Ask HN: Name one product/service that you personally need but doesn't yet exist |
Ask HN: Name one product/service that you personally need but doesn't yet exist |
I think this is possible now, when it was impossible before. it funds a debit card monthly for you, and calculates everything else. it learns you finances and then plans accordingly. most people will adapt to whatever money they have, they just suck at managing it. there isn't anyone that tells you "you can't afford that." or "you will run out of money if your lunches are so expensive" "your rent is too much money, get a better job" "you are not saving enough, what can you change so I can save you more money?" that would make life SO much easier.
Then a lot of payments show up as rather generic. You would need to map a lot of "Payment Messages" to a topic, again something i think i would not do.
I think i could see that working rather in a Bitcoin only environment than anywhere else.
But then again, there apparently are americans who use their credit cards all the time and for everything. This might be just a american thing i cant understand.
Tink is a Swedish one that I've used and it works well. It uses some Bayesian classifier or whatever to map payment codes to specific vendors, and to assign categories to vendors. When you login, it might say "we're uncertain about these 7 transactions, please classify them." In exchange for this very small amount of work, you get pie charts and trends and whatnot to visualize your spending habits.
When I first tried it years ago I immediately started baking my own bread and making my own hummus every day to cut down on lunch spending.
There are many consumer vendors in Sweden that don't even accept cash. Most bank offices don't handle any cash whatsoever.
I'd input "trip to Thailand" and the service would break that down into:
1 check your vaccines
1.1 hepatitis A most important
1.2 try local clinic X, click here to dial
2 check your insurance
2.1 click here if you have home insurance
2.2 click here to purchase trip-specific travel insurance
3 decide dates
3.1 week? two weeks? month? click to specify
3.2 pick a flight, click to browse curated list
And so on. (These should probably be in reverse order but I'm too lazy to change the numbers.)
Say, I use Itunes every morning at 6 am for my morning run, except on Sundays or holidays. My Jarvis would see that I'm up and going outside and it's a Tuesday and get my regular playlist ready as a little icon on an unobtrusive toolbar. Or whatever it finds and figures out. Sure it would be a little clunky at first, but people tend to be regular and predictable. Also, people tend to externalize their bodily functions, fire is an external step of digestion and clothing is an external form of fur.
Is it realistic to get something like a 20hrs/mth retainer for like $10/hr to sort out things for me. Something that was a longer term relationship so they get to know your personality plus build trust ideally.
Possibly share this assistant with friends/family.
The role would be to create a 1) one stop shop that 2) gets to know you and 3) can remove small distraction tasks; like coordinate dinner with friends, monitor my emails to pay bills, find good tyres for my car, come up with gift ideas, find me a new cleaner etc.
Hey, big spender !
For example, don't just tell us he said, and she said, and leave us to try to figure it out. Investigate until you know who's right, and why, and tell us.
- Teleportation
- Time Machine
- Dream Recorder (as in record our dreams as we see them)
- Mind Reader (as in Mel Gibson in What Women Want :))
This is a really, really bad idea.
They have a population database which is queried by companies, such that if you move house your details are updated once, and instantly visible to companies.
It's both a little disturbing, and highly useful.
The products I would like to see don't exist because they're not economically viable (e.g. high-quality development and mobile phone hardware using open source firmware) or they depend on technology that doesn't yet exist or doesn't scale well, etc.
You may come up with a novel idea for a viable product, but no one can do this for you.