
Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups? - seahckr
What are some market segments &#x2F; areas that are ready to be disrupted? If you&#x27;re a VC, what are some problems you don&#x27;t see a lot of startups trying to solve?
======
JamesBarney
A marketplace for specialized micro-consulting(30 minutes to an hour).

I've seen plenty of projects that are rife with anti-patterns because a team
was unfamiliar with a problem or technology and made a bunch of bad decisions
while they were still coming up to speed.

The use-case I envision would fix this. Because it's really a travesty that
when we're the least familiar with technologies is when we make some of the
most important architectural decisions. And these mistakes could be avoided
with questions like "What issues will we run into?" "What patterns should we
follow?" "What are good resources to get started?"

For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to
speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for
every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React
Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his
time.

Obviously the biggest problem is ensuring quality without having to hike rates
too much.

~~~
danieka
I'm the co-founder of Fliffr. We're building a marketplace for services where
you can charge by the minute. We have everything from experts in SEO, chefs,
personal trainers, Esport professionals. We also have a couple of developers,
for example you can contact me for advice on #go #javascript or #ionic. Our
goal is to build a service to quickly get in contact with an expert and only
paying for the advice you need.

Users can contact our experts through chat and video/voice calls.

Do sign up for Fliffr and try it out, we're on both iOS and Android stores, or
visit [https://www.fliffr.com](https://www.fliffr.com) . And if you have any
feedback I'd love to hear it.

~~~
danielvinson
Love the concept, but I can't see this as useful as an App, since pretty much
every use case I can think of I'd want to be at my computer for.

I also find it kind of amusing that you're advertising esports advice from a
woman who plays on a CS:GO team which can't even compete with a mediocre ESEA-
IM team... she might be an absolutely amazing teacher and amazing person to
work with, but she isn't good at the game, which really undermines your
marketing strategy.

~~~
azm1
Are the csgo team coaches really good at playing comp. csgo? Dont think its
the main quality you need to have to push him forward.You great player but
never be able to communicate it to others.But as a good observer with
analytical skills you can be great at spotting potential and weakness etc etc

~~~
danielvinson
That's something that has been discussed in depth in the pro community for a
long time... the conclusion that most team owners have made is that you
generally need a coach who can play at a top pro level or has previously
played at a top pro level. Obviously the target market here isn't pro teams,
but even so, the people who have large amounts of money on the line choose not
to hire coaches who have never been very good at the game.

I also have a lot of first-hand experience with this since I taught paid
lessons in CS 1.6 way back in the day. Generally the market for lessons is
full of mid-tier players who are very dedicated, but don't have the support
necessary to improve (ie. a team of players as good as them or a proper
coaching system). These players are almost all looking to go pro some day, and
want to be able to break through to that level. Since the difference in skill
between a Top 1% player and a Pro in CS:GO is so massive, any random
competitive player won't be able to give good advice since they are at the
same place as the client, and can't understand WHY things are done the way
they are among the Pros.

It's worth noting that the Orbit Female CS:GO team isn't even all among the
top 1% of players - they went 10-6 in ESEA-Open last season, which is the
lowest level of competition which is even sanctioned. Any team that is
dedicated and practices, even if they aren't good, will make it through Open
at X-4 without much difficulty (I've coached a few teams through this).

~~~
danieka
We'd love to have you on our platform. Have you considered signing up?

I'm available on danielk at fliffr.com if you have any questions.

~~~
danielvinson
I haven't played in a long time (I'm only involved tangentially these days),
so I wouldn't be interested, but thanks :)

------
jandrewrogers
Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit
biased toward areas I work in:

\- Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people
currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance
match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality.
There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding
of the problem domain and tooling requirements.

\- IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this
currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of
what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this
product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using
open source backends.

\- Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to
cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data
analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant
tech gaps here.

\- Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular
volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at
scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a
terabyte of data.

\- Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but
none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would
deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.

\- AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech
everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.

~~~
ColanR
> AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech
> everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel
> approach.

Any chance you can elaborate on what you're talking about here?

~~~
Jzast
I believe he is referring to AI that can generate new ideas, similar to
'thinking' versus pattern recognition, which is 'I've seen something like that
before (during training!).

~~~
derrickdirge
So AI that can develop algorithms on its own? Basically AI that can write
code?

------
ninjakeyboard
An economist and a normal person are walking down the street together. The
normal person says “Hey, look, there’s a $20 bill on the sidewalk!” The
economist replies by saying “That’s impossible- if it were really a $20 bill,
it would have been picked up by now.”

~~~
npezolano
An economist from Chicago _

~~~
splintercell
Correct: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-
market_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis)

EDIT: FYI, not all pro-Free Market economists believe in EMH, Austrians for
instance, have criticized Chicago school for this ridiculous theory.

------
mslot
I always think there are huge opportunities for growth in intra-EU trade. It's
a market with over 500M people and a $17 trillion GDP. While the EU has taken
away a lot of trade barriers, language and unfamiliar regulations remain a
huge barrier, but also a huge potential for growth.

If a company in California has ample opportunities to sell in Florida (>2000
miles away), why then is it significantly more difficult for a company in
Greece to sell in Denmark, which is a much shorter distance.

There is a notable lack of an open European marketplace along the lines of
Alibaba. There are many challenges in making that model work for the EU,
especially ~24 languages and big cultural differences, but the tech industry
is in a good position to overcome such boundaries.

~~~
adventured
To what extent does the EU need to substantially consolidate language further
to become more effective? There are two dozen major languages spoken in the
EU. Nearly half of the EU can't communicate well with the other half because
they share no common language. How do you get the EU to pursue a
standardization of language, such that ~95% of people in the EU are fluent in
at least one EU-wide common language (whether Spanish, English or other)?

~~~
pawadu
Beside the old generation from the former eastern block (who studied Russian
instead of English) pretty much everyone speaks enough English to communicate.

I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero
problems getting by.

~~~
kbart
_" I've traveled to EU a lot and even in a country like France I had zero
problems getting by."_

Only if you travel along established tourist routes. Go to a local marketplace
or try to ask for directions in a smaller town and you will find it hard in
many EU countries. Yes, in Northern countries even most elders speak English
fluently, but in South I have had many situations where finding a single
English speaking person was a challenge (notably in Greece and Italy).

~~~
monodeldiablo
I don't believe it. I live in Croatia and everybody under 30 speaks English
beautifully. Almost everybody under 40 speaks functional English. Most people
under 50 understand commercial English, even if their grammar is shit.

You probably didn't struggle to find an English-speaking person. You struggled
to find a person _willing_ to speak English with you. That's a subtle, but
important, difference.

Most of my neighbors pretend not to understand English around tourists because
it saves them enormous hassle. At first, I was appalled when I realized this.
Now, I confess to doing it myself. It gets exhausting answering the same
questions from unresourceful tourists over and over again.

Locals don't want to be your tour guide. They just want to enjoy their coffee
in peace.

------
ungzd
Creative tools. Everyone is so obsessed with content consumption tools and
making TV out of internet, with deprecating desktop in favor of handhelds
where you tap ads and take selfies with dog faces.

For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but
still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991.

For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe,
but VST system is stinky and stuck in times of Windows 95. People are buying
hardware synths (which are just computers running software) only because
software on these embedded computers runs reliably, but VSTs crash, freeze
every time and require hardware license keys plugged into parallel port. Also,
everything inside is complete black magic and every supplier of software
pretends that there are super secret algorithms everywhere. Every oscillator
and filter is super-secret and super-unique and there's no articles in the
open how to design "decent" oscillator and filter. Medival times everywhere.

And these tools should be designed for users, not Entertainment Content
Production Corporations.

~~~
Dragonai
A friend and I are actively working on innovating in the context of DAWs and
music production, we're specifically trying to modernize the discovery and
accessibility of plugins. Nice to see DAWs mentioned here - there's a lot that
could be improved in the field and we're hoping to tackle several outstanding
issues in the near future.

(If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)

~~~
IAmGraydon
Don't you think it's a bit unethical to collect email addresses with the
promise of a download, only to tell the user that the download isn't even
available. But hey - thanks for giving us your email!

~~~
Dragonai
That's on us, our bad - we intended to put the download up right around when
we were finishing the site design but encountered a few last-minute bugs. This
fell to the wayside, I'll fix it ASAP!

------
whitepoplar
Physical space for lounging, socializing, and working. I live in NYC and
there's still a striking lack of space that facilitates people getting out of
their apartments and doing "whatever." Starbucks popularized the concept of
the "third space" (the first two being housing + workplace) and I think
there's so much room to improve upon this.

~~~
whitepoplar
Related: physical space that welcomes the elderly. Loneliness/depression is a
huge problem for older people. I think it would really boost wellbeing for
these people to participate in _something_ and to see other faces.

~~~
jblumstein
Agreed. Interestingly, it seems McDonalds ends up being the physical space
that plays this role for a lot of older folks, both in urban areas (Koreans in
Queens, NYC) and rural areas (Chris Arnade has done a lot of interesting
documenting of this phenomenon).

~~~
tiger3
See [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/nyregion/fighting-a-
mcdon...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/nyregion/fighting-a-mcdonalds-
for-the-right-to-sit-and-sit-and-sit.html)

------
Gustomaximus
Contract Economy: There is still a significant opportunity for a
Freelancer/Upwork group to exist. Something that better vets quality while not
pushing for Toptal prices. I suspect you'd need to set up physical presence in
the likely countries properly vet and control quality but this could easily be
covered by a premium for a know quantity vs going to western rates.

Crytpo Currency: There is room for more disruption here. I suspect a currency
that is both trackable and backed by a pool of commodities/currencies could be
quite popular. Traceable would make theft risk reduced as money could
effectively be returned if it is stolen and being backed/hedged by
currencies/commodities would help with confidence.

Cargo: I'm surprised we haven't seen electric cargo ships. Even combine solar
with sail as winds are favorable. This combined with auto-navigation (at least
between ports) seems more easily achievable than cars yet technology is
further behind.

Dockable Phone to PC (physical or even better if wireless dock): Surprised no-
one has done this well yet. I can image whoever does this with really take
ownership of the OS space. I always felt this could be the best route for
Microsoft to re-enter the mobile space with force.

~~~
nradov
Cargo ships don't have enough free surface area to mount the number of solar
panels that would be needed for propulsion. Sails are already being used on a
few ships but they only save a small percentage of fuel.

~~~
Gustomaximus
I wouldn't write it off.

There could be could add battery storage to be used during the journey. They
could include wind turbines to add further power generation.

Also ships can go slower. In my limited knowledge of boats every extra knot
takes significantly extra fuel. If we were bringing multiple power sources
'slow' cargo may be viable. And the has to be other ways to increase this
function.

And there is always hybrid. Not all power has to be renewable sources. A
solution could start with supplementing diesel driven thrust with some lower
cost green power. Given diesel is 70% of shipping operating cost that seems a
potential option.

~~~
dirtyaura
Norsepower provides modern sails: "a spinning cylinder that uses the Magnus
effect to harness wind power to propel a ship."

"When the wind conditions are favourable, Norsepower Rotor Sails allow the
main engines to be throttled back, saving fuel and reducing emissions while
providing the power needed to maintain speed and voyage time. Rotor sails can
be used with new vessels or they can be retrofitted to existing ships."

