination of Magic and Tinder.
I totally get what the op is saying. I get a ridiculous number of adds in my email. I never click on them. But I don't actually mind knowing about deals and product offerings. I wouldn't mind having an app where all these offerings are sorted intelligently in some easy to see manner.
OP is complaining about companies gathering data to better target you with relevant ads and in the same breath is complaining that his ads aren't targeted enough.
You can't have it both ways. I would say that a good portion of the ads I see are surprisingly relevant, but I might be biased because as a marketer, the people targeting me are the best marketers out there.
I get recruiter spam pitches for ad-tech companies trying to build what you're describing every single day. they all go out of business within a year. I don't think anybody actually wants this product. I think it just sounds good (to VC's anyway) on paper.
Some of them are lucky enough to get acquired by bigger ad-tech companies; I was interviewed at one of those and it was funny because they looked like they were ramping up in revenue (over 30% growth year over year) and then bam acquired. Might as well have gone out of business since only the few founders got equity.
1. Build a bitcoin based, secure methodology for money transfer between individual/institutional NGO donors and end-users (cutting out a lot of NGO middle men and/or Western Union style folks)
2. Build a simple, deployable, open source system for low income countries where SMS is still used to find information on stuff like farmers wanting to know prices at new markets.
3. Micro-services to help young NGOs get setup.
-Find individual/institutional donors which match the NGOs theme
-Help with regulatory process
-Help with introductions to donors
-Write applications
-Admin tasks - website, brochures etc
4. Build a secure, Open Source platform for low-income country government management systems. (With modules, for example: Need a simple health management system? - here ya go...need a simple method of managing education results? - here ya...need a simple method of managing voter registration? - here ya go etc etc)
5. Build a system, ranking etc for measuring digital security risk (on a close to real time basis) on a country-by-country basis. The sort of thing already used on a physical basis for stuff like kidnap and terrorism...So I could travel to XYZ country and see that last week there ABC number of censorship incidents, ABC number of reporting fishing attempts using 123 exploits etc. This is only the first stage, the REALLY hard part is then linking it to tools, behaviour change and processes to mitigate these risks...(We are trying to hack together something a little in a very very simple version in our app, Umbrella but dam is it hard.)...
6. Make PGP so simple my grandma can do it (HERE, TAKE MY MONEY!!! :)
While I appreciate your ideas the point with this thread was to find problems not come up with solutions. Maybe I am reading them wrong but they sound like (great) ideas, but are they actual problems?
For instance do my grandma really care about cryptography?
By turning it around and ask for the problems I am hoping for a more open ended list where the solutions aren't given already.
or just browse complaint sites. There is a company in New Jersey that browses amazon reviews for feature requests and creates those updated products in china and sells them on amazon. They do hundreds of millions a year in sales.
See my comment below... Here is a quote from the fast company article about them..
"He has an entire team of people who read reviews on Amazon, looking for moments when people say, "I wish this speaker were rechargeable." Pikarski then makes a rechargeable version. "
That is really fascinating. The guy seems to understanding marketing to a level to not try and place his products in retail shelves as people tend to judge based on looks rather than features.
I did spend one Sunday afternoon reading up reviews on apple app store. while there were some pretty interesting ideas, I saw one huge issue - the search on app store is unreliable. One, there could be an app implementing the said "idea" or "feature" but somehow not readily visible. Second, no way to really dig and learn about your competitors. Third, the same search might hurt the app chances.
Glad someone could make that work. I tried it with RentACoder a few years ago (scanning the "need a coder" lists for product ideas), but the requests had very little in common besides only wanting to pay bargain-basement prices.
What were the issues you encountered? I know a few people who developed side projects by reading through oDesk and elance jobs. I read them time to time to stimulate brain to come up some relevant features to my own projects.
Definitely you will need to have patience to find ones that catch your fancy. Also no one job going to give you idea, but when you read a lot of them, you start to see patterns and might develop linkage that will make interest project for you.
It was over 5 years ago. There really weren't any issues. I just didn't see any common threads that were interesting. Could very well be the type of projects I looked at.
BUT the ideas are easy. The problem is market testing each idea to see what works.
ProductHunt is going in the right direction - but unfortunately the products are already built with little or no market testing so I predict a high failure rate.
KickStarter is a nice way to see if there is some market demand, but also a high failure rate (55%) by people who lack the experience to execute.
We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power generation). Each company has its own supplier registration process for procurement, usually it involves entering our company's basic financial info, customer and project references list, etc. into some kind of custom Java web application.
There should be just one place that asks us to enter our DUNS number, our tax id, upload our W8BEN form, our ISO certificate, our company contacts, our references, our company financials, etc. and then mass-submit to all supplier registration forms within the industries we want to target.
