
Startup Idea: Solve Personal Analytics - socmoth
http://blog.kirigin.com/personal-analytics
======
ArbitraryLimits
"So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have
an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would
be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes
envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to
keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to
the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to
record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are
mysterious at best. What is this business about "shopping, typing piece,
dinner with E, depressed"? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was
this "E" depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?"

Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"

Apologies for the long quote but this is pretty much how I feel about all
attempts at "personal analytics" so far. As other posters have mentioned,
analytics are great for businesses who have their FOMs and TPMs and KPPs and
whatever to maximize already, but on a personal level the best use of diaries
and journals is to force yourself to realize what your goals are, not to help
achieve them.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I liked "Where I was From," the book she wrote about how crummy California is
and how she had disowned it as her childhood home. I was feeling down on
California at that time, and it was a great book to read.

Personal analytics software is something I would never use. It must be nice to
have a life worth quantifying.

------
crucialfelix
I've built this and have used it for years. Initially I decided never to make
a product out of it so that I could allow myself to experiment and really just
solve my own problems.

Its exactly focused on insight and de-cluttering the mind and finding focus.
Being happier and more creative.

It really works and lead me to significant periods of peace and contentment
and working on meaningful things.

In the last year I did a lot of work to turn it into a proper business, but
got caught up in another startup which took up all my time.

I am planning on making it into a product with great design.

That's really the primary work now: crafting a design that is communicates the
data in a clear way.

Some messy bells and whistles thing with all the data and graphs and
features.... nope. Not interested. I want clarity.

~~~
ivankirigin
Did you build it so others could use it? Link?

~~~
crucialfelix
I'm restarting work on it in December. but the path to launch should be fast.

~~~
Semaphor
I'd love to check this out, maybe set up a site to gather emails?

~~~
crucialfelix
OK, thanks ! I'll refresh the landing page and add a launchrock.

Its "newrelic for the soul"

or maybe "your own personal planantir" ;)

~~~
Semaphor
But where is your landing page? :) I'd like to bookmark it :)

------
KrisJordan
I'm building a mobile app, called DidSum, that focuses on your #2 "Avoid Data
Entry, but Make it Easy" (and putting an API around the data). It's almost
ready for broader use.

I use DidSum to track running, blogging, eating healthy, sex, coffee
consumption, and more.

DidSum allows you to define the actions you want to improve at. You can track
publicly with friends and family and encourage/compare/compete with each
other. You can also track privately (some actions I only track with my wife).
It has basic analytics, which will get more powerful with time.

We're in a closed beta right now, if you're interested in helping test I'd
love anyone interested in this thread's feedback:
[http://didsum.com/auth/register.html](http://didsum.com/auth/register.html)

~~~
sundeep
I'll give it a go ... always been interested in personal analytics.

------
wildermuthn
> You need as much data as possible.

You need to separate the signal from the noise, and ramping up the noise isn't
the solution. Quality takes precedence over quantity. Benjamin Franklin
identified thirteen 'virtues', and those signals seemed to work for him.

> I propose a simple data entry framework: click a button, and that event gets
> tracked.

The problem with data entry is that it requires the motivation and initiative
of the user, which is precisely what the user lacks. That's the reason people
get personal trainers and life coaches: you need someone else to keep you
accountable and motivated.

> Machine Learning Matters

Here's where I think almost all of these personal-analytic type applications
go wrong: it's trying to solve a very subjective human problem with a very
objective machine program.

Here's an alternative startup idea: a web application for life coaches and
their clients, focused on providing them the tools they need to communicate
better with one another. I'm betting that life coaches use email, text
messages, phone calls, a calendar, and maybe a spreadsheet. They probably
could use some help integrating all those tools and all the data they are
collecting.

~~~
ivankirigin
You don't think there are correlations in behavior? I'm pretty sure when I
drink I don't sleep as well. What if you could show that with actual personal
behavior instead of "some study"?

And as far a motivation, the mobile component is essential because it will
literally buzz in your pocket to remind you to do things.

------
paulrademacher
> If you consider the number of people that want to lose weight, quit smoking,
> or get better at something, I’m probably wrong about the market size. It’s
> huge.

Everyone wants to improve something (or everything!) about themselves. Most
people have a sense of what that is, and what they _should_ be doing. Stop
smoking, go to the gym, get more sleep, eat better, spend less money, make
more money, etc. A personal analytics system may help someone _optimize_ their
life from seeing the hidden details, but I claim that the steps to self-
improvement for most people are fairly obvious. The problem in self-
improvement is not lack of data, it's how to execute on the obvious known
fixes (how to stop smoking, etc).