[http://www.norsepower.com/](http://www.norsepower.com/)

~~~
Gustomaximus
I love that you posted an 'in the wild' solution. So many people saying this
is not possible. And then someone has found a creative way to offer one
alternate. Such a good example of dont listen to the nay-sayers if you want to
mentally explore something. There are almost always solutions and I'm sure
there are more for this one.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
No one said it wasn't possible. Clearly, it's possible since ships were wind
powered for millenia. The problem is that with very low fuel costs, it's not
feasible because the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

------
lngnmn
I think this is a wrong question, or at least oversimplified view. The real
recipe is to be highly qualified on whatever you do and ready to catch an
opportunity and ride on an emerging trend. Today the buzzwords are about
security, a few years ago it was about services for selfies of teens. On a
larger scale there is already biotech bubble and emerging AI bubble, etc.

Basically, the strategy should be to follow the money (the demand) and to love
what you do (be above average). This, it seems, the most probable way to get
noticed, to get funding (for abilities) and to succeed. The markets are
stochastic.

For example, if you ask yourself, how come that such piles of Java crap as
Hadoop came to be so popular, the answer would be that the biotech industry
has almost unlimited hot money that time and huge demand for big data
processing tools, so even such poorly designed and implemented by amateurs
crap would be a good-enough tool.

Suppose, I would like to make a similar tool, order of magnitude less
wasteful, based on ideas from Plan9, Erlang, based on ZFS, etc, in other
works, do it the right way, would I get any funding? No, because there is no
real demand for quality solution when a crappy one is OK. There are
exceptions, of course, how, for example, nginx became a well-crafted
improvement over apache, but this is indeed an exception.

So, go to the valley and keep looking. There, it seems, no other way. The
principle is that there must be a strong demand backed by big money (Wall
Street investors), so even a half-backed result could be easily sold and re-
used to return investments and even make some profit.

------
jdietrich
Older people.

We live in a rapidly ageing society. Retirees are a large and wealthy
demographic. Despite that, tech companies are absolutely woeful at designing
products for older users. We don't empathise with their needs. We don't
understand how poor eyesight, arthritis or cognitive difficulties can affect
UX. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand and excellent opportunities for
future growth.

~~~
sideproject
I do agree. But what specific areas do you think would be good to target? You
mention their poor eyesight and difficult UX, but that doesn't mean we should
start creating Facebook or Twitter clones with bigger fonts and easier UX? (or
should we?)

~~~
jdietrich
> But what specific areas do you think would be good to target?

Almost everything.

Here's an experiment you can try. Stay up for two nights in a row. Have a few
drinks. Put on a pair of ear defenders, a pair of glasses with the wrong
prescription and a pair of leather gardening gloves. Try to go about your
daily life. You'll very quickly see plenty of industries that are ripe for
disruption.

The man-made world is overwhelmingly designed by and for the not-yet-disabled.
We build overly complex interfaces with too many options and too few
affordances. This makes life difficult for everyone, but it can totally
exclude people with impairments.

Nobody realised how awful smartphones were until the iPhone arrived. I think
that most products and services are just as awful as a Windows Mobile phone
circa 2005, but we have become inured to their awfulness. We're drowning in
unnecessary complexity, in large part because we don't expect anything better.

~~~
bertjk
It is interesting that you bring up the iPhone as a positive example of better
accessibility. I always thought that physical buttons which could quickly
become muscle memory and relatively simple function were way more usable for
the demographics in question.

------
sytelus
Hackers rarely think of politics as playing field for startups, so in my mind
this one of the biggest untapped opportunity right now. People from both sides
are going nuts over Trump politics. That means tons of eyeballs and attention
that would be available for the right startups for next 4 years. Things like
BuzzFeed and DailyXYZ are going to make a massive killing in terms of ad
revenue. At this stage still the real disruptive startup are few and far
between. Nice thing is that you might actually end up doing something good and
impactful. If Zuck runs for president, may be even big exit ;).

I can think of few ideas right away:

\- website that gives stories from other side

\- activist website that uses better tactic than "getting signatures"

\- know how your congressman votes on each of the vote

\- automatic ratings generator for congressman

\- news article that only comes from international press

\- software for politicians: campaign management, voter management, political
ad management etc

~~~
panic
_\- know how your congressman votes on each of the vote_

If anyone from Facebook is reading, this would be a great feature for the
site. Imagine following your representatives and getting their votes
automatically in your newsfeed.

~~~
jsymolon
> know how your congressman votes on each of the vote

Actually, the opposite may be a better way.

Our representatives votes should be secret for the same reason that the people
votes is secret: prevents the voter from being intimidated and from selling
his/her vote.

~~~
mthoms
Interesting thought.

You know, you could also just make it illegal to "sell" votes in the way the
United States currently allows? Most other Western/Democratic countries
figured this out a long, long time ago.

~~~
daveguy
No need to make it illegal. Votes can't be sold because they can't be
confirmed (it's anonymous). That's not what they are talking about here. They
are talking about representative votes and yes, it is illegal to buy/sell
congressional votes. It is also not private, just like every other
Western/Democratic representative government.

------
cperciva
Figure out a way to reduce the not-in-San-Francisco penalty for startups.

There are some very good reasons why startups flock to the bay area, including
"lots of available talent" and "that's where the VCs are", but there are also
problems with being in the bay area -- talent is considerably more expensive
(due in part to the cost of housing) and visa issues (particularly under the
current presidency) being the first two which come to mind.

If you can find some way to give non-San-Francisco startups the same
advantages that San Francisco startups have -- better tools for remote
workers, for example, so that companies can easily hire from anywhere rather
than needing to be where the largest number of potential employees are found;
or something to make VCs interested in investing in companies which aren't
within a narrow radius of Sand Hill (since I've never dealt with VCs, I have
no idea what such a solution would look like) -- then you'll create a huge
amount of value for companies around the world and it should be easy to
transfer some of that value into your pockets.

~~~
dirtyaura
I wonder if this is really solvable by technology and tools?

In my opinion, tools for effective remote working are there. Github, Slack
style communication, collaborative project management tools, CI tools in
cloud. Design tools could be more collaborative, but it ain't a showstopper.
Video conferencing still sucks now and then, but 50 years after the Mother of
All Demos, it starts to be usable enough :)

I feel that it is something else, culture issue, that still makes teams that
are physically in the same location, to perform more effectively. Fixing work
culture to support remote work better is likely the key instead of tech and
tools.

And money will follow: when VCs believe that remote teams and remote
networking are as effective, they will invest everywhere.

~~~
metafunctor
Yep, video conferencing still very much sucks. For starters, we need a video
chat app that enables eye contact. I think it would be a big deal.

~~~
mnembrini
You should take a look at [https://catch-eye.com](https://catch-eye.com) It's
a plug-in on top of Skype that let's you make eye contact with the other
person

~~~
metafunctor
Nice, thanks for the link, will definitely check this out.

------
alexose
Not necessarily a killer app idea, but:

I think there's an opportunity to redefine the idea of an employee-owned
company. A company with an employee stock pool of 100%-- not 10%-- with no
opportunities for dilution, non-voting shares, takeovers, or other financial
tricks. Early employees would get more stock, but it would curve gently
according with the growth the of the company, so that later employees would
also end up with a meaningful share.

The company's charter could be codified in plain English, in an easily
accessible, version-controlled markdown file. The board would be made up of
some combination of elected employees and outside advisers.

This company would be at a serious disadvantage to raise money. It would have
to be able to survive on slow, steady growth rather than VC cash infusions. On
the other hand, I suspect it would have a big hiring advantage. The trick
would be to attract employees who highly value equity but don't want to become
founders themselves.

I bet there's a business model out there that exploits both these facets.

~~~
daveguy
I think this is a thing. Registered as cooperatives. Even more liberal as
customer owned like REI? Of course it could be they are just really good at
selling that 10% stake.

I do agree that is a potentially exciting organization. I think there are some
market analysis companies that have significant employee ownership and most
profits are returned as dividends to make for a very cooperative atmosphere.

~~~
alexose
REI is an interesting example. It's a co-op in name, but the employees don't
have much representation at the top. (See:
[http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/07/11/24328725/rei-
work...](http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/07/11/24328725/rei-workers-call-
for-better-pay-and-working-conditions-consider-unionization)).

There are lots of great companies that are employee-owned (the Winco chain of
grocery stores comes to mind), but I'm not aware of any in the tech startup
world.

I'd love to know about market research companies with an employee-owned model!
If you know of any specifically, let me know. Google doesn't seem to be of
much help.

~~~
substack
Winco is a privately-held company with an ESOP (employee stock ownership
plan). Employees do not have voting rights. This is better than most private
companies, but cooperatives provide voting rights in how the company is run
which I think is more important.

------
cheetos
Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-
manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and
client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-
party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing
all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be
relevant and attractive (since you chose them) and setting your own prices.

~~~
aapusaam
Wasn't this how independent websites use to work before ad networks such as
Google ads took over the internet? Problem with managing your own ads is that
it would be very hard to get quality relevant ads if you have a small website,
not to forget the overhead involved in maintaining ad space without a
dedicated ad server.

~~~
pookeh
How about a blockchain based decentralized ad bidding system. Ping me if
interested there are plenty of ideas in this lucrative space.

~~~
marktangotango
No email on your profile...

------
petra
1\. Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive, because only a rare
few companies has managed to do the r&d to create great noise cancellation

But if there we're affordable headphones that are software programmable and
act as an app store for noise cancellation algorithms, that would definetly
reduce the price.

2\. One of the ideal ways to recieve ecommerce packages is on your car's
trunk. It's possible to build a smart lock for your car that enables the
delivery guy to drop packages.

The hard part is making it cheap, making installation cheap, and designing a
rapidly growing business model that grows rapidly.

3\. Many restaurant use a combi-ovens to reheat frozen food with great
results. Combi ovens are now starting to become cheap($300), most of them for
the home.

But what about the workplace , where for some places, frozen food may be a
good alternative to restaurant ordering(it may be cheaper, for example), but
that will require an affordable multi-meal oven, which doesn't exist yet ?

4\. Apache Isis is a great, rapid , domain driven framework for business app
development. But it's quite complex. There may an opportunity in synmplifying
it and introdcuing it to new users. Maybe in a service based form.

~~~
d_burfoot
> Great Noise cancelling headphones are very expensive

I think a smart signal processing/soundtech/AI hacker could create a software
program that uses a computer's audio to destructively interfere with other
sounds in a room. Say there is an annoying mechanical whine coming from
outside your bedroom. You position the computer's microphone near your bed,
then tell the program to start listening. The program learns the audio pattern
of the whine, and then begins to emit an antiwhine that cancels it out.

~~~
petra
Noise cancelling headphones work much better and are much easier to do than
room level noise-cancellation.

Why? Well, the whole point of noise-cancellation is to create an interference
pattern in your ear, that is as similar as possible to the noise in your ear.

The farther you get from your ear that becomes harder, because of the room's
acoustics, because of latency, because of the fact your head is moving, etc.
And we see that in the results of room level noise cancellation attempts in
the past.

------
ccvannorman
Early in my startup career an investor told me, "There's money everywhere.
Where you go, how you get there, and how fast, is dependent on your skills,
drive, network, and luck. But there's money everywhere. Never forget that."