This is a really simple business problem with a clear technical solution. Honestly you could just solve it by:
- WuFoo form to collect the company's information
- Excel spreadsheet to list the vendor registration portal URLs for each company, with different industries in different tabs
- Human labor to go through and find the data from WuFoo and plug it into each supplier registration webapp.
You could make money on a pay-per-registration model. All that would be required would be a simple portal for users to see the progress of each supplier registration application. It's basically CRUD.
Maybe some ambitious company would try to innovate by building the One supplier portal to rule them all, but for now, this is an opportunity for a quick win & a business that could be run for cash.
I'll second this, before becoming a programmer I was a mechanical engineer in piping, we have tons of inefficiencies like this still. Partly it's that the people who run these industries are comfortable to keep using fax and e-mail, but another issue is that companies often don't have access to good technical knowledge to pick the right tool or develop better ones. Huge opportunity here.
I've looked into this issue specifically for piping, as it happens. From my perspective one of the issues with 'solving' this is basically: https://xkcd.com/927/
At the place I worked we had 3 different supplier databases, each one having been introduced to replace the last, which was never fully phased out.
Definitely an issue! We try half baked things and they just stick around. On the other end of the spectrum, once something works, it's kept around forever. It's interesting, this industry seems ripe for disruption, but it hasn't happened yet. I think maybe because we think any tool will do, when in reality we need a 10X tool like any other industry. Also, your customers are people who are far less computer savvy than other groups, so UI/UX issues are paramount.
Sounds interesting. I'm not seeing who the customer would be? How would you charge for it? (Feel free to email me if you want to discuss offline in more detail)
The customer is a company, Acme, that manufactures a "widget" for power plants.
Imagine there's another company, let's call it Texas State Power Construction (TSPC), that needs a new widget to replace the old one in the plant. The engineer at the TSPC plant sends a request to the procurement manager asking for a new widget. The procurement manager then searches his or her (more often her) Supplier database for registered companies that make widgets. Procurement manager doesn't contact Acme because Acme never registered with TSPC. Acme loses out on this business opportunity.
Suppliers get in the db by registering on the enterprise-y, most likely Java, "Supplier Registration" portal linked to on the website.
Registration is a pain in the neck mostly because it's boring and nobody wants to do it. I would love to do it for every power company in the USA, but it's boring. I guess I could try to hire an employee to do it for me at $15 an hour but I would rather just pay for results.
(My company is an "Acme". We make a "widget". We would LOVE to be in the database of every "TSPC" and get more sales inquiries.
I spend $500/month on adwords and get maybe 2 leads, and they're of dubious quality. $250/lead sound too high? The last trade show I went to cost $1600 in expenses alone and I generated only two good leads. That's $800/lead.)
I have experience of doing that but for the water engineering industry. I'd assume there was some similarities in the processes. Would you be interested in a trial to see what value this generates for you?
That's the important question for B2B companies, how long is the sales effort to close a deal on something like this? How will anyone discover this and buy it?
I can authorize $400/month for such a service today and could easily sign a letter of intent if the prices were reasonable and you only billed me after successful registrations (after initial registration is fine too; sometimes they request additional information).
@mdolon I sent an email with some of my thoughts mapped out in greater detail. Thanks for asking.
@gargarplex. I'd also love to learn more about this problem. My partner has worked extensively in securing deals with Fortune 500 companies previously. Shoot me an email henrythe9th at gmail. Thanks.
Are you looking for a way to automate the registration process on the web? Not sure if that's what you are looking for, if so I have a product that can be customized to do exactly that, can you send me a quick email in my profile?
What? A tool that helps discover inefficiencies in Hive/Presto/Dremel query/pipeline/scripts.
Why?
It is so much easier to just add new machines to your cluster, than to optimize your code and fix inefficiencies. But the latter option typically results in millions of $$$s in savings.
For EU mainly, US had some alternatives like these, but they seemed to be shut down due to legal issues.
A place where I, or anyone trying to contact me, can send snail mail to. These then get scanned and forwarded to mail mailbox and/or dropbox and/or stored online with an OCR PDF.
This would allow me to
a) send my bills, invoices there
b) able to move house more easily without having to keep track of address changes.
Real estate title/escrow API for California (then USA, then world)
Currently most title/escrow companies are local brick and mortar shops, largely due to slight regional differences in how the process works and who pays what (these differences are mostly historical artifacts that we don't want to mess with) [0].
At Open Listings [1] we're building the slickest real estate offer/transaction platform in the industry but it involves a fair amount of offline coordination with other agents, inspectors, banks, and title/escrow companies. Essentially, we're building an API on top of a lot of human interactions and an interface for our clients and agents to drive that API. We'd love to be able to plug into a preferred escrow service to do the title transfer and replace one slow, expensive interaction with an API call.
