New Startup Ideas Spreadsheet(spreadsheets.google.com) To follow on from cdixon's recent submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710), I suggest we put into practice the "opposite of secret" theory. Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. Also if you see something that interests you, get in contact and make it happen! |
Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. If you see something you like, get in contact and make it happen!
What I'm getting at:
Show don't tell.
So how about a list of products/service prototypes that people are actually building, and making that a starting point. I'd much rather take 10 seconds to click around on an app, than read text in a cell as noted above.
I guess I'd just rather read constructive posts first.
I thought of some form of karma might be needed to avoid people joining a class and spamming the forum. But that is probably a issue for later.
More communication methods would be good. IRC server with a web client, and per class chat rooms that saved the chat logs.
The major suggestion I have at this stage is to separate the module from the class. So that different groups can follow the same module. Too many people following the same class would generate too much traffic.
I'd also though it would be nice to signal that you were willing to run a course if enough other people wanted to join a subject.
I also think that some way to create tests would be useful. Of course it wouldn't be under exam conditions, but it would be a nice way of seeing how you were doing.
You are basically setting up a community of some sort, which has the basic problems of.
1. Too quiet 2. Too Noisy 3. Attracts spammers/trolls
Be prepared to deal with these as you go forward.
I know it's a little bit out there, but I think it would be a fun startup to make something like this work.
You could also expand it in various ways beyond tracking new releases for a single band to make it more of a music discovery service, e.g., (a) tracking side projects started by members of a given band or band "communities" where there are several inter-related artists and bands that appear in various ways in one another's work (like Broken Social Scene, Wu Tang Clan or The Bird and the Bee) (b) tracking other bands/albums/songs etc. that someone had a hand in (e.g., show me new releases that Pharrell Williams produced) and somewhat obviously (c) tracking new releases in a given genre, which could be very fine grained.
Interested to collaborate on it, or has something to say about the idea, drop a note on the community feedback column on spreadsheet! Thanks!
But breeding dustmites? Sigh. Do you then on releasing them into the wild or selling them door to door?
..but then again, a lot of these problems could be solved with some sort of (online web app?) system: a) Basecamp tweaked for massive collaboration. b) StackOverflow-esque reputation system + karma + uservoice demand identification? c) No suggestions here yet, but HN seems to be doing a pretty good job at engineering away the Digg-problem.
It probably sounds more fun than it is going to be. But it should be cool.
100% return lottery.
pandora for chatroulette.
Wordpress.com 20 years more advanced, for video blogging.
Public Takeover - Use capitalism to control the ills of capitalism, one share at a time. Use crowdsourcing and social network effects to take over public companies by linking all socially-responsible minority shareholders.
*Dog Walking 2.0 - potential acquirer 37 signals?
They're probably one of the worst examples. It was technical brilliance, not their idea, that allowed them to succeed.
My take on this is.
If your idea is good you might as well put it out there as you won't be the only one who have thought about it.
If your idea is brilliant it will have no takers as brilliant ideas seem to be less obvious in the now and will only with time and in retrospect be obvious.
If PageRank was closely guarded in any way, it could have been so that Page and Brin could submit their research paper about it to SIGIR--at which point it would be public. On the other hand, Page and Brin hosted the search engine for anybody to use.
2) As an aside, assuming the page below is the actual paper, does it mean Larry and Brin already have funding at the time they were writing it up? It mentions that users should try the search engine out at google.stanford.edu, but supposedly, it was their first investor who named Google.
Dogwalking is big business - there are more rich people with dogs than you would dare dream of, and they all need to have their dogs walked. On the other end of the leash there are social welfare clients that want more money from the state - and if you have a dog you get a monthly allowance to buy dog-stuff and food. So the ingenious business proposition was to make money by walking rich people's dogs, and renting them out to welfare clients that only need a dog for half an hour to prove that they do indeed have a dog that they can claim dog-welfare money for.
Absolute genius I tell you!.
Would add value by providing customer reviews and rankings.
In any of these projects the dominant cost is salaries, which are not so high if you hire great young people who care about it. It only seems impossible to those with a lack of imagination.
As for selling them, here a market for you: ecologists with asthma. These probably number in the low ten thousands, they probably spend close to a thousand dollars a year in medication, and four years in lifetime. That's hundreds of millions in that market category alone.
EDIT: At this point their brand is also a source of Google's money. Today you need both to compete in search.
It's not even that hard: Facebook for the platform, directed edge for the recommendation engine, something like camarades.com / ww.com for the webcam plugin.
- Invitations
- A "materials needed" list for each class
- A public forum for general subject discussion
- A calendar
- Conferencing (with voice, video, images, chat)
- Buy books or supplies if needed
- For learning languages, there could be a service to chat with a fluent speaker
- To make tests, you can use something like Wufoo to make forms for tests
- Background theme for classes
- Progress charts
- Grade checker
- Mobile apps
- OpenID/other logins
- Citation helper
- Look up quotes and verses
- For whiteboard, maybe something with HTML5 canvas
- Group mailing list
That doesn't improve the video player interface at all.
That doesn't make metadata for videos any better.
That doesn't provide any improvements in the ability to remix video.
That doesn't offer any advantages for having multiple video bloggers on the same platform.
That doesn't add any interactivity to video.
I feel like I'm saying, "There's a ton of room for innovation and additions to the paradigm of web-based video viewing", and you're saying: "sooo... a better theme, then?"
I have seen a couple of times that the idea did not make any 'sense' to me during ideation stage, but when was presented with a working application - I just 'saw' it as needed!
For certain ideas, the way they are executed matters a lot.
[1] http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/main-test...