For me, the biggest untapped market potential is educational video games
(which is why I work on supermathworld.com). The market literally doesn't
exist. There are but a handful of educational products that could rightfully
be called "games".

~~~
jstandard
I'm not so sure about the "literally doesn't exist" part, schools have been
buying educational video games for decades.

25 years ago I played educational games that look conceptually identical to
the kind on supermathworld and mathbreakers. I built space stations, launched
rockets, battled monsters, and even learned geography and critical reasoning
skills to catch the elusive Carmen Sandiego.

Graphics and gaming capabilities were a bit different on the Apple IIe though
:)

A friend of mine organizes a conference on educational games which sounds up
your alley, check out:
[http://intentionalplaysummit.com/](http://intentionalplaysummit.com/)

------
abetusk
My opinions without any real insight into how practical/viable/useful they
are:

\- PCB prototyping. Board costs are way down but the 2-week turnound time
kills a lot of nimbleness that could be gotten from a cheap in house rapid PCB
prototyping machine. This has been tried without too much success (Othermill,
LPKF, silver paint methods, etc.) imo. Isolation routing by copper ablation
might even be a possibility.

\- Oligonucleotide synthesis machine. This should be possible at the
"hobbyist" level and would start bridging the gap to more accessible DIY bio.

\- Resin 3D printing. Resin curing is one of the only methods where it's clean
enough to not be hazardous, rapid and has the hope of consistent quality of 3D
printing. There are some companies out there that are doing this already, of
course, but I believe is still very ripe for innovation.

\- DNA sequencing machines. Illumina still has a monopoly on whole genome
sequencing. Even cheap genotyping at the consumer/hobbyist level would be a
coup.

\- Closed loop precision CNC machines. Right now most low-end hobbyist CNC
machines are open loop. There's no reason, aside from NRE, that position
feedback and other sensors couldn't be added to a host of CNC applications for
low-cost CNC machines.

I haven't touched on some of the other electronics markets like pick and place
machines that might be much more accessible with machine vision and other
enabling technologies. With the DIY bio focused areas, a little infrastructure
might enable other areas. For example, one step to solving the common cold
might be tracking it's progress through a population, sequencing it as it
crops up, seeing how it evolves and cataloging effective treatments. There's
also microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" technology which seems like it's much
more accessible now but it's not something I have a lot of familiarity with.

My opinion is that without open standards, free/libre software and free/libre
hardware, all of these are almost a no-go from the start but I think that that
opinion is in the minority.

------
rl3
Many of the same things as five years ago.

While it's easy to say IoT, cryptocurrency, or whatever the latest buzzwords
happen to be—there's ideas that have been floating around for years which are
still viable, it's just that they're hard and require exceptional execution.
In that sense, they are almost timeless until implemented correctly.

For example, another comment suggested marketplace/content discovery. That's
been an unsolved problem for almost a decade now. Ads are another great
example: they've been dishing out human misery for about the same length of
time. People hate them, so they use ad blockers, and everyone loses. These
aren't new problems or opportunities.

~~~
abraae
It may be in areas that don't even look unsolved. Pretty sure that a few years
ago many people would have declared messaging to be a solved problem. Now it's
the white hot center of multi billion dollar tech warfare.

------
tyingq
The old shared hosting market is still pretty large. But it is stuck with
ancient stuff like cpanel and mostly dominated by stagnant players like EIG,
GoDaddy, and the like.

Seems like there's room for a move something like what DigitalOcean did in the
VPS space.

~~~
ClassyJacket
I just tried to set something up on DigitalOcean. It's a small website with
some PHP (already written), but I'd like the possibility of expanding it with
Node later. So I rented a VPS, but setting everything up is such a pain, with
all that SSHing and process management and Linux permissions and everything.

Something that allowed me to just throw my site up with the ease of a common
shared web host, but also allowed me to do Node with sane permissions etc.,
would be great.

However, it occurs to me this probably exists, and I just don't know about it.

Maybe that's the untapped opportunity - connecting people with the services
that suit them?

~~~
kelvinquee
Have you tried nearlyfreespeech?
[http://nearlyfreespeech.net](http://nearlyfreespeech.net)

~~~
ClassyJacket
Yeah, so I've just spent about four hours trying it, and unfortunately it
doesn't seem possible. They don't let you set more than one proxy setting for
a site, which makes it impossible.

------
giardini
Bring certain folk remedies to market.

For example, there are some medical trials indicating, and many folkloric
claims, that eating a small but increasing amount of poison ivy, oak or sumac
leaf each day will fairly quickly make your body cease to respond badly to
contact with those plants.

A 30-day packet of capsules, with successively increasing dosages of urushiol
(the irritant in those plants), would likely build up the body's ability to
tolerate urushiol. It would make it much easier and safer for the average
person to remedy their condition, since, the suggestion that one gather one's
own poison oak and preparing it for ingestion appears fraught with peril and
leaves most poison ivy victims aghast. Were such a remedy provided in a safe
encapsulated form, their fears would abate.

This would be of enormous benefit to homeowners, campers, farmers, gardeners,
tree-trimmers, and in short, nearly everyone who goes out into the woods or
gardens in the summer. Believe me, this would fly off the shelves once word
got around.

Poison ivy sucks.

~~~
daveguy
Yeah. That's going to be one that needs rigorous safety testing. Where are
these medical trials? Are they double blind placebo controlled every possible
effect (no matter the severity) reported?

------
burgalon
Here are my thoughts

1) Free p2p money transfers / gateway to bitcoin or other crypto-currency so
that it's more widely adopted

2) Better open bank accounts - allowing open transparent accounting for
organizations and companies

3) Solve democracy - better analytical tools for mass discussion, arguments
and decision making which will encourage use of facts and science, and
discourage politics

4) Human-Machine interfaces - memory augmentation

5) Solve the common cold and influenza

6) Robotics - better batteries, finer motors and sensors - possibly through
the usage of biological systems

7) Public access to satellites - realtime security monitoring, crops analytics
and forecasting

8) Solve weather or create private air-conditioned jackets ;)

~~~
sunshinejoy
For 3) Solve democracy, a friend showed me pol.is (neat demo of it:
[https://pol.is/demo/2demo](https://pol.is/demo/2demo)).

Anyway, it's description is..."pol.is brings AI & machine learning to
participatory democracy. Scale up outreach in online consultation & get
powerful insights that can shape and legitimize policy." It would be amazing
if U.S. politics could be grounded in legitimate understanding of each other.

~~~
cel1ne
The problem is not making the tools, it's getting everybody to learn and use
them.

~~~
burgalon
I'm wondering if some kind of mind-map/graph mashed-up with a wikipedia model
and "likes" on each node, can help drive decisions or is it just too
naive/simplistic and low adoption

~~~
cel1ne
It starts with the issue that most people don't especially like to use
computers and will avoid them if they can.

------
johnlbevan2
Hundreds of restaurants in the same geographic area will be purchasing
ingredients from a variety of different suppliers, based on their need.

If they clubbed together with other local businesses to source common
ingredients they could benefit from economies of scale; i.e. instead of 100
restaurants each buying 200 onions, there'd be a bulk order for 20,000 onions;
meaning 1 lorry to deliver direct from the supplier(s) rather than multiple
vans to cover each supplier/buyer combo.

i.e. Create a platform that would allow suppliers to list what they're
selling, buyers to list their needs, and match these up with one another.

    
    
      - Group similar suppliers or buyers together geographically to help improve the efficiency of individual orders by making them part of a larger collective order.
      - Add filter options so that when buying people can specify certain criteria (e.g. "I only want potatoes from soil-association approved suppliers").
      - Now people don't buy from suppliers, but rather buy from a service/pool.
      - ...and people don't sell to buyers, but rather sell to the service/pool.
      - This same model works regardless of supplier or buyer size; i.e. benefits both big and small (though the benefits to smaller companies are more significant as they start to get the benefits of scale that the larger ones have anyway).
    

Though I'd start with restaurants (i.e. to keep the platform focussed / avoid
being too broad too soon), this same platform could over time expand for any
purchasing interactions.

~~~
bpicolo
This is the reason distributors already exist. Almost all restaurants buy
almost all of their ingredients through food distributors (or on occasion just
the local Costco).

Not saying that there's not room to grow in this area, but it's definitely not
the case that restaurants are buying straight from a bunch of individual
suppliers, minus restaurants aiming for hyper-local or small batch
ingredients.

~~~
14113
And the ones that are buying from individual suppliers are doing so for non-
economic reasons, e.g. "buying local", or specialised produce variants.

------
kul
Mostly posting this because I want to see it, but drones to automate
residential property inspections. I'm actually thinking about miniature drones
that can do internal and external residential inspections. My startup is in
property management and a lot of the work a human does could be done by a
drone + healthy amount of machine learning on the images captured.

~~~
mccolin
The human element of home inspection is invaluable. That interaction between
homeowner (or prospective) and a knowledgeable professional is critical. But
drones as _tools_ for that professional could be great.

~~~
ehnto
I think he may have been referring to rental inspections, of the quarterly
kind. A pretty standard checklist. "Is there mess, is there mould, is there
damage, are there pets and is that allowed?"

~~~
dx034
And then you let a drone fly through a flat every quarter? I think the odds of
destroying something in the process are higher than the saved costs.

On another note: Are quarterly rental inspections a thing in the US? Never
heard of that, why should my landlord care if I tidy up my apartment?

~~~
ehnto
They're standard practice in Aus, not sure about the US sorry. I agree though,
I don't think it would be a flawless plan to use drones for it.

------
cdiamand
If you're looking for oppportunities in different industries, I send out a
daily email filled with short interviews.

I ask about industry problems, and the software that could solve those
problems.

You can check it out here:

[http://www.oppsdaily.com](http://www.oppsdaily.com)

~~~
antfarm
Great idea! Is there a way to see archived interviews?

~~~
cdiamand
Thanks antfarm :)

I'll be setting up a "vault" of sorts in the next few weeks where you can see
pretty much all the interviews I have.

------
lj3
Better marketplace discovery systems. Apple's App Store, the Google Play store
and Steam all suffer from the same problem: it's very hard for the people who
would enjoy your app to find your app. This probably also applies to streaming
video and music.

~~~
overcast
I'm saying it now, apps are on their way out, web only is the future. Everyone
is completely sick of installing a stupid app for everything the want to use.
Compound that with a billion notifications for all of those apps. With that
said Steam does a pretty good. The discovery queues have led me to some great
finds, as well as all of the curator lists.

~~~
sotojuan
The web has a long time to catch up in terms of technology (iOS has poor
support for APIs that would make web apps compete with native) and culture
(most businesses don't care that their app is slow and bloated and defer
resources to the app).

~~~
overcast
What do the majority of web apps need, to compete with native apps? 99% of
them definitely DO NOT need to be native.

~~~
j_r_f
I'd say the one really important thing web is missing is notifications for
when your not on the site. I don't really know how a browser could ever
implement in a similar fashion.

~~~
mydigitalself
This already exists, just not fully on mobile yet, but it's coming.

[http://w3c.github.io/push-api/](http://w3c.github.io/push-api/)

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-
notif...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-
notifications-on-the-open-web)

------
WA
Contraception. Almost everybody needs it. The current solution of flooding the
body with hormones works, but causes side effects.

The pill for men won't make it. My prediction is that we'll have some other
non-hormonal contraception within the next 20-30 years, probably invented by a
startup that wants to disrupt this billion dollar market.

~~~
cr0sh
> The pill for men won't make it.

From what I understand, "they" have already developed this, and trialed it. It
worked great, but for many men it had certain undesirable side-effects, and
for a very few the side-effects weren't good at all. But for most, it worked
well.

The interesting thing? Almost all of the side-effects that were experienced by
the men in the study all sounded exactly like the side-effects women
experience when they are on "the pill"!

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the reason we don't have a male hormonal-
based contraceptive is actually because men can't handle the changes and
problems women have been dealing with for decades.

~~~
viridian
As funny as this anecdote is, the real issue was that it caused a couple of
cases of permanent sterility so the scientists were forced to abandon the
study.

The whole thing is annoying because I've now seen the whole "lol boys can't
handle what girls put themselves through on the pill" from print news, reddit,
buzzfeed, my girlfriend's gynecologist, and now hacker news. It would be great
if male contraception existed, and lots of men would be fine with the side
effects, but permanent sterilization is a whole different ballgame as far as
risk factors go.