No doubt the entire title insurance industry could likely be turned over though the laws would make this very difficult.
I noticed that OpenListings is looking to try to disrupt on the buy side of real estate transactions. Curious why you wouldn't try to do something on the sell side where I think there is massive room to change things and it's pretty darn formulaic.
My guess is that they started with buyers because buyers typically are less wedded to an agent. Most agents start out on the buy side because significant numbers of buyers have no loyalties, and because buyers "pay nothing" for the services of an agent (as opposed to the sellers, who pay 5-6%), so customer acquisition is easier. (Of course, buyers do end up paying, it is just wrapped into a 30 year monthly payment.)
All this only applies to the US market,not sure about international RE. Source: I worked for a brokerage for years.
Regarding buyers: we heard a lot of frustration from savvy buyers... people either didn't see the point of their Redfin agent or wanted a simple way to go direct with the seller. The idea of making it less expensive to become a homeowner also really resonated with us.
Id love for title/escrow companies to go away. They charge a few thousand dollars and provide very little in return. The problem is, the seller picks the title company, but the buyer pays.
I have a theory that there are a lot of interesting and successful businesses that could be build on insights that people have gathered over the years.
For example, I would love to talk to a series of very experienced (read older people) people working in various industries what they consider the biggest problems they have to deal with. People who are on the verge of retiring.
This is why I asked the question this way, so far some really good problems to tackle.
Ever log every single sensor output (as well as 200 more) every 50ms of a vechile over an 18 hour road test while recording audio and thermal video from 2 dozen different points? How about on fleet of 40 vehicles daily, for 2 months, in the middle of Alberta or Death Valley.
Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour? And can keep up with the expected geometric growth? (I've got a decent solution for this actually currently needs to be vetted). (Also security has to provided on a per-channel basis, not per-test, T1/T2 companies need access to their test data, but not global data).
Contact me. I'm a member of the ASAM standards committee that recently met to discuss how basically every auto-producer and tier 1 has NO CLUE how do implement this. And easily 2 dozen companies are just waiting to throw money at this problem.
Currently one doesn't exist, and the solutions that do exist manage paths to raw data blobs, not actual records/data points.
I couldn't see a way to contact you. I was about to email you some ideas but looking at your angel.co page it seems like you'd already know how to do this?
I know the technical side/requirements, and the people. My business skills and design are lacking. Also a whole front end for interfacing/formating/report generation needs to be created.
So I'm listening to this Radiolab episode [0] about drones with cameras that can solve crime (traffic and other societal ills) and it occurs to me that with everyone soon to be walking around with DSLR-quality smartphones, couldn't we triangulate all this video/ audio data and provide substantially better resolution to daily life? Think of it as continuous Meerkat/ Periscope localized around an event in four dimensions.
I was involved in a project conceptualizing real-time video streams from smartphones and synchronizing, adjusting/correcting quality before having it be presentable... in real-time!
Think of a soccer stadium, with fans taking "video" of the game. All the feeds would be gathered, synchronized, quality adjusted and put online for anyone to view, from any angle.
CloudFlare has an approach that may scale to the levels you are looking for; rather than storing the logs, they analyze and rollup the expected responses in realtime, and store additional detail for items that appear anomalous. John Graham-Cumming performed a talk on this topic earlier this month at dotScale:
If you have no working model of what is/is not correct how do you determine anomalous responses?
To Expand:
This method is already used in data logging compression (slightly) where one stores channel delta's/time stamps. Reconstructing the value ad-hoc when necessary. This is a good way to compress non-violalitle datasets.
I've actually watched the talk already. And while it seems to apply the problem is it doesn't. Every data point is important, because the real problem is comparing different tests, with time between tests to attempt to get an idea of how hardware ages. Or to test componenet swaping, where a known test is performed on several different items and in post processing the results are compared. To use the suggest method your storage solution requires knowledge of whats being stored.
:.:.:
The goal is to unify these storage solutions, and present a unified front end for querying/report generation.
> a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data
Could you expand a little more on what sort of features you would like to see in a solution? I have some relevant experience and I could see myself taking a stab at this problem
>Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour?
Is this data logging the changes or the states of your sensors? If it's the states, then I am guessing most of this is highly compressible. If it is actually 100TB of changes logged, then that's a pretty difficult problem.
I could go on for hours about all of this, but long story short, I'm the head of product of a company that builds a data system designed exactly to handle this kind of scenarios (we provide data collection services to Pioneer to mention one).
Called into the company, and I suggest looking into an operator. If you press 0, you just keep repeating the same menu. Submitted an information request.