~~~
KrisJordan
What I'm finding from using and talking to beta users of DidSum (referenced in
another comment on this post) is that the act of physically tracking a
behavior has value in building habits and improving toward goals (or being
extra aware of it, when you're not).

This is doubly true in a social setting where your friends/spouse/mom/coach
can _see_ when you are or are not taking actions toward what you want to
improve at.

------
wslh
I've published some code and articles about this concept. My idea is to have
something like:

friends <\- [user.alice, user.bob, user.carol] # array of friends
friends_movies <\- apply(friends, movies)

When a friend updates its movies everything is recalculated like in a
spreadsheet. The core idea behind this is to end with emergent behaviour from
the small scripts of millions of people.

To simplify the programming language everything can be written as an
s-expression. I've published the parser (using o-meta) with an article here:
[http://blog.databigbang.com/parsing-s-expressions-in-c-
using...](http://blog.databigbang.com/parsing-s-expressions-in-c-using-ometa/)
more food for thought in:

i) Egont, A Web Orchestration Language: [http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-
egont-a-web-orchestration-...](http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-
orchestration-language/)

ii) Egont Part II: [http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-
ii/](http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/)

------
joshsharp
This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve with
[http://exist.io](http://exist.io).

For the moment we're starting small and just trying to pull in activity
tracker data (Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings etc) and some secondary services that
provide useful quantifiable data - things like Foursquare checkins, Gmail,
task management tools, productivity trackers, etc. It's hard to interface with
every service when you're writing custom API clients for each of them. And on
the other hand, if you try to dictate a common standard without any clout to
back it up, you just end up with [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/).
We're working on an API to export all your data too, so people can build
visualisations and apps on the aggregates of their data.

Tracking things has to be as frictionless as possible, so I'm wary of manual
tracking unless you're already quite committed, or it takes mere seconds - the
interface in #2 looks like a good way to approach this. But we're avoiding
this for now.

The other thing we strongly agree on is #4 - you need insights, not just data!
Numbers alone are of limited value, and a lot of people already into
Quantified Self end up with "number fatigue" where they're no longer motivated
to put in the effort to track things, let alone work towards a goal, just so
they can see the number go up. People need to qualify their data and make it
part of a narrative about their life. They also need actionable feedback,
which is where we're trying to focus on providing value - if you're trying to
be more productive, on which days is that working, and what are the factors
behind it? We'll try and tell you so you can focus on that. Same process for
becoming more active or anything else.

It's a big problem to solve, but so many possibilities too.

------
tansey
I think the oversimplified nutrition analytics is actually killing one of the
biggest potential sources of insight from personal analytics. The key then is
having a large, accurate database of nutritional information so you can see
which fundamental ingredients a users is constantly ingesting.

Other than that, I totally agree. Someone please make this app-- then let me
do the machine learning for you. :)

~~~
ivankirigin
Users won't input that data. I care a lot about this, and found using apps
like LoseIt to track food way too much overhead.

I know some people are trying food tracking via taking a photo. Taking a photo
per meal is a lot of overhead! That said, 4 Hour Body recommends it to stick
to a nutrition goal.

Also, I disagree with your premise. I know what I shouldn't eat, and the main
questions I want answered are what correlates to my making bad decisions. How
does sleep relate? Alcohol? Being around friends? Tracking specifically what I
eat seems irrelevant.

~~~
DLarsen
I've been taking a similar approach to a side/hobby project that relates to
personal spending/budgeting.

I am seeking to apply the "easy data entry" \+ "subjective good/ok/bad"
measures to help folks discover patterns of bad spending decisions. While most
every budgeting/spending app will show you "how much you have left" or "safe
to spend" the real measure of improvement is whether you made good decisions
or bad decisions given your life circumstances. This also has the effect of
softening the penalty for missing data. If you miss some data, you just pick
up where you left off. You're not trying to balance your budget. You're
tracking decisions. Although I'm not (yet) biting off the notion of
correlating it with other personal analytics, that's an interesting extension
of the idea.

I'm really convinced that a behavioral approach to spending/budgeting would
lead to longer lasting positive changes than fretting about exceeding your
grocery budget by $19 due to unexpected company joining you for lunch.