~~~
phreanix
Agreed, it's a risk factor women won't willingly accept if it was the case
with their pills.

Also, ballgame, I see what you did there.

------
therealmarv
Note taking done right. Android, iOS, Desktop, Markdown & HTML, easy flat file
format, Web clipper, offline and do this all without wasting whitespace (no
doc editor like Evernote) and good sync and instant search results. <\- NO ONE
is doing this! Closest is maybe Google Keep (seriously it's good at some
points I'm mentioning).

~~~
vlad_p
> do this all without wasting whitespace (no doc editor like Evernote)

What do you mean by this? Do you just mean a raw HTML/markdown editor and a
rendered view?

~~~
therealmarv
I mean that notes (at least for me) tend to be short. What I don't like is
that many note taking systems think that a note needs to be edited like e.g.
an Email or Word document (the Evernote approach). So when I see e.g. 10 notes
I want to see the most of the content of the 10 notes very good and when I go
into one note I don't want to see a whole big word processor with one blank
sheet. Google Keep is doing a good job there, also not bad is e.g. Tiddlywiki.

------
csbartus
Devices as designers

Sooner or later (IoT, AR, VR) we will have to let devices (AI) to assembly the
final user interface.

I imagine something like this: we designers / developers / UI architects are
creating plenty of interconnectable components describing our idea of a
product covering all scenarios and use cases.

Then the device will asemmbly the final UI based on the individual user, and
the device capability.

For example a watch will display something different than a large digital
billboard on a skyscraper.

And everyone of us will see a different design each time we look at a display,
based on our individual digital history (Data mining).

The point is predetermined design must be advanced to on-demand, context
based, liquid design. We let the big picture be assembled by third party, we
focus only to smaller components.

Something like

[http://metamn.io/beat/tomorrowww/](http://metamn.io/beat/tomorrowww/)

------
dtjohnnymonkey
I just read this article today and thought a great idea would be to develop a
platform for simplifying the process for starting up community credit unions.
Kind of like Stripe Atlas but for credit unions. It could benefit a lot of
small communities.

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-
organ...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/2/1/community-organizing-
credit-union)

~~~
dgrealy
Very interesting idea. Pricing seems like the biggest challenge that comes to
mind, but maybe there is a good solution.

------
CM30
I think media and content monetisation is a massive opportunity here. Or in
other words, finding a way for people to get money from their written content
without ads or subscriptions.

This is because the advertising industry is in a bit of a decline at the
moment, and it's likely than in a few years things like AdBlock will make many
ad funded businesses (like media outlets) completely unsustainable. So if
anyone finds a good alternative, it will probably make them rich.

Just... good luck finding said solution, given that we've tried ads,
donations, subscriptions and microtransactions and found that all four have
major problems as far as getting people to actually use them goes. Still, the
opportunity is there for whatever miracle worker figures out a way to make
content profitable again.

~~~
yoshyosh
I wish this was automatic, factored into your browser + existing internet
bill. This way the sites you consume the most content on / get the most from
naturally get some form of compensation automatically

------
adventured
This won't be popular on HN: start aggressively patenting anything and
everything you can around CRISPR. It's dirt cheap to work with both Cas9 and
Cpf1.

Figure out how to use CRISPR to insert or edit genes that we already know help
to make some people practically bullet proof when it comes to cholesterol and
common cardiovascular problems. Patent everything you can around using CRISPR
to fight high cholesterol (the drug market for that is truly massively). Move
fast, right now, while most of the pharma giants are asleep at the wheel (most
of big pharma is a minimum of five years behind the curve, they always try to
buy their way out of it after the fact).

Congratulations, you're now a billionaire.

~~~
GreyGhost
Sure you can do this. You can also set back the development work on these
genes by a long time with someone patenting something they know nothing about
just to get rich from it.

~~~
nojvek
Or probably innovation just doesn't happen in the name of fear. Worse because
of the patent trolls someone ends up releasing targeted crispr viruses
unleashing another black plague

------
lwhalen
Outsourced testing. I can think of a few sites that would pay a pretty penny
to have unit, spec, and acceptance-tests written for their pre-existing code.

~~~
ernestipark
See [https://www.rainforestqa.com/](https://www.rainforestqa.com/), a YC
company. They do some of this.

~~~
nanch
Was definitely interested, clicked through a bunch and wanted to see pricing
and sign up. Unfortunately it's a "contact us for more info" situation, which
is really a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks for the recommendation though.

~~~
hkmurakami
The opaque pricing is a sign that they've moved up the market to target
enterprise. When a company reaches that stage, it's basically telling you, "if
this turns you off, then you won't move the needle for us so we don't want to
talk to you."

~~~
daveguy
> "if this turns you off, then you won't move the needle for us so we don't
> want to talk to you."

Yes. Like Amazon and Google, with their contact us for pricing.

------
simonebrunozzi
Cities. The way cities are designed, built, operated. I am actually trying to
see if I can build a company around this. It's the biggest challenge I can
possibly imagine for me, and I don't know why I haven't given up yet :)

Cities help people connect (in a physical way), and help companies provide
goods and services to them in a more efficient way.

However, cities today are maintained, operated, and enlarged based on legacy.
I think there are huge inefficiencies, and yet it seems that trying to fix
existing ones is a nightmare.

What about NEW ones instead?

I find this extremely interesting. We'll see.

~~~
Synroc
This has been one of my passions too. I recently became a member of Strong
Towns, in which we have a slack group to discuss cities.

There are definitely members looking on how it would to start a company based
on solving cities' problems.

------
ikeboy
I think retail can be improved, and even small improvements can have large
impacts because of the sheer size of the market: US retail sales are in the $5
_trillion_ range yearly, mostly in brick and mortar.

Specific problems:

1\. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with
e-commerce be fixed?

2\. E-commerce doesn't work well on cheap items where shipping cost is
prohibitive. Different companies have tried to solve this in various ways,
with Prime (losing money on cheaper sales in hopes they can reduce logistics
cost and drive larger sales) or Jet (directly giving shipping savings for
ordering multiple items at once). It will be difficult to compete with Prime,
but there has to be an angle that works, Jet found one.

3\. Simpler price comparison. I tried to build the feature I thought should
exist at [https://icanpriceit.com/](https://icanpriceit.com/) as a side
project, but didn't spend the time to properly launch it. I hope some startup
succeeds in that space, I've been watching
[https://wikibuy.com/](https://wikibuy.com/) which is quite similar.

I think there's plenty of room to build the next Amazon or eBay. The fees they
charge third party sellers have been going up over time, if a marketplace was
willing to accept lower fees at first it could help early growth.

~~~
Kalium
> 1\. Why is brick and mortar still so popular, and can any pain points with
> e-commerce be fixed?

One thing I much prefer B&M shopping for is clothing. Sizing is so wildly
variable across brands, and clothing such a tactile thing, that I cannot
completely get away from physical storefronts.

~~~
mthoms
That's a good point. I wonder why the big brands have not gotten together to
create standardized sizing scheme.

~~~
mywittyname
If they did that, they'd have too many sizes. Just look at jeans: most brands
carry 100 or so "sizes", not including variations (tight, slim, regular,
loose, baggy, tapered, straight, etc). With women, it's even worse because
their body types are even more varied. It's easy to end up with 1000+
variations if a store tries to cater to everyone.

Instead brands cater to certain demographics and their sizes are relative to
the body types they try to attract. It's unlikely that a woman who regularly
buys from NY&Company would expect something at Lane Bryant to fit them.

------
whitepoplar
"Kickstarter" for cities. Housing is unaffordable in desirable cities, but
nobody wants to move to less desirable cities, where housing _is_ affordable.
Take a city that is desperate for development, like Detroit, and figure out a
way for a couple thousand people to "pledge" moving to a dense-ish urban area
at a preferential rate.

~~~
maxsilver
I think you have cause/effect mixed up a bit. Those cities are only
"affordable" because people aren't there.

If a couple thousand people all simultaneously buy into an "affordable dense-
ish urban area", that action would make that area un-affordable, and
subsequently create all the same displacement/gentrification/nimby problems
that follow. Your Detroit example is a good one, the dense-ish urban area now
costs around $300-400k, because people already did what you've suggested.
Unless your moving into lower-density mostly-suburban-ish areas in Detroit,
your not really saving any money anymore.

\--

If your going to "Kickstarter" a city, let's make a brand new one. Find a
bunch of empty land (greenfield or brownfield), and build a whole new dense
city from scratch on it. This is easy/cheap to do compared to actual urban
development (it's how all affordable suburban housing already starts), but
just skip the suburb part and go straight from land to tall density, so
there's no existing population to harm, no existing zoning issues to fight, no
existing infrastructure problems to deal with. Go from nothing to 100% modern
on day 1.

You could buy a bunch of land near say (picking a place at random) Hazelwood,
Minnesota. Build your city with dense urban environment to start (enforce your
own density rules, straight to 5+ story buildings). Fund an expension of light
rail, and your just 30 minutes away from MSP airport by train, with direct
flights daily to NYC, SFO, and SEA. And your already on I-35 freeway for
freight.

There's such a shortage for _affordable_ dense urban housing, that if you
could provide affordable density with fast reliable transportation to existing
cities (light rail to the closest major airport), your new city would likely
fill up quickly, and help make these existing cities more affordable too.

~~~
rco8786
I bet you're always the one in brainstorm meetings that says we need to
rewrite everything from scratch, vastly underestimating the amount of work,
bug fixes, and tribal knowledge that went into the existing solution in
addition to the cost of building a new one.

------
xchaotic
Aaccurate 3-d scanning of 3d environments - houses, mines you name it. I think
the tech is there in your pocket and with good software plus very accurate
measurement of location, orientation + panorama/spehrical photo shoots, you
could have very high quality recreations of real world areas - which in turn
could be explored, modified and enjoyed in VR/AR/MR. For example simulating
house refurbishment or furniture purchases, remotely inspecting places to
buy/rent/go on holiday.

The tech is mostly there, but I'm too lazy to put it altogether as I know that
someone with access to more capital will also attack it, sooner or later, not
just startup but IKEA, Airbnb, etc...

~~~
loader
BBC's Italy's Invisible Cities used 3D scanning to showcase areas in three
Italian cities (Naples, Venice, and Florence). Seeing things mapped in 3D made
a world of a difference trying to understand those spaces. It was a great
show.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0881gfb](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0881gfb)

------
algirau
Lithium recycling technology. Electrochemical storage may be a renewable
technology to store energy but the raw materials are not infinite.

------
kul_
QM/MM for fighting antibiotic resistant bacteria.

[http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-
antib...](http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/computer-simulation-antibiotics-
resistance-bacteria-54254/)

------
Lxr
A good native LaTeX editor, with quality on par with modern IDEs (deep
understanding of syntax and semantics, intellisense, etc).

~~~
Sophistifunk
What do you think is the intersection of "needs to do a lot of LaTeX" and
"pays for software" groups? Honest question.

~~~
Lxr
Why do you think there is a small overlap? The first group is very large
(almost all academics in CS/math/physics departments around the world) and is
generally affiliated with universities that pay for software.