Having looked at just the raw data from OBDII on a few vehicles; data format standardization there is none. Not between car makes, models, years or versions (ie 2014 Suzuki Swift vs 2014 Suzuki Swift S) - this would require either months (or years) of reverse-engineering, or unfettered access to auto maker's internal documentation (for some I know it's minimal). (Likely require partnership with the auto industry to avoid litigation.)
If you pulled that together and offered it in a usable format.. Wow.
If you want to know how to capture and handle automotive test data, look into process automation systems for manufacturing industry. I used to work at petrochemical facilities in 90s as process control engineer, we not only received data from Thousands of I/O inputs (for example, from temperature, flow, pressure, vibration, rpm sensors) every second to every tenth of a second, but we processed them, made decision and sent out I/O signals to controllers (for example, flow control valves). We used combination of programmable logic controllers and distributed control systems.
Talk to companies like Honeywell (I believe they do something similar to what you are trying to do for aviation industry), ABB, Foxboro, etc. These guys have been doing this since 80s.
They do measurement, and live analysis. If there a method of storing and collating data after the fact they haven't announced it to the industry at large.
Having dealt with health problems this past year, I would love to see somebody write something that simplifies the voodoo going on between health care providers and insurance companies. Even though they both have online portals these days, trying to reconcile and make sense of the two systems is infuriating.
I was diagnosed with a melanoma a couple of years ago.
Luckily early stage but had to deal with several hospitals and dermatologists who just doesn't talk with each other, add to that the complexity of insurance-agencies and the fact that I have more than a thousand of those little bastards and you begin to see the potential for mistakes and the stress that might incur on a lot of people.
Whoever could solve this would be someone I would pay money.
Can you go into more detail about the pain points? I imagine there are lots of readers who have been blessed to not have major medical issues on their own insurance yet and might not be familiar with the process. I know that when we had our last baby we received mountains of paperwork in the mail, but since my wife used to work as a claims adjuster she dealt with all of the issues. (We ended up getting overbilled by $3k.)
Well the biggest problem seems to be that the billing from the health provider doesn't sync up with insurance. So you'll get a bill like "you owe $1,295" but there's absolutely no way to reconcile this with the services you received. You can call your provider and they'll try to provide you with a detailed invoice (maybe if you're lucky). If you argue long enough with both then eventually you might get somebody to make some type of adjustment but even still it's random. At the end of the day you might wind up paying $500 just because you figure that's as good as it's going to get!
This is probably a difficult problem to solve, but one thing that might be possible is just a way to look up the bill and translate the insurance "codes" that are meaningless to normal people and require looking up in various medical or insurance sites. Like code 123456 means you had your blood drawn. Or code 67890 means they ran some test, etc. It takes forever to look this stuff up.
The codes aren’t meaningless or arbitrary. Think about how many different types of “office visits” there are. Forget about any services performed DURING the office visit, think about just the office visit itself. Walking into a room, talking with a medical professional, and leaving. It could be a 10 minute followup visit. You could be a new patient and they are establishing your history for their record, maybe that’s a 45 minute visit. You could be walking in to get a new prescription written. You could be talking to doctor to get a second opinion. You get the idea. My point is that these have varying levels of time spent and doctor-involvement, in which they would have different charges for. A 5 minute visit shouldn’t cost the same amount as a 60 minute visit, right? Each one has their own code, and even modifier codes on top of them (to indicate things like ‘left’ or ‘right’, when a particular procedure is performed on multiple areas) The codes allow them to record the service and bill as accurately as possible. Without them, instead of seeing a bunch of codes and wondering how that equals a thousand bucks, you would get a piece of paper that said “services performed: medical stuff” and a bill for a thousand bucks instead.
@waldoh can't reply to you - you've been hellbanned. anyway, the codes are obviously not meaningless in general. As I wrote, they are meaningless to "normal people" meaning the patients. Having an app that just showed you the line items, with the explanation next to it would be a huge improvement.
You're also talking about going to see the Dr for a cold or something. When you've had a major surgery and months of follow-up procedures with pages and pages of line items on your bill, hundreds of codes, disputes with things you think you have already paid, bills that don't match up with what insurance says, etc... then you'll understand what I'm talking about.
Hey, friend just sent me a link to your comment. So two things: 1. we (Prime) are still in beta but happy to extend an invite your way if it helps—it'd allow you to connect all your patient portals and have the data synced in one place; 2. maybe more relevant to OP and HN at large, we released a new tool this morning called Patient Portal Finder: http://useprime.com/blog/2015/06/29/introducing-the-patient-... (sounds like you probably don't need this but just in case)
I'll stick around the comments too but email me tyler@useprime.com anytime if I can help with this madness. Been through it way too many times myself.
Related to this, I was listening to an NPR program recently that tackled the question: If your pet's doctor can give you a list of pricing options before you decide on treatment, why can't your own doctor do that for you?