The general gist is described here:
[http://www.spendlight.com/land-3.html](http://www.spendlight.com/land-3.html)

~~~
jlees
The issue is that of avoidance. If I have to tell an app I've been bad, I'm
more likely to avoid telling it at all. (Like not getting on the scale when
one knows the weight won't be good news.)

Sure, highly motivated users will track everything, but it doesn't take much
to leave the highly motivated state. There's also the angle that knowing you
have to report in with bad news might stop you doing the bad thing in the
first place, but when the penalty for not reporting in is nil, it loses some
of its power. Perhaps approaches that use human accountability or other reward
systems (eg. GymPact) could help here.

~~~
DLarsen
Good point. This is absolutely essential.

In some circles I've described it as "a money tracking tool built for couples"
and that's true. This all emerged from a chart my wife and I had been using on
our fridge. We wanted to address the decision making progress as a couple and
not beat ourselves up over specific failures (impulsive spending, false
bargains, etc), but try to improve our process for budgeting and spending
money.

------
source99
What companies have been at least mildly successful in Personal Analytics?
From where I am standing I can't think of any.

Yes Fitbit is a great pedometer that gets people to walk more but last time I
checked they weren't recording that much data and linking to connected scales
is useful but its barely scratching the surface.

One issue with Personal Analytics is we need more data and it needs to be
EFFORTLESS to record. The ROI is only high enough when the effort is very low.
This is a challenging problem that requires "true innovation". I don't think a
tracking app on my mobile phone is going to be the answer.

Another issue is the ability to improve some facet of my life with this
data(weight, sleep, etc). Even if I can correlate drinking coffee in the
evening is causing me sleep problems unless I can change my habits its not
useful information. We need to be able to change our habits and processes
based on this data. There are scientific strategies to get people to change
habits and simply telling them they need to walk more or eat less do not pass
scientific muster. Trigger -> Habit -> Reward. If we need to change Habits we
must replace them something. If I need to stop drinking coffee then I need to
replace it with something.

~~~
mahyarm
Well the basis watch is pretty good in the passive recording department. It
automatically tracks your sleep and activity levels with many sensors and can
give you a pretty good estimate of your daily calorie burn. You never have to
press any buttons to track sleep like with the fitbit, making it purely
passive. It's also in a watch form factor, preventing the device loss you can
get from the fitbit form factor.

Basis although is lagging in the software department. Their mobile apps are
not very useful and their API is not open so people can't grab their data
without doing unofficial hacks that accesses the web apps json data directly.

I think although people are going to be using something like the iPhone 5S's
M7 motion tracker more than something like a fitbit, because they carry their
phones everywhere and don't have to buy or manage a separate device.

This would be the best current combo if basis opened it's data silo:

1\. A basis watch for sleep and general activity.

2\. A wifi weight scale for weight & easy to measure BF%

3\. Runkeeper, etc to track your cardio activities. Basis & fitbit doesn't
track actual fitness activities (like biking or hiking) too well compared to
runkeeper.

4\. Also lets you manually input personal measurements such as your navel,
hips, waist, etc from the mobile app. Fitbit does not do this.

All of these items in one cloud-managed website & mobile app will be pretty
powerful. The closest you have for this is fitbit right now.

In the future, a credit card / payment system that automatically tracks
nutrition purchasing info will be very powerful. This needs to be combined
with more nutrition estimates in restaurants although.

Passive 24/7 location tracking can also help co-relate events. It can track
the effects of vacations, ski trips, trips to the pool, more grocery shopping
less restaurants, etc to put more meaning into your graphs. It can co-relate
you going to the gym frequently or not going to burger king anymore with you
losing weight.

I think just awareness that your slowly gaining weight can help snip weight
gain trends in the bud, along with warnings your eating a lot of high calorie
crap that you might not be aware just how high calorie it actually is.

------
mtsmithhn
4 months after our 2nd child was born my wife still wasn't getting enough
sleep. Part of that was the child's sleeping pattern and part of it was her
not being disciplined with sleep (not taking naps or staying up even later).
Of course my telling her "you need more sleep" fell on deaf ears. So I
recommended she get a fitbit since it claims to track one's sleep. It was a
big reality check to see on her computer in a big red circle that she was only
getting on average 4hrs of sleep each day. Just seeing it on the computer
meant she could no longer ignore the truth. It's the same as a doctor's
prognosis vs. a friends opinion. The former carries a lot more weight. She
started getting more sleep the following week.

If someone can create a system that nearly automates the tracking of what you
eat you'll make gazillions and help a lot of people along the way. Maybe a
bluetooth food scale in conjunction with a tablet that can do "facial
recognition" on a plate of food to estimate what I'm eating and the
carb/protein/fat/calorie breakdown. Then based on my physical activity for the
day and calorie consumption it could recommend I skip desert or have a carrot
instead.

------
physcab
How would tracking all this be useful to you? Why would you pay for it? The
reason why tracking is more common in business is that knowing the metrics
gives you guidance on how to be profitable. Therefore you can optimize all
your metrics to paint that picture. With personal analytics, there isn't one
thing that delivers that kind of ROI, even if we're talking about the
investment from inputing the data alone.