~~~
Sophistifunk
I didn't really know who the main users would be, that's why I asked :)

------
logicallee
By far (as in, by a mutiple of approximately 10,000) the biggest untapped
opportunity is disrupting the geography of worldwide startups, meaning venture
capital and so forth. Startups and ideas wither on the vine and shutter
(close) due to lack of access to the startup ecosystem on equal terms: these
startups often could produce billions in value in their respective markets and
then worldwide. Further, this can be bootstrapped as many startups would agree
to pay back to the community (through investment at high valuations) in
exchange for investment today. You do not need access to billions today to
solve this problem tomorrow. This isn't a billion, ten billion, or one hundred
billion dollar problem. If you clock back from 2060 to 2017 using a discounted
net present value analysis (if you do it correctly) you will find that this is
a 10 trillion dollar (today's dollars) segment or in other words the
equivalent of not one, ten, or one hundred Airbnb's: but, one thousand of
them. (For comparison or as a sanity check on my number, worldwide economic
GDP in 2016 was 75 trillion[1] so the number I quote is 14.2% of a single
year's GDP - or the total value the world produces in just over 7 weeks. So
these 7 weeks of economic output are what I quote as a discounted value from a
total market extending over the next 50 years, worldwide, discounted to today.
It is a conservative number.)

We live in the dark ages of startup capital investment, and it's as hard to
get investment as it was to get an education in the 1400s: you had to be rich,
privileged, then go to a center of University learning. Geographically
speaking, it is as bad today. Today, you have to go to silicon valley (as in,
physically drag your body there) or one of a few other major startup centers
(which give much poorer results), then somehow network your way into getting
introductions. it is like being a scientist in the fifteenth century. enormous
privilege and very difficult to achieve, with no clear path. Disrupting these
geographic facts of capital investment and access to the startup and equity
culture and markets is massive - when this starts to change, it will
completely change the face of the planet in every way, for everyone.

If you want to make the most massive disruption you can make in your lifetime,
disrupt the geography of startup ecosystems.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\))

------
cdvonstinkpot
Political Science & Democracy Management

AFAIK there's little to no innovation in this field aside from the occasional
electronic voting machine, whose security may or may not be totally un-
hackable.

In a day & age where the internet reaches every home, & there's a web browser
in nearly everyone's pocket, it shouldn't be that difficult to effectively
discern the will of the people. But we're still depending on manual polling,
which as the recent US election has shown, is woefully inaccurate. Why are
these still done on the phone? Why do people still have to physically go to a
neighborhood voting location? Why are elected officials still allowed to make
empty promises while campaigning with no follow-through once they're in
office?

These are solvable problems which I'd imagine technology can indeed address.

~~~
Kalium
You're absolutely right! Democracy is critically important, and discerning the
will of the governed shouldn't be this hard. It boggles the mind!

Yet, computer security is _hard_. Like, holy shit, all the problems of
physical security combined with all the problems of network security.
Decentralized paper balloting limits things to just the relatively-well-
understood physical side while limiting the scope for the damage of a breach.
It turns out there are distinct advantages to this approach that justify it
over something web-based.

Elected officials making empty promises is a social problem. Technology can't
help us there.

~~~
cdvonstinkpot
I disagree that empty promises isn't addressable with technology. Thinking of
smart contracts as a potential solution here.

~~~
Kalium
You're right again! Smart contracts are abstractly a perfect fit for ensuring
compliance with arbitrary promised behavior.

The current state of affairs is such that smart contracts are viable for
things readily machine-verified. This does not apply to all things that might
be promised by a politician today. This problem could be resolved by voting,
but now we've reintroduced all the problems of politics and reinvented the
Sierra Club / NRA / etc.

Additionally, it only matters if voter opinion is swayed by a failure to
comply with the contract. At this moment in time, voters generally reserve the
right to change their minds at any time and for any reason. It is possible
that convincing voters to hang their votes entirely on a smart contract might
prove challenging.

------
pgroves
Health Insurance / Hospital.

I'm old enough that I now go to the doctor more frequently than I used to and
it's a mess. A health insurance company that could reliably allow a user to
change their address on a website would be competitive. Having all of your
medical procedures and orders accessible through a simple CRUD app would be a
threat to a lot of multi-billion dollar companies. It's still all done through
phone calls and faxes and there are lots of mistakes and it's hugely
inefficient. I went to the ER last year and got 5 different bills from
different departments of the same hospital. The online payment portal doesn't
work unless you call them to set it up. That's not the hospital network I
usually go to - my usual provider is probably worse.

~~~
pdq
What will improve the medical industry in the US dramatically is transparent
pricing.

When both consumers and providers have no idea how much the product or service
they are using actually costs, there is no way to control costs (ie
competition, delaying the service, using an alternative product/service, etc).
Thus our prices have spiraled out of control.

For example, delivering a baby is an incredibly common procedure, known months
in advance, but with opaque pricing paid by third parties, there is no
incentive to price shop, nor is that straightforward for a consumer to do. The
current average price of a routine delivery is over $8k [1].

[1] [http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/costs-of-delivering-babies-
va...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/costs-of-delivering-babies-vary-widely-
in-us-california-cities-most-expensive.html)

~~~
jsymolon
> there is no incentive to price shop,

Again there is NO single item that will solve the "healthcare" issue. Voodoo
Free Market ...

You don't price shop. Your OB/GYN has admitting privileges to 1-2 hospitals in
the area. You go to the one that your OB/GYN is AT and is closest to you.

When the Anaesthesiologist trainee _fucks_ up your epidural, you're going to
whip out your phone to call another ? Not fucking likely. You're passed out at
that point.

Fucking Christ people, you have a relationship with your Doctor.

"Come down to Joe's Oil, Tire and Baby Delivery Shop" $19.95 oil changes,
$59.95 Baby deliveries. Additional charges may apply. (including emergency
room access due to failed deliveries)

~~~
conductr
Yes and no. Outpatient procedures could and should be price shopped. Do you
have a relationship with the lady who draws your blood? The MRI tech? Not
usually, or not a strong enough one that would cause changing providers a high
friction experience.

Birth is a perfect example to make your point of an existing, usually long
term, relationship because of the typical women's health regimen. More usual
however is you finding you need a procedure (maybe soon but not emergency),
you then ask for a referral to a specialist or ask friends and do google
searches to try to get a sense that the specialist isn't a quack. You could
price shop at that point. Instead, the system is built upon referrals and
kickbacks. Although, kickbacks are illegal now so they form physician groups
which is basically a kickback in the form of profit sharing.

------
koopuluri
Fresh air. It's tough to breathe in many cities across the world, especially
in Asia.

I'd pay a lot (probably more than I would for my laptop / car) for a tool that
would help me breathe fresh air in the midst of a polluted environment.

Of course, a long term solution would involve actually reducing pollution, but
there are enough of us suffering from a lack of fresh air, that a short-term
solution would be greatly valuable.

~~~
overcast
You can pay a lot less, and go live in the "country" somewhere. Tons of fresh
air out here.

------
9erdelta
Collecting boxes and packing materials. Seriously, I am overflowing with
pristine boxes and packing material courtesy of Amazon prime. Certainly there
has to be a business surrounding the collection of these materials and selling
them back to Amazon et. al.

~~~
enknamel
Huh you'd think UPS, etc would offer that service.

------
Animats
Figure out some way to reliably get an IP connection between two any devices
without help from a central server or service. Kill Skype, etc.

~~~
mypalmike
It is impossible to set up a peer-to-peer connection between two devices on
symmetric NAT, often used by mobile carriers (or at least it was last time I
looked into doing so a few years ago). A STUN server can be used to initiate
between other forms of NAT, and TURN can act as a passive full-time
intermediary, but there's no way to avoid some sort of central server in many
cases.

~~~
zurn
Since then mobile carriers have started doing IPv6 in a big way.

~~~
Animats
I understand that T-Mobile supports handset to handset IPv6 connections. So
that's a place to start.

------
benologist
Many countries can't participate on iOS, Play, Amazon, Stripe etc. People in
many countries jump through hoops just to use e.g. PayPal.

Apple recently removed apps from Iranian developers who were circumventing
restrictions by pretending to be from another country.

Millions of other developers can't participate in online markets we take for
granted, unless someone facilitates it for them.

------
jdironman
Leased CGI sets / models / scenes.

Building full fledged models / generations of popular cities and places and
leasing them to film producers. Its cheaper for them to lease than it would be
to hire full devs and designers to start from scratch..I know there is some
're-use' in place by these companies such as pixar and disney. Re-use is not
what i am talking about though. I am talking about movies like transformers /
godzilla / etc which need on point rendering of actual cities and places.

Just a thought I had the other day when reading how film companies were
struggling with growing movie budgets and diminishing returns.

~~~
VLM
Look into games. Imagine some GTA-like game set in actual Chicago, or
minimally edited Chicago to remove all trademarks anyway.

~~~
jdironman
Right, I completely forgot about the gaming industry.

------
bikamonki
Here's my wishlist, not sure if there is a market for it:

\- Twitter w/out fake accounts.

\- a marketplace that uses Facebook as a vehicle for engagement/promotion but
which operates independently.

\- Secure SMS for 2FA tokens

\- Android w/out Play Services

\- Schema-based email

\- Stripe for the rest of the World

~~~
fizerkhan
For me, I desperately need "Stripe for the rest of the World".

~~~
janklimo
Is Stripe Atlas not an option where you are based?

~~~
pmtarantino
Sometimes you need Stripe for a side project or stuff like that. Atlas is
focused in large corporations and, besides, you have to pay to be
incorporated.

------
gavanwoolery
Biggest: largest, most ambitious, most lucrative, riskiest, highest impact? I
have one that meets all of those criteria. Ditch legacy and redefine one
language/OS to rule them all. Give app stores the middle finger. Throw the web
browser away. Throw away antiquated build systems. Create a universal,
minimal, extensible, and sensible layout and rendering engine. Create an
imperative language as fast as c yet portable at the code level. Oh, and
expect no one to invest in your madness. :) Be Steve Jobs and throw away the
floppy disk and CD ROM before anyone else.

~~~
edraferi
OK, so say you do that. What advantages do you think you could realize through
this ground up rewrite?

~~~
gavanwoolery
Look at the millions of complaints filed about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.
There is huge room for improvement in the way we write native and web
applications - the fact that we still make a distinction signals its own
problem. We can do better, and there will always be room for more innovation
and improvement.

~~~
vcanales
'From the ground up' doesn't always equate better. In this case, why not just
innovate and improve on the tools that are already in use?

~~~
gavanwoolery
I agree. Similarly, keeping around tech with several decades of built-up cruft
can also hurt your cause when you are trying to build an elegant, concise, and
predictable system. :) You can keep putting a new coat of paint on 1950
Ferrari, even regularly changing out its parts, but it will never match
something designed from the ground up with modern tech. The web browser, by
nature of its spontaneous birth, ill-thought-out design, and insistence on
backwards compatibility places many bent nails in the foundation. Adding on
new layers to an old thing almost inevitably results in leaky abstraction.

I have projects that are 10 years old. The code isn't unusable, but I know I
can do better. Sometimes adapting the old code just makes it ugly, hard to
maintain, and error prone. So when it makes sense, I usually start fresh.

------
sureshn
I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on
stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins
for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the
tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in
Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code
, the next tab he should be able to see a CI build kicked off and the
following tab a docker container which is ready to host the built new code
commit for QA.

~~~
wolfgang42
GitLab is doing this. They currently have:

\- Issue tracking (jira)

\- Issue kanban (trello)

\- Git repository

\- Chat, via bundled Mattermost (gitter/slack)

\- CI (jenkins)

\- Docker registry

Plus, they're planning on adding even more features. We have a self-hosted
instance at work and I use it for pretty much everything other than email and
actually writing code.

~~~
sytse
Thanks, this is exactly what we're doing. The complete scope is detailed on
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope)

By the way, we see Mattermost as an alternative for Slack but not for Gitter.
One is team chat and the other is 'project' chat with different requirements.

~~~
wolfgang42
Mattermost is the one thing listed above that I don't use. What do you see as
the differences between team and project chat? I've always seen Gitter as chat
with one room per repo; on the other hand, I've also never had a team chat.