The answer was that our doctors are disconnected from the costs of treatment because they can't be expected to know every possible charge for every different insurance plan (what the patient would have to pay for procedures, medicine, support staff [anesthesiologists who are out of network, for example], devices [pacemakers, wrist splints, artificial hips, etc.], lab fees, etc.). So why not something that can bring that information to them?
This would be a benefit not just to consumers but to insurance companies as well, and that's where the money would be.
Directionally correct but slightly off. Vets don't memorize all that either; they also use EMRs.
The difference is in insurance:
1. You pay directly for your pet's care. Your vet gets the money. No in-between to obscurify the money.
2. You pay insurance for your own care, and your doctor bills your insurance. Your doctor's EMR might know the insurance cost, but that cost can still change. And there are lots of middlemen in billing processing in healthcare, so it's not an accurate representation of reimbursement anyway.
There are quite a few startups trying to remedy this in various ways. Most of them focus on data transparency; they try to aggregate and publicly list all the direct pay costs for different doctors. The problem with that remains the same: most people don't have the precedent in their head of paying for healthcare, so they don't want to pay direct.
Not impossible to fix. Someone certainly will. Probably orthogonally, like how Slack is unbundling email. But the tech barrier is small compared to the social barrier.
Would be pretty sweet if someone was able to map out all insurance costs though, even to 90% consistency. Hooo boy that would be sweet.
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[ 536 ms ] story [ 802 ms ] threadI know I would, thats why I asked the question that way :)
Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole. And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign.
https://youtu.be/LQPxuS9Ffwo?t=57s
I know Amazon tried to solve it but failed, I guess a few of those deal sites too are trying. Right now the only true contender i guess is something like graigslist?
I have seen dozens of business start off this way and than eventually become enterprise only platforms or worse, programmatic advertising providers marking up CPMs by ridiculous ripoff margins.
(see: boost media, dispop, etc...)
That's why we built Hits Analytics (http://hitsanalytics.com) specifically to tackle this problem. All you need to do is set the budget and pick a segment of product(s) you wish to promote, and we will automatically create and track Facebook ad campaigns for them (we do the "heavylifting" of optimizing the campaign behind the scenes based on the conversions we are tracking)
Right now the process is pretty much that you (or someone you pay) have to do a ton of reading and become an expert in import/export and RF law for any given country which you wish to sell or distribute a physical product in. Then you have to get written quotes from a few vendors who you find that actually do said testing and generally the test houses are just test houses, they don't necessarily know the laws of each country they just know how to run the tests and issue you a report, which can take weeks, at best (or you just go to the local place and it costs what it costs). But you have to know what tests to ask for.
There should just be a simple one-stop online form that you fill in your product's information and get an instant quote back with each country in the world and what's required for your product along with instant quotes (price and lead time) for each of those certifications. Then, you can check box all the certifications you want right now (likely with discounts if you pick more than one, so a live-updating pricing matrix will be useful here, and a live world map highlighting countries which you can sell in) and pay via credit card for the certifications themselves. You get in return a mailing label to ship your prototype device to the testing company along with instructions on how the testing company uses your device so they can test it.
The actual testing can be contracted out to 3rd parties. This could just be a broker, but it would have to be a broker that knows the rules of the world and can express those rules in a straight forward way along with instant pricing. The prices don't need to be the best prices, they just need to be straight forward and competitive.
However, my experience with the test house has been different: (1) they actually do provide the knowledge and experience with regards to your specific product and needs, (2) it takes a bunch of conversation and bi-directional education to get the manufacturer and the test house on the same page, and (3) it's still fairly unique to each product. For example, we had to build custom firmware and custom hardware just for the testing process. (Remember, this isn't dealing with an efficient marketplace; this is dealing with multi-country government regulations that are designed by big companies to erect barriers to entry for smaller competitors.) And the volumes and willingness-to-pay from small hardware startups are low, and the test houses make most of their money from bigger companies that do more product variations, more iterations, etc., which requires relationship building, rather than a one-stop online form.
So, while I'd really like your version to exist as a customer, unfortunately I don't believe it's a match for what most of the hardware testing market looks like.
Obviously the broker I describe can't know everything about your product and market segment and customers and said laws that would apply, but 80% of the time, there's nothing unique to a product from a regulatory point of view, someone already has a product which falls under very similar guidelines. For example, if you don't have a radio transmitter, the types of tests you have to do for FCC are pretty straight forward. And if you do have a radio transmitter in an ISM band, again the tests are pretty cookie cutter. And if you aren't AC mains connected and don't have any voltages above X VDC then UL low voltage testing is easy. Lots of products would fall into these categories.
It's when you venture out into niche market segments with radio transmitters that you really need to know what you're doing and not rely on a test house or broker (besides, your company is liable no matter how much info the test house or broker can provide you with).
