

Ask HN: What is the next industry to be disrupted? - ConceitedCode

There's a lot of talk about what industry start ups and new technology will disrupt. I usually hear legal and medical, but I haven't seen much head way yet. What do you think the next one will be and why?
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D_Alex
I received a 3d printer last week, at work. I ordered it to try and make some
oilfield equipment models. My expectations in truth were low, the printer is a
cheap hobbyist unit (Makerbot Replicator 2). After using it for 2 weeks, I am
very impressed. The mechanical properties of the PLA plastic used are much
better than expected, and there are things you can make that would not be
possible with any other manufacturing process - eg. objects with an internal
3d honeycomb structure for great strength and lightness.

I think the technology can already disrupt such industries as hardware shops,
spare parts warehouses, hobby shops and of course industrial model making. In
the future I expect 3d printed concrete buildings, and mainstream consumer
goods.

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davyjones
This certainly seems promising and one can also probably piggyback on 3D
printing by offering FEA services before printing. Prediction of failure loads
and stress points, auto-optimisation to an extent, etc.

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brudgers
Legal and medical will evolve, but there will not be disruption because:

a) They are heavily regulated and moving outside the regulatory framework is
subject to vigorous prosecution. AirBnB is in a comparitively lightly
regulated industry and its transactions can remain private.

b) These industries are already profitable so the most likely perceived result
of disruption is a reduction of profits.

c) The amount of cash already attracts many players to the market who can
focus on sales - lawyers and doctors like a professional sales force and
personal attention - rather than innovation. Little egotistical professional
service companies are as problematic as big dumb one's. Maybe worse because
they are about more than the bottom line.

d) These industries have better ways to make money than software services.
Insurance companies don't reimburse for medical records on an iPad. Lawyers
bill by the hour.

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bigmickey
Banking. This is already happening. Paypal has already forced banks (at least
in the UK) to stop holding onto people's money for 3 days during account-to-
account transfers; zopa.com is disintermediating the banks with a peer-to-peer
lending model (as is prosper in the US I think?); fundingcircle.com is doing
that for commercial loans; currencyfair.com is doing the same thing with FX
transactions; kickstarter.com is making it possible for companies to raise
money without going to the capital markets. To cap it all, bitcoin is
challenging the traditional role of banking in controlling the money supply in
the first place! In short, almost every aspect of banking is under attack from
startups everywhere. To date I haven't seen much of a response from the
incumbents. Maybe the effect is too small at the moment but it is exciting to
watch how it unfolds :)

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t0
Textbooks. The market is controlled by a half dozen huge companies that charge
around 10x too much because they can.

I intend to tackle it one day. The biggest hurdle is actually finding
instructors willing to write a textbook.

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Stwerp
I think the question to ask is why are the professors who tackle writing these
books going through such distribution chains?

It is not the monetary incentive. My friends who have contributed chapters to
books generally see essentially zero return from royalties when the books are
printed/sold.

Academics are more concerned about getting their name out (i.e. prestige). The
business a professor runs is his/her name and they must market and position
this well so that they get the funding and grants and the agencies recognize
their name. There is nothing limiting professors currently from assembling
notes into a textbook using free tools like LaTeX and putting their book on
the web. Some currently do this (thank goodness!). However, putting a point on
a CV that you uploaded a PDF file to your personal website versus being
published by a well-known publishing firm makes a big difference.

That would be the problem to tackle: assuring authors that their time will be
worthwhile. The fact that a book gets through the process to be published is
seen as a mark or seal of quality, whether this is in any way true or not.

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t0
You're absolutely right. Is there any way to solve this? I don't know that a
small publisher could ever give them this recognition. Maybe find some that
are interested in money versus fame?

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ZenzerNet
Airline delayed/missing/found baggage items. Once, the SITA database in
Atlanta was bigger than google (10 years ago or so). A monopoly that carries
extreme costs for airlines. All interaction via archaic terminals, with a few
local GUI implementations. I've done one via piggy-backing, however if you're
not a handling agent or airline then you're not allowed into the ecosystem. -
I'm interested in pursuing this, but it's too large for me alone to handle.

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sssk
IMHO, Groklaw's activities have laid a good pattern that can be followed for
disrupting the legal industry. Some effects of the disruption could be \-
interesting cases using crowd sourcing to aid discovery \- finding economical
and effective lawyers made simple \- decreasing tolerance for frivolous
complaints

Similar things could be done in the Health industry as well

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promagnon
I'd guess it will be the one most people are trying to disrupt. I know that
sounds trivial, but if you throw enough hackers at an industry, something new
will probably come out. There seems to be a lot going on in education, and
even though it hasn't been totally disrupted, there appears to be enough
effort and focus that it will happen eventually.

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DigitalSea
Health is definitely a hot startup niche that is getting some traction. For
years the health industry has been lurking in the shadows, a rotting archaic
industry heavily controlled by lobbyists and pharmaceutical companies. Seems
people are trying to change things, if you succeed in the health niche, you're
set and others are starting to see this.

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leeny
Hiring. There's something fundamentally frustrating about knowing that all the
data you need to make the perfect decision about where you should work is out
there but that getting even a small piece of that data involves a series of
nondeterministic, flawed, and sometimes intentionally opqaue human
interactions.

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labratmatt
Pants for dogs. The current dog pants industry is old, slow, and full of
inefficiency. It's next.

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alid
I like to be a contrarian with these things. The true genius ideas, to me, are
those that no one was betting on. (that said, there's some good ideas here!)

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samirmenon
Definitely health care and medicine...so many people are working on it, and
its so far from optimal

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rayj
Academic journals. It is not hard to host PDFs, I mean look at arxiv.org/.

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sixQuarks
Glasses that are supported by your nose rather than your ears

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nshankar
Any industry with productivity disruption

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o0-0o
Lobster rolls. wait

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ZenzerNet
Sorry wrong.