~~~
sytse
Project chat is easier to enter. Anyone can join.

------
Tepix
Provide a paid subscription to Android updates for old popular phones. Don't
add new features (unless it's easy), just make sure they remain secure.

Phones are lasting longer and longer, the main reason to get a new one is no
longer that it's too slow, it's the lack of updates. It's very wasteful.

~~~
TulliusCicero
The problem here is that the people who are actually aware and concerned about
security updates (or lack thereof) are the technologically literate who
upgrade to a new phone fairly frequently.

The target market that you want to secure is generally either unaware of or
apathetic towards security concerns (until they get hit).

~~~
Tepix
But the people who are knowledgeable also give recommendations to their
friends and family who want something that just works.

If you can buy a 1-2 year old phone for $100-$200 (without contract) and pay
an extra $10 per year to receive security updates, that's a pretty good deal.

~~~
homakov
My recommendations to use full disk encryption etc go ignored.

------
mrschwabe
The stock market (ready for disruption).

There is a new generation of investors who are not interested in the 'old
stock market' but who are instead looking for equity investment that can offer
the efficiency, integrity and anonymity that cryptocurrency provides.

~~~
dx034
A good example for anonymous investments are bearer bonds. They're illegal in
most countries (in their purest form) because they're a prime tool for money
laundering. It won't be different for any other anonymous investment.

Also, stock markets are by far more efficient than bitcoin, especially when it
comes to larger investments. A reason why algo traders are so widespread is
because it's extremely cheap to buy/sell stocks if you're an institutional.

------
shaunrussell
Replacing real estate agents and brokers.

Most of the value they provide can be replaced by (or already is) technology.
The only thing keeping them afloat is regulation.

~~~
joeax
Disrupting that industry would be tough. Zillow came close, but the industry
in general is so protective that anything perceived as a minor threat is
blackballed. My bro-in-law RE agent bashes Zillow all the time.

I think baby steps are essential. A good first step is a broker-licensed
startup with self-serve/AI agents. Why do I need an agent to look at houses
when I can just find a house myself? The listing side can remote-unlock a
house for me to look at. The buyer then keeps most of the commission.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Would the unique value proposition for the buyer to use this new service be
that they would get a rebate on purchasing this house through this new
service?

~~~
joeax
Perhaps at first, but the eventual goal is to get rid of the expensive
commissions altogether.

------
xer
I believe there are three good indicators to look at:

\- Infrastructure, these can also be called enablers. E.g. fiber accelerates
Internet usage, AWS drastically accelerates SaaS businesses. Over time this
acceleration will also happen in e.g. biotech and such introductions are to
look for. If the infrastructure is missing, its likely gonna take some more
time. Success stories in this category would be Spotify, Netflix and most
apps.

\- Accumulators is similar to a network effect. Information, money, users and
customers are orbiting certain networks and companies. These instances are in
their domains black holes and it's mostly a bad idea trying to restrain or
compete. The opportunity is to harness the momentum. A success story in this
category would be Buzzfeed.

\- Automation, we are living in the golden age of automation. Essentially it's
just to evaluate all repetitive tasks finding those with the highest value to
the lowest investment.

~~~
chatmasta
Adding to this, we often see a pattern of Innovation -> Commoditization ->
Aggregation.

Cloud computing is currently in the commoditization phase. The next step is
aggregation.

There will be an opportunity for a company that successfully "abstracts away"
the many different cloud providers, creating a single interface to a computing
marketplace with supply spanning all providers.

There are a few companies trying to do this that I've seen. Can't remember the
names offhand, but I know packet.net partners with one of them to sell their
excess capacity.

------
miguelrochefort
1\. Capsule-style rooms for <$200/month

2\. Ketogenic diet cafeterias

3\. Semantic programming + smart contracts + automated UI design

4\. Social score (trust, reliability, predictability)

5\. Mechanical Turk / AI powered object recognition

~~~
pards
There was a Black Mirror episode called Nosedive that partially covered the
topic of Social Score.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive)

------
fgpwd
Anything related to lucid dreams? Think of the ability to utilize the 8 hours
of sleep for something productive or recreational. It will take atleast a
decade before VR catches up with the level of detail you get in lucid dreams.
Something that makes them more accessible for people, so that everyone could
get this "me time" every night would be amazing.

If you want to try, just keep on asking yourself if you are awake throughout
the day. Try reading something, it's difficult to read something on dreams. Or
try using electricity switches, they normally don't work in a dream. Sooner or
later you would find while doing this that you are in a dream. From there, sky
is literally the limit. Imagine whatever you want, fly across mountains,
travel in spaceships, etc. till the time you wake up.

~~~
bbayer
Lucid dreaming is not part of normal sleep cycle. It reduces deep sleep time
and most people report that after long time with lucid dreams they feel
exhausted and they feel like they haven't slept at all. So, in the longterm it
is harmful.

------
SQL2219
Imagine if you had a nuclear powered aircraft carrier with a desalination
plant on it. You could sail from country to country and fill 'em up with fresh
water.

~~~
mgav
It may not be able to produce more water than a single city requires:

Charleston, SC uses 50 million gallons of water per day*

For reference, that's about 75 Olympic size pools (at 660,000 gallons per).

* source: [https://sc.water.usgs.gov/infodata/wateruse.html](https://sc.water.usgs.gov/infodata/wateruse.html)

~~~
SQL2219
Well I wasn't thinking about pulling up to a US city, more like Chad, Somalia,
etc. They'd be thrilled with 1 gallon per head per day.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
How is an aircraft carrier going to get to Chad?

~~~
SQL2219
parachute?

------
kevin2r
Person to person IT support. A service where I could get help with my
computer, but not from a company that tries to sell me junk software. I let a
person with IT skills connect to my pc while interacting by chat or
microphone, I pay them by time spent helping me.

~~~
yeukhon
There's MouseSquad or local IT. A lot of computer problems tend to be more
hardware or require reboot or physically attaching disks/usb to the machine
for troubleshooting.

~~~
kevin2r
Mousesquad has shutdown, that's the first google result. I don't see results
for localit related to computer.

About your comment, imagine that the app can know my location, and pair me
with a local expert, if the expert has to go to the other person home to fix
their computer the price increases.

~~~
yeukhon
I meant geek squad at best buy. I still remember the old mouse squad learning
program (but not entirely dead it's just launched with a different
initiative). Thanks for correcting.

~~~
kevin2r
Do you see the name "Best buy", how can I work for geeksquad? I mean something
more like Uber, where everybody that knows how to drive can become a taxi
driver in an hour.

~~~
csydas
I understand your focus here, but I'm not sure how you'd establish consumer
confidence. Driving at least comes with a state issued certificate that you
are capable of driving the car, and it's a bare minimum requirement. Obviously
other factors will come into what makes a good taxi driver, but the bare
essentials can be quickly verified.

I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide
the same baseline of consumer trust; peek on craigslist and you'll find dozens
of computer service postings for even a small town, and in large cities it
gets even bigger. I agree that it's probably an area that could benefit from a
loosely centralized provider, but adoption seems like it will be very
difficult.

~~~
kevin2r
"I'm not sure what equivalent you could have for computer service to provide
the same baseline of consumer trust"

Have you heard of IT certifications?, each vendor provides certifications
based of their technologies, Microsoft has a lot of different certification
programs.

If the client only wants to know the basic usage of a program, the service
could pair it with another person not certified. If it's a company requiring
for help or a developer in their home, he could request for "advanced service"
and then a certified person could help in the specific field of the problem.

You can have a reputation system, with badges that determine how the person
has being helpful, reviews from the clients etc.

------
listentojohan
Dispersion of research. I find that research and knowledge derived from it,
could be shared much more effectively with industry / the public.

------
johngalt
Legal tech is ripe. E-discovery is what everyone is paying attention to, but
no one has got it right so far. Additionally there are many other areas with
opportunities that aren't getting as much attention. Basically take on
anything LexNex is doing now.

------
bra-ket
Build cheaper houses

~~~
TulliusCicero
The main reason 'housing' is getting more expensive is zoning regulations +
limited supply of land in desirable areas. You can still find cheap houses in
places that not many people want to live in.

------
Grue3
A truly customizable browser for power users. Kind of like Firefox is
currently, but not about to render most of its useful add-ons obsolete.

------
jbhatab
A light field projector so we can get sharp images projected on any surface in
any lighting. That would be huge for all types of applications that hinge on
projectors. Imagine smart boards but in any area projected from all types of
objects.

------
cel1ne
Design refugee-camps. Many of them gonna be needed in 25 years.

~~~
daveguy
Like pop-up city/shelters?

~~~
cel1ne
I thought about "temporary" cities that are actually gonna stay.

How to do efficiently provide medical services. How to lay it out so that
violence won't spread etc.

------
LeanderK
Easy, personal access to cloud computing. I have a macbook and am pretty
satisfied with it. But a problem is, that in order to learn data-science/deep
learning i need a beefy GPU/CPU and everything else. I could buy a desktop,
but i am a student and not much at home, also in the age of cloud computing
this seems silly. Also the upfront investment for a student is not negligible.

I want really easy, flexible instances that are super, super simple to
activate. Something like click website -> click start GPU with tensorflow
preinstalled -> upload & run my python.

Ideally per minute-billing and super, super simple to set-up and ssh into.

~~~
VLM
So you want rollapp to add some kind of python IDE. Could happen. Works well
enough with emacs. Price is not too ridiculous. You'd have to work top down
and given some sort of python IDE you'd need to install your tensorflow stuff.

Going bottom up a lot of people for a very long time (decade+ now) have been
using services like linode as a personal server, here's your ubuntu install
now now put "whatever" on it and run it remotely.

------
gwbas1c
A better DVR for cord cutters. The Tivo has a ridiculous monthly fee, and the
Tablo is garbage. HDHomerun's DVR software is decent, but in its current form
I don't see it as something I'd sell to my grandparents.

~~~
kingnothing
Plex. [https://www.plex.tv/features/dvr/](https://www.plex.tv/features/dvr/)

------
ende
None of these are all that flashy, but one could probably find a nice niche:

\- Most bars/restaurants still use Aloha for point of sale system. Surely
someone can update this concept.

\- A kitchen inventory system that doesn't rely on manual data entry, but
rather barcode readers and electronic weight sensors to maintain an up to date
kitchen inventory.

\- In biotech, the state of off-the-shelf LIMS (laboratory information
management systems) is pitiful. Granted, it's a tough problem to generalize,
but every solution out there is clunky.

\- A UI builder platform for non-frontend-devs to create interfaces to REST
APIs through drag-and-drop form elements.

------
eastindex
Mechanical Turk for Programming tasks would be great to see.

~~~
asenna
Me and a friend of mine built something similar (think Upwork + StackOverflow)
as a side project a while back - [https://www.ladr.io/](https://www.ladr.io/)

Unfortunately we couldn't put in as much time back then. But I am thinking of
picking up the project again. Any feedback would be appreciated.

------
sputknick
ML in CRUD apps. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be sophisticated. I
think you could do a lot to make basic business tasks more efficient with some
basic decision trees.

~~~
parasitid
madlib

------
schappim
Function as a service (like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure
Functions) for Ruby. None of these natively support Ruby ^1 ^2. It's mind
boggling that this is the case, especially considering how many Rails/Sinatra
apps there are!

^1 Sure there is hacks for getting Ruby running on them, but no native support

^2 Yes I know about Ironworker, from iron.io, but they're going a dockerized
and up market and don't even display pricing any more. :(

------
skynode
While we seek out new areas that are ripe for disruption, I'm particularly
excited about what MapD is doing using GPUs in analytics.

Disclaimer: I don't work for MapD.

------
imd23
Simplify worldwide taxing, company creation, money routing?