Yeah, if you're making a cell phone or fancy internet of things radio device, this isn't a necessarily a service for you. But if you're taking an arduino-like prototype and turning it into a real product or making a new USB charger or a keyboard or computer input device or ..., then it could fit quite well I think.
Finding trustworthy travel destinations for families that don't like all inclusive but prefer smaller boutique hotels that are family friendly.
Despite all the online travel sites that are out there its still often hit and miss how great the places we go are.
We are looking for those that are but without the tediousness of the all inclusive crowd.
I have stayed on many expensive hotels but that is not what we are looking for. We are looking for hotels that are family friendly so other families go there but without it being a family hotel.
We will pay whatever it cost but it's not so easy to find that the balance.
Any suggestions on family friendly places you've found?
I would say the Atlantis, Bahamas resort does a good all-inclusive. It has activities for kids and adults. The resort I stayed in Malta was clearly for young adults. The kid and I were practically chased out the pool once the sun set.
sure theres plenty of hotel or airfare or rental or 'town of xyz events calendar' sites but no one solving the entire problem.
I've yet to find an end to end trip planning site, especially one that is family oriented.
My guess is that the solution is something simple, something that isn't algorithmic but rather a platform for travel agents who can listen to and understand the individual needs.
If something is going to be plugged into the wall, it will be badly fitted, upside down, unplugged by the night cleaners for her Hoover and when you are on the phone to the engineer he won't know his arse from his elbow.
Get good young people in a dozen countries - give them decent wages, half decent travel options and a training and upgrade path.
But problem I am facing is my users are from all over the world and every country has different taxation law. And there is no proper service to pay my users except paypal (whose credibility is getting worse day by day).
Large catalog where every screw is of different shape and requires a different tool to be put into a different wall in a different town so to speak.
Not affiliated with them, but was a happy customer when I worked at a real estate company recently.
On the other side, its very hard to find good products online since the search results are full of SEO optimized junk.
If only there was a way to combine these two together. e.g Users could enter what they are looking for in an app and they only get very targeted advertising from business big or small inside that app. Matchmaking algorithms help make the initial connection. Think of a combination of Magic and Tinder.
That made me laugh.
> "SEO optimized junk" This did too.
>"only get very targeted advertising from business big or small"
Wait, did I misunderstand your first points?
Seriously, is this post a joke or were you serious? I cannot tell.
You can't have it both ways. I would say that a good portion of the ads I see are surprisingly relevant, but I might be biased because as a marketer, the people targeting me are the best marketers out there.
I think that's the actual business model for these companies. there's a reason I don't accept those pitches.
1. Build a bitcoin based, secure methodology for money transfer between individual/institutional NGO donors and end-users (cutting out a lot of NGO middle men and/or Western Union style folks)
2. Build a simple, deployable, open source system for low income countries where SMS is still used to find information on stuff like farmers wanting to know prices at new markets.
3. Micro-services to help young NGOs get setup. -Find individual/institutional donors which match the NGOs theme -Help with regulatory process -Help with introductions to donors -Write applications -Admin tasks - website, brochures etc
4. Build a secure, Open Source platform for low-income country government management systems. (With modules, for example: Need a simple health management system? - here ya go...need a simple method of managing education results? - here ya...need a simple method of managing voter registration? - here ya go etc etc)
5. Build a system, ranking etc for measuring digital security risk (on a close to real time basis) on a country-by-country basis. The sort of thing already used on a physical basis for stuff like kidnap and terrorism...So I could travel to XYZ country and see that last week there ABC number of censorship incidents, ABC number of reporting fishing attempts using 123 exploits etc. This is only the first stage, the REALLY hard part is then linking it to tools, behaviour change and processes to mitigate these risks...(We are trying to hack together something a little in a very very simple version in our app, Umbrella but dam is it hard.)...
6. Make PGP so simple my grandma can do it (HERE, TAKE MY MONEY!!! :)
For instance do my grandma really care about cryptography?
By turning it around and ask for the problems I am hoping for a more open ended list where the solutions aren't given already.
"He has an entire team of people who read reviews on Amazon, looking for moments when people say, "I wish this speaker were rechargeable." Pikarski then makes a rechargeable version. "
http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon...
Here is a blogpost I wrote about them. http://www.davidmelamed.com/2013/11/22/what-customers-really...
Here is a Fast Company feature about them http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon...
I did spend one Sunday afternoon reading up reviews on apple app store. while there were some pretty interesting ideas, I saw one huge issue - the search on app store is unreliable. One, there could be an app implementing the said "idea" or "feature" but somehow not readily visible. Second, no way to really dig and learn about your competitors. Third, the same search might hurt the app chances.
Definitely you will need to have patience to find ones that catch your fancy. Also no one job going to give you idea, but when you read a lot of them, you start to see patterns and might develop linkage that will make interest project for you.
ProductHunt is going in the right direction - but unfortunately the products are already built with little or no market testing so I predict a high failure rate.
KickStarter is a nice way to see if there is some market demand, but also a high failure rate (55%) by people who lack the experience to execute.
We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power generation). Each company has its own supplier registration process for procurement, usually it involves entering our company's basic financial info, customer and project references list, etc. into some kind of custom Java web application.
There should be just one place that asks us to enter our DUNS number, our tax id, upload our W8BEN form, our ISO certificate, our company contacts, our references, our company financials, etc. and then mass-submit to all supplier registration forms within the industries we want to target.
This is a really simple business problem with a clear technical solution. Honestly you could just solve it by:
- WuFoo form to collect the company's information
- Excel spreadsheet to list the vendor registration portal URLs for each company, with different industries in different tabs
- Human labor to go through and find the data from WuFoo and plug it into each supplier registration webapp.
You could make money on a pay-per-registration model. All that would be required would be a simple portal for users to see the progress of each supplier registration application. It's basically CRUD.
Maybe some ambitious company would try to innovate by building the One supplier portal to rule them all, but for now, this is an opportunity for a quick win & a business that could be run for cash.
At the place I worked we had 3 different supplier databases, each one having been introduced to replace the last, which was never fully phased out.
Imagine there's another company, let's call it Texas State Power Construction (TSPC), that needs a new widget to replace the old one in the plant. The engineer at the TSPC plant sends a request to the procurement manager asking for a new widget. The procurement manager then searches his or her (more often her) Supplier database for registered companies that make widgets. Procurement manager doesn't contact Acme because Acme never registered with TSPC. Acme loses out on this business opportunity.
Suppliers get in the db by registering on the enterprise-y, most likely Java, "Supplier Registration" portal linked to on the website.
Registration is a pain in the neck mostly because it's boring and nobody wants to do it. I would love to do it for every power company in the USA, but it's boring. I guess I could try to hire an employee to do it for me at $15 an hour but I would rather just pay for results.
(My company is an "Acme". We make a "widget". We would LOVE to be in the database of every "TSPC" and get more sales inquiries.
I spend $500/month on adwords and get maybe 2 leads, and they're of dubious quality. $250/lead sound too high? The last trade show I went to cost $1600 in expenses alone and I generated only two good leads. That's $800/lead.)
@mdolon I sent an email with some of my thoughts mapped out in greater detail. Thanks for asking.
What? A tool that helps discover inefficiencies in Hive/Presto/Dremel query/pipeline/scripts.
Why? It is so much easier to just add new machines to your cluster, than to optimize your code and fix inefficiencies. But the latter option typically results in millions of $$$s in savings.
A place where I, or anyone trying to contact me, can send snail mail to. These then get scanned and forwarded to mail mailbox and/or dropbox and/or stored online with an OCR PDF.
This would allow me to a) send my bills, invoices there b) able to move house more easily without having to keep track of address changes.
This has caused during that snailmail delivery will be only 1-2 times a week, when it now is every workingday.
Currently most title/escrow companies are local brick and mortar shops, largely due to slight regional differences in how the process works and who pays what (these differences are mostly historical artifacts that we don't want to mess with) [0].
At Open Listings [1] we're building the slickest real estate offer/transaction platform in the industry but it involves a fair amount of offline coordination with other agents, inspectors, banks, and title/escrow companies. Essentially, we're building an API on top of a lot of human interactions and an interface for our clients and agents to drive that API. We'd love to be able to plug into a preferred escrow service to do the title transfer and replace one slow, expensive interaction with an API call.
[0]: http://www.firstam.com/assets/title/ca/respa-reform-tools/wh... [1]: https://www.openlistings.co/
I noticed that OpenListings is looking to try to disrupt on the buy side of real estate transactions. Curious why you wouldn't try to do something on the sell side where I think there is massive room to change things and it's pretty darn formulaic.
All this only applies to the US market,not sure about international RE. Source: I worked for a brokerage for years.
Regarding buyers: we heard a lot of frustration from savvy buyers... people either didn't see the point of their Redfin agent or wanted a simple way to go direct with the seller. The idea of making it less expensive to become a homeowner also really resonated with us.
For example, I would love to talk to a series of very experienced (read older people) people working in various industries what they consider the biggest problems they have to deal with. People who are on the verge of retiring.
This is why I asked the question this way, so far some really good problems to tackle.
Ever log every single sensor output (as well as 200 more) every 50ms of a vechile over an 18 hour road test while recording audio and thermal video from 2 dozen different points? How about on fleet of 40 vehicles daily, for 2 months, in the middle of Alberta or Death Valley.
Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour? And can keep up with the expected geometric growth? (I've got a decent solution for this actually currently needs to be vetted). (Also security has to provided on a per-channel basis, not per-test, T1/T2 companies need access to their test data, but not global data).
Contact me. I'm a member of the ASAM standards committee that recently met to discuss how basically every auto-producer and tier 1 has NO CLUE how do implement this. And easily 2 dozen companies are just waiting to throw money at this problem.
Currently one doesn't exist, and the solutions that do exist manage paths to raw data blobs, not actual records/data points.
I know the technical side/requirements, and the people. My business skills and design are lacking. Also a whole front end for interfacing/formating/report generation needs to be created.
[0] http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/
Even the buzzword-du-jour is getting involved[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cizgVZ8rjKA&feature=youtu.be
Think of a soccer stadium, with fans taking "video" of the game. All the feeds would be gathered, synchronized, quality adjusted and put online for anyone to view, from any angle.
I really miss the challenges of real-time signal and data processing. I really want back into it.
http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/john-graham-cumming-i-got-...
Here is the related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778986
-G
To Expand:
This method is already used in data logging compression (slightly) where one stores channel delta's/time stamps. Reconstructing the value ad-hoc when necessary. This is a good way to compress non-violalitle datasets.
I've actually watched the talk already. And while it seems to apply the problem is it doesn't. Every data point is important, because the real problem is comparing different tests, with time between tests to attempt to get an idea of how hardware ages. Or to test componenet swaping, where a known test is performed on several different items and in post processing the results are compared. To use the suggest method your storage solution requires knowledge of whats being stored.
:.:.:
The goal is to unify these storage solutions, and present a unified front end for querying/report generation.
You have no contact listed...
Could you expand a little more on what sort of features you would like to see in a solution? I have some relevant experience and I could see myself taking a stab at this problem
Is this data logging the changes or the states of your sensors? If it's the states, then I am guessing most of this is highly compressible. If it is actually 100TB of changes logged, then that's a pretty difficult problem.
Feel free to get in touch.
My email is in my profile if you'd like to chat. :) Hope to hear from you!
If you pulled that together and offered it in a usable format.. Wow.
Talk to companies like Honeywell (I believe they do something similar to what you are trying to do for aviation industry), ABB, Foxboro, etc. These guys have been doing this since 80s.
I was diagnosed with a melanoma a couple of years ago.
Luckily early stage but had to deal with several hospitals and dermatologists who just doesn't talk with each other, add to that the complexity of insurance-agencies and the fact that I have more than a thousand of those little bastards and you begin to see the potential for mistakes and the stress that might incur on a lot of people.
Whoever could solve this would be someone I would pay money.
This is probably a difficult problem to solve, but one thing that might be possible is just a way to look up the bill and translate the insurance "codes" that are meaningless to normal people and require looking up in various medical or insurance sites. Like code 123456 means you had your blood drawn. Or code 67890 means they ran some test, etc. It takes forever to look this stuff up.
You're also talking about going to see the Dr for a cold or something. When you've had a major surgery and months of follow-up procedures with pages and pages of line items on your bill, hundreds of codes, disputes with things you think you have already paid, bills that don't match up with what insurance says, etc... then you'll understand what I'm talking about.
I'll stick around the comments too but email me tyler@useprime.com anytime if I can help with this madness. Been through it way too many times myself.
The answer was that our doctors are disconnected from the costs of treatment because they can't be expected to know every possible charge for every different insurance plan (what the patient would have to pay for procedures, medicine, support staff [anesthesiologists who are out of network, for example], devices [pacemakers, wrist splints, artificial hips, etc.], lab fees, etc.). So why not something that can bring that information to them?
This would be a benefit not just to consumers but to insurance companies as well, and that's where the money would be.
Feel free to cut me in on the action.
The difference is in insurance: 1. You pay directly for your pet's care. Your vet gets the money. No in-between to obscurify the money. 2. You pay insurance for your own care, and your doctor bills your insurance. Your doctor's EMR might know the insurance cost, but that cost can still change. And there are lots of middlemen in billing processing in healthcare, so it's not an accurate representation of reimbursement anyway.
There are quite a few startups trying to remedy this in various ways. Most of them focus on data transparency; they try to aggregate and publicly list all the direct pay costs for different doctors. The problem with that remains the same: most people don't have the precedent in their head of paying for healthcare, so they don't want to pay direct.
Not impossible to fix. Someone certainly will. Probably orthogonally, like how Slack is unbundling email. But the tech barrier is small compared to the social barrier.
Would be pretty sweet if someone was able to map out all insurance costs though, even to 90% consistency. Hooo boy that would be sweet.