~~~
_98fj
That is not a technology problem. Every tried to get a law passed?

~~~
Sunset
What about a unified interface which takes into account each sub-
jurisdiction's arcane rules and gives you advice how to handle things?

Of course you would be paying to keep the product up to date with local laws.

~~~
_98fj
That sounds like a good idea, but don't underestimate just how complex law and
tax is in each country. You need hundreds of lawyers to sift through this.
There are so many law and accounting consultants for a reason.

I once met an SAP-contractor who was paid 5 digit amounts for implementing
1000 loc modules that was required because a tiny paragraph of some pension-
law in a single country was updated.

------
RantyDave
TV's that work. I have the most god awful rats nest of cables in the corner of
my living room - someone needs to make the iMac of TV's.

------
deegles
I'm hoping it will be voice application development. I think it will take off
once the 3rd platform announces. It will be Siri or Cortana.

------
vasilakisfil
A global VOIP service that is based on open standards. Or an open social
network, also based on open standards. Both should be extensible.

~~~
ValentineC
> _A global VOIP service that is based on open standards._

Is SIP [1] not open?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol)

~~~
vasilakisfil
SIP is open, but none uses it :/ That's why I feel pushing for open standards
is the key: it will allow you to install any voip app as long as it is
compatible (follows the open standards).

------
jokoon
A binary, pre-parsed version of HTML with its smartphone browser. Maybe with
python scripting?

Anyway something that would make the web on phones great.

~~~
sah2ed
On a philosophical level, what you are asking for is what Google's AMP
(Accelerated Mobile Pages) was designed to solve except that this will leave
us with a web much broken than how we started.

~~~
jokoon
Broken, why?

~~~
sah2ed
Previous discussions on HN:

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722590)

------
jkaljundi
Wonder what could change in the areas of online recruitment and candidate
sourcing? It's a nice business because the business demand is always there -
just provide the candidates. Still after Indeed/Simplyhired and Glassdoor, no
major innovation besides some niche engineer scraping/sourcing tech. WHat
could be done there?

~~~
mgav
I'm not a recruiter, but I have a startup for matching candidates and jobs on
criteria other than what appears on resumes and LinkedIn, but it's hard to get
much candidate volume. Even if (a huge "if") I'm right, and this is a much
better way to match, it doesn't mean the world will change form what's
"working" (or at least familiar) and adapt a new approach. Internal recruiters
are often extremely busy and lots of new startups do a nice job of
streamlining their work.

~~~
yoshyosh
Sounds like the classic 10x problem. Switching costs are so high that your
solution needs to be 10x and/or you find an underserved piece of the market to
start

------
marcosdumay
I'm not a VC, but I see this huge thing: Popularizing large-scale
opportunities.

I mean, there is a huge amount of investments that small and medium business
all around the world do not do because they don't have enough scale to get a
good ROI from them. And they most often lack that scale because there's a
labor cost within that investment that doesn't vary with business size. If you
reduced the non-elastic labor cost, you'd normally open up a market that grows
exponentially with that cost reduction.

Now, there are all kinds of ways to go after this. In theory, that's the most
obvious huge application of an AI, but there are simpler avenues for that,
like standardizing things, mass-selling things that currently require
personalization, creating high productivity tools, or just pushing some prices
down and hoping for the best (what may be the greatest way to spend VC money).

~~~
vtange
Going to be devil's advocate here, but if a business has to be large scale to
have a good ROI, then it should be reworking its business plan so that it
profits at smaller scales. We can't just simply pump capital into all
businesses assuming they will actually profit at a higher scale -> That's the
"if you build it, they will come" philosophy, and we have plenty of examples
of that not working.

~~~
Aeolun
Amazon

------
LouisSayers
This is a bit broad, but essentially there are issues that we have in society
that end up costing tax payers, and individuals a lot of money, or are simply
really inefficient. Education is one such thing, but you could also branch out
into other issues such as theft, health care, environmental issues.

You can see that there are certain companies that are helping to tackle these
issues in various roundabout ways, but I believe that there is big opportunity
here, and it's kind of easy to quantify these issues, which makes it easy to
sell solutions.

Sorry if this sounds very broad and generic, but I promise if you sit on this
idea, and take just a single societal issue, once you start to dig a bit
deeper you'll see opportunities jump out.

~~~
pjc50
> Education [...] health care, environmental issues.

All of those are public goods/tragedy of the commons issues operating in
highly political regulated environments. Very difficult for a startup to make
a difference there in a way that can make a return.

Theft on the other hand is gradually being diminished by technology: the same
omnisurveillance of always-on IoT devices makes it easier to remote-brick them
or find their location if they're stolen. The problem shifts to hacking and
ransomware.

~~~
LouisSayers
The barriers in place are reasons why they're good areas to innovate.

It may be difficult, but that's all part of the game.

Also on theft - not everything is an iPhone, and I don't believe tracking is
very prevalent just yet. There's plenty of opportunity here that's currently
left untouched. I'm less thinking about petty crime and more about burglaries
/ theft of high value goods (boats, cars etc).

------
vayarajesh
I think the field of 'Agriculture' is untapped and can be / should be more
advanced

------
mehdym
Politics. Current technologies allow implementation of direct democracy.
people can cast their votes on every matter to their representatives. It can
simply start with a voting app for smaller institutions and eventually
transform the congress as we know it.

------
contingencies
Food. So much waste in transport, spoilage, excess out of season consumption,
etc. Also a very effective means of direct charity. We are trying a new
approach at [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/)

------
deepnotderp
A method for semiconductor startups, especially in analog to tape out on the
leading nodes.

Things that could expedite this:

Better affordable EDA tools (maybe even open source? startups that succeed and
become self-sufficient would pay big bucks for customization and support).
Especially for analog!

Some sort of business model which pays for masks, such as perhaps taking a
percentage of the money in exchange for a MLM mask. This could be something
that a mask work company does. Another related but orthogonal startup
idea(albeit much harder than an app like snapchat)would be to develop a
maskless lithography technique for cutting edge nodes, such as electron beam
lithography.

------
nareen4768
I think Agricultural sector in India is largely untapped by startup revolution
despite being a major force in IT & Software development. It is very very
tough nut to crack and majority of farmers in India are not very educated.

------
chphipps
Transportation.

Half of the energy used every day, worldwide, is used on transportation (cars,
trains etc.). But is this energy well spent? I have seen first-hand, and so
have you, that people spend their mornings unhappily commuting to work, school
etc.

This needs to be changed, and given how fast technology has been advancing in
recent years - change is coming sooner rather than later when it comes to
transportation.

Great question by the way, have a look through YC's RFC list.
[https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#vrar)

------
palidanx
I think there are a lot of grants start-ups could take advantage of. In
particular there is one about promoting farmer's markets (note you basically
have to be a non-profit entity to apply)

[https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/fmpp](https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/fmpp)

And I noticed all of the previous winners were other farmer's markets managers
expanded their current market. It would be nice to see some new way of helping
the underserved community get food.

So examples I've seen are ideas are mini markets at bus stops.

------
skynode
We need to simplify the whole lifecycle of data management. It is still
considerably complex. We'll see an accelerated revolution in other areas such
as machine learning when this simplification is complete.

~~~
yeukhon
I am not sure what kind of data and what kind of data management you are
referring to. But from my own perspective, data management is not always a
technology problem. Data management should be addressed top-down, with
business owning the data quality. Technology should be used to help identify
and correct data issues.

~~~
skynode
'Top-down' is actually why data management is still the way it is. Our
handling of the primitives (think bottom-up approach) that build up to how
things are structured at the higher level is still subpar at best, resulting
in the massive inconsistencies, scaling issues and data integrity problems we
face daily. Neurons (near-atomic components), from the biological sciences are
still being compared analogously with more complex data structures in
computing, raw grapes and wine style. Per being a technology problem, the
question was about area/market segment requiring a breath of fresh air, not
particularly what technology needs to be deployed.

~~~
yeukhon
Top-down means the top is responsible for data quality's failure. Engineering
can only build what the business anticipated to get, but in the end, human
needs to be the one driving the mandate. When you are looking at enterprise
data management, with many data format and global business, with many legacy
systems in place, data management is not possible without a full commitment
from the top. Heads of each business division has to be responsible for the
shit their department produced. Whenever engineering shouts "data management"
the business will just leave that to the engineering folks to build automated
system, but who is actually looking after the data? Machines doesn't know what
they are doing - someone is coding the expectation, that's all. But data
management is dynamic. You can't just have an engineer shouts "this stinks".
The business needs to own the shout and the mandate.

------
z3t4
Some sort of sonar/x-ray to see what's in the ground before digging. Ever
wanted to make a hole and then you hit a big rock ... Or when plowing down
fiber, or for calculating the costs for doing so.

~~~
cr0sh
You must mean something cheap, portable, relatively small, etc - because
ground penetrating radar is a thing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-
penetrating_radar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar)

I could see something that could be "attached" to a cell phone (via bluetooth
or such), attached to a stick or such (like a metal detector) - would be
useful. Sonar would probably be the cheapest way, but the power requirements
would be fairly large (at least as much as what's needed for a fish-finder, I
would imagine).

Hmm - gotta give some thought to this!

------
ilaksh
Doesn't seem like that many groups have really both studied the existing AGI
research _and_ are seriously trying to apply the latest NN developments like
GANs to (virtually) embodied AGI.

~~~
nharada
This isn't really a startup idea, this is more of a basic research idea, and
one that's years away at that.

------
Roshmos
The utilities industry, industrial IoT, smart grids, and "Industry
4.0"...These will be the next innovation areas in my opinion.

------
Huhty
Traditional blogging.

Hence why we're working on improving the blogging experience that hasn't
changed and/or improved much in almost 2 decades.

Our "manifesto" explains it in full here:
[http://blogenhancement.com/?to=manifesto](http://blogenhancement.com/?to=manifesto)

------
Findeton
I'm going to say the obvious: VR. Really, there will be an explosion in VR
sells and when it happens it will be too late to be there. I don't think it's
going to be a fluff this time, we just need the right killer application and I
know what's going to be.

~~~
kozak
The big question is where is money in VR (except for entertainment).

~~~
michael_bluth
Training

------
sAbakumoff
I can't resist

"By wearing this standard ear-bud headphone, modified with a small
piezoelectric sensor, the user can control their phone solely with their
neural impulses. Point, click, drag, even type...all using only
brainwaves.Think it...and it happens."

~~~
mosuk
Silicon Valley?

~~~
sAbakumoff
Sure :)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE)

------
frankydp
Small and Regional government decision making and administration tools.

\-- Geo-spatial \-- Tax analysis \-- Real property automation (a dozen
different workflows) \-- Permit automation and analysis(multiple workflows)
\-- Licensing automation and analysis

------
vinitagr
ChatBots: One big opportunity that i can see is the rise of chatbots on
popular messaging platforms. It is going to bring the tech advances to a lot
more people in a much easier way.

~~~
pyromine
Question: I've seen a large amount of hype around chat bots, but is there any
evidence that "normal" people really use these for anything more than novelty,
excluding the realm of Amazon echo et al.

~~~
lacampbell
Completely anecdotal - a non-programmer at my work used a chat bot provided by
their ISP to help them with some internet connectivity problems. I was
surprised too.

I might postulate that programmers have more of an aversion to chatbots than
the general public. Presumably because we tried one of the famous general
purpose ones at some point - then were disappointed when we failed to make it
understand why humans cry and why it is something they could never do.

------
abvdasker
True P2P social networking. No ads since there will be little infra to
support. Solves major privacy concerns when data is decentralized and not
monetized.

------
aashishkoirala
House service/maintenance/repair. Severe lack of professionalism and customer-
service-orientedness there. Serious disruption needed.

------
bitwize
Asphalt.

~~~
cel1ne
What do you mean?

~~~
dredmorbius
It's a concrete example, where the rubber hits the road, that facilitates
commerce and exchange, used the world over.

Genius!

------
aaron695
Find something that works ok in the US and export it to another country where
it doesn't exist yet.

> market segment - Non English speaking

------
spacetraveler
Some ideas:

1) Post-quantum encryption.

2) Desalination.

3) Storing kynetic energy.

4) Echo/acoustic mapping (inspired in bats) system for blind people.

5) Quantum computer chips operating at room temperature.

Thoughts?

~~~
Lanthanide
Desalination is definitely a big one, innovation here may be needed to head
off major ecological/humanitarian catastrophes.

Desalination itself isn't hard, keeping it affordable is.

Between ill-advised agricultural ventures in the past few decades and clumsy
regulation here in the GCC, groundwater deposits are draining frighteningly
fast. Desalination is just too expensive as it is since it's directly linked
to hydrocarbon prices and deposits.

------
NurAzhar
The maritime industry specifically bunker fuel

Use blockchain

------
rini17
Handheld (spectrometry?) scanner for food - check for most common cases of
mold, toxins, contaminants.

~~~
roberdam
Check this one
[https://www.consumerphysics.com/](https://www.consumerphysics.com/), I
already have one.

~~~
richard___
Does this give an accurate calorie count just by visually scanning food

~~~
daveguy
No.

------
metaphorm
New web browser that is legacy tech compatible (i.e. HTML, JS, CSS) but also
natively supports new options for scripting and styling. I feel like JS/CSS in
particular are just not what we should settle for. We've grown accustom to
working with them but I think there is a lot of possibility for better front-
end technology in the future.

------
pizza
Multiplying the value of bitcoin.

------
Torkel
iPhone was released 10 years ago. We have insanely more capable screens,
cpu:s, gpu:s, sensors. Find what's next and you will make a dent in the
universe.

------
sparkzilla
Interesting that no-one here mentions fake news.

------
uptownhr
Stop paying high rent and move out of the city center. This not only saves the
business money but every single employee that also doesn't have to pay high
rent.

------
husamia
help large inefficient organizations reinvent their structure

------
luzia19
such a great qn. what about health intervention for elderly?

------
realworldview
Airbnb for clothes.

Uber shoes.

~~~
mccolin
It's higher fashion, which is perhaps the limiting factor, but Rent the Runway
was "Airbnb for clothes" pretty well:
[https://www.renttherunway.com/](https://www.renttherunway.com/)

------
jhylau
international markets.

------
aabajian
The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can
be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve,
but there _has_ to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity
trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but
there are three basic facts:

1\. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.

2\. The _vast_ majority of calories come from carbohydrates.

3\. Carbohydrates activate addictive dopaminergic pathways
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nih...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nihms36189.pdf))

People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term,
immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to
break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc.
can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to
provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?

~~~
DiabloD3
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been
scientifically proven false.

Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day
and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because
I was losing weight too quickly.

Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not
confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not how many calories you
eat, it is _where_ they come from.

I used to weigh 340 pounds, I went strictly Paleo, did not increase caloric
burn, did not decrease caloric intake in any meaningful way, hit 214 in a
year, and then continued dropping; roughly 2000 calories a day and not a lot
of exercise (was afraid of joint damage due to weighing so much).

~~~
delecti
You've provided almost no information, but at 340 lbs it's possible your TDEE
was _more_ than 4000 calories/day, meaning it's possible you went on a reduced
calorie diet with your bacon strategy. Without more information, your anecdote
is useless, and even with more information it's still just an anecdote.

Also, Paleo, like any similar structured diet, is just a trick to get you to
ingest fewer calories.

And I'm going to piggy back on the [citation needed] about calories in/out
being scientifically disproven.

[1]
[https://mytdee.com/#gender=male&yr=30&cm=182.9&kg=154.2&bfp=...](https://mytdee.com/#gender=male&yr=30&cm=182.9&kg=154.2&bfp=&goal=maintain&formula=standard&units=imperial&exercise=moderately)

~~~
CuriouslyC
While not the OP, there is research demonstrating that the blood glucose and
insulin response to various carbohydrate sources is highly specific to the
individual. In the study I'm thinking of, some people were given cookies,
others were given bananas (among other things). The responses weren't
consistent at all.

As for calories in/out being a simplification, while it is mostly true, the
tricky bit is that calories out actually varies wildly with the foods you eat.
Your body's hormonal milieu changes very significantly with what you eat, and
that has a massive impact on your biochemistry. Additionally, the microbes in
your gut have certain food preferences, and they can metabolize a significant
fraction of the calories you eat. Thus, hormonal shifts and rate of microbial
metabolism can spike your "calories out" far above what would be predicted by
BMR and activity level (and the reverse is unfortunately true as well).

~~~
scriptkiddy
I agree with you to an extent. However, none of this changes the fact that
consistent exercise increases the rate of metabolism significantly and
generally leads to better mental and physical health. It also doesn't change
the fact that eating at a caloric deficit will always lead to weight loss. A
caloric deficit alone is not enough for one to reduce to a healthy weight as
they may also be losing large amounts of muscle mass. Conclusion: Consistent
exercise and a well-balanced diet are still the best ways to become healthy
and maintain health.

~~~
crazygringo
But it's not that simple -- "eating at a caloric deficit" isn't a constant
thing. You can eat less, but your metabolism might drop even further, so
eating less calories _can_ lead to weight gain, or a loss of muscle mass that
is more than made up for by a gain in fat. And plenty of research shows that
exercise is, for most people, counterproductive for weight loss because they
wind up eating afterwards than the calories they burn. Yes, exercise leads to
general better health, but that's a very different goal from losing weight.

~~~
nradov
Oh no, not the "starvation effect" nonsense again. That's been thoroughly
debunked.

~~~
DanBC
No, it hasn't, which is why yoyo dieting is so harmful and why refeeding
people with anorexia is done so carefully.

~~~
nradov
Anorexia treatment has zero relevance to the vast majority of overweight
people who need to eat much less to lose weight.

------
vegabook
taking on the Bloomberg terminal.

They've got over 300 000 subscribers each paying circa 2000 USD every month.
That's 600 million dollars of revenue per month. They're running a
labyrinthine functionality on a 1970s System/360-style interface (command line
at top of screen). He hires an absolute army of "reps" who's sole job is to
try to help subscribers to find functionality, through an interface that is
best described as "arcane" and where there is no semblance whatsoever of a
user-discoverable taxonomy of functionality. It's all just sort of "you gotta
know where you want to go". Most people use 5% of the terminal's functionality
(mainly messaging) but Bloomberg refuses to tier pricing. It's all or nothing.
And with finance changing rapidly, the clients are axed to cut costs. Not to
mention real suspicions of monopoly because bberg is increasingly competing
with its own clients in order to maintain share.

This tyrannosaurus will be hard to take down frontally, but the beast is big
enough and unwieldy enough that small nibbles here and there in specialized
areas can be very attractive businesses.

Other tidbits:

* Bloomberg is stubbornly Windows only. No web, no Linux, no OSX no anything else except a bit of crippleware on mobile.

* Multiple Fortune 500 companies and banks would salivate at taking him on, which means a ready pool of very cash-rich potential buyers for your growing business if you get any traction, and that includes Bloomberg itself.

* Michael Bloomberg the man has not endeared himself to the current president so may be vulnerable.

Challenges:

* quant-style people who know what they're doing are very expensive. 200k USD plus per year.

* network-effects powerful in favour of bloomberg.

* once you're through the crusty user interface, assuming you found what you want (often with the help of a bloomberg "rep"), the actual functionality is often amazingly good.

~~~
sah2ed
Surely, Money.Net [0] is a first step? It was founded by a former top
executive at Bloomberg: Morgan Downey.

[0] [https://www.money.net/](https://www.money.net/)

~~~
mgav
I'm a former Bloomberg Terminal subscriber ($3k per month) and day trader. I
may have used 1% of the Bloomberg's capability in my best day - money.net
would have been a great alternative.

------
jerianasmith
The biggest untapped opportunity for startups is hiring skilled workers
without any consideration to location or a single geography.

------
zump
Sleep. How can we make better use of that wasted time.

~~~
lessclue
Sleep isn't "wasted" time. Without sleep, we'd be dysfunctional, and soon
thereafter, dead.

~~~
zump
\- Why can some people get by with less sleep than others and thus be more
productive?

\- How can I determine the best time to sleep?

\- What food to eat before sleep?

\- How can I be productive all the way until I fall asleep?

\- Why no sleep drug without harsh side effects?

Just a few things I'd like to see research into...

~~~
cel1ne
For decades there haven been a lot of research on sleep if you bother to look
up medical and neurological papers.

Also you're mixing up many different aspects. Feeling sleepy doesn't mean
you're sleepy. Motivation is a different thing altogether.

~~~
zump
> Feeling sleepy doesn't mean you're sleepy

So power through?

~~~
cel1ne
If your body had enough sleep that night (6 hours, uninterrupted) and you
aren't sick or otherwise stressed, then yes, power through.

Getting sleepy is your brain telling you to preserve energy. Only sometimes it
does that because something about the work itself bores, infuriates, disgusts,
or otherwise upsets you.

That means getting "procrastination-sleepy" is your brain trying to prevent
spending energy on the miniature emotional turmoil "breaking procrastination".

------
ommunist
Automatic real-time discovery of people spending a lot of time in social
networks, and offering them better ways to live on a subscription base for
self-couching. Like making toxic waters to detox themselves. (RAW thought, but
I'll enjoy refining it.)

------
eip
Anti-gravity and permanent batteries.

------
dilemma
Establishing nationwide retail distribution networks and ignoring e-commerce.

~~~
yeukhon
Isn't that what Walmart, BJ, Macys' or any chain retail store doing?

~~~
ganesharul
May be we should ask what is missing in that Walmart, BT or Macys. Than,
already doing

------
xyzzy4
Closed door office spaces that contract out to open office companies.

------
ommunist
Providing basic income irrespectible to nationality or citizenship in exchange
for confirmed real time spent online irrespective of activity.

~~~
unusximmortalis
In exchange for what?...

------
mayrosedgdotcom
[https://www.packtpub.com](https://www.packtpub.com)

the content is the best in the world. Total game changers. Just have to take
the time and read

------
alexdgg
[https://www.packtpub.com](https://www.packtpub.com)

these guys are amazing

------
vatotemking
Decentralized sharing. Person 1 and 2 turns on wifi on their phones. Person 1
sends a file to person 2. Person 2 receives a notification and accepts. File
is now on his phone. This works without cel coverage and without internet.
Just the wifi of 2 phones turned on.

~~~
olivierduval
Wasn't it one of the firsts basic use case for Bluetooth? For me, it's already
working.

~~~
vatotemking
Unfortunately, bluetooth is clunky. Wifi is ubiquitous and has a bigger range.
Use case? Let say person 1 wants to share with person 3, but person 3 is out
of range. Fortunately, person 2 is in between and is in range of both, so the
"app" just finds its way hopping between nodes. Networks can be created on
demand. Thats what I mean by "decentralized sharing".