~~~
bckmn
Yep. I created a system that addressed 3 or 4 out of these 6 points a few
months ago, but struggled with adoption and monetization simply because it's
hard to find a tangible use/benefit from seeing these trends as an individual.
One thing I am/was considering is the value of comparing your data to that of
others.

~~~
ivankirigin
Try [http://www.sanebox.com/](http://www.sanebox.com/) and notice how they
make it social in comparing your performance to others.

------
bwood
I feel that the most important part of this is having clear data ownership
rules to assure users that they actually own their data. That is, they can
take it in a machine-readable format whenever they wish, and with it remove
the right of the company to continue holding the data. I am very much in
favour of stepping up personal analytics, but there's no way I'm going to just
hand over some of my most personal data and hope that the company doesn't use
it as the ultimate lock-in tool.

If a web platform is developed to provide storage and an API, the only way I
would trust it is if it were completely open source and users were encouraged
to run their own nodes (as well as supporting easy data migration between
nodes).

~~~
ivankirigin
Considering your early adopter audience is probably going to be highly
technical, I think this matters. Having a clear benefit also makes the privacy
cost more appetizing.

But frankly, requiring users to run their own nodes is a terrible idea and
would doom a startup that followed this advice to failure. It would please
some early adopters, but make growth essentially impossible.

~~~
bwood
I don't think it is necessary to require users to run their own nodes, but
simply allow the option and encourage a community to form around doing so.

Basically, set up a scenario where the startup is service-oriented and must
stay honest because it competes with its own community for users on the
official node. Most users will prefer to trust the startup with their data for
ease of use, and there will be an enormous amount of credibility gained by
having a mechanism to keep the startup's greed in check.

~~~
ivankirigin
> the startup's greed in check.

I didn't mention this, but the value and the revenue will come from solving
people's problems. I think things are really well aligned here. You have a
really cynical view that most people don't share. You're probably closer to
reality, but what users actually care about matters more than reality.

~~~
bwood
I should probably mention that I have put quite a bit of work into developing
a similar system myself. I even prototyped and pitched it a couple years ago,
but basically got shut down by judges who were offended by the kinds of data I
suggested tracking (i.e., everything).

I am quite cynical about companies that extract revenue from personal data
(LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, etc.), and I recognize that most people probably
aren't. I suppose I am more of an idealist and would have trouble sleeping if
I inadvertently created Big Brother, which is why I would risk hamstringing
such a startup to try to ensure that it stays honest.

------
jcutrell
[http://jcutrell.svbtle.com/a-simple-and-flexible-
selfquantif...](http://jcutrell.svbtle.com/a-simple-and-flexible-
selfquantified-aggregation-idea)

I've written a response, but I suppose I am hellbanned for new posts. No clue
why unfortunately.

The basic idea: prompting is of great importance in this field. You can't get
GREAT data through passive measures, but you can get much more consistent data
if you consistently prompt. (This is my personal method, at least.)

[edit] It's not so much of a response as it is related - a way to capture data
about self. Not so much related to the startup viability discussed in OP's
article.

~~~
robbiet480
I'm seeing you just fine without [dead]

~~~
jcutrell
Sorry - should have clarified. My commenting is good to go, but my Submissions
are all dead on arrival.

------
AznHisoka
"Every piece of content created: mobile camera roll, instagram, facebook,
vine. Every piece of content consumed: amazon, itunes, netflix, spotify, rdio.
Every place you go. Every dollar you spend. You won’t start with 100 services,
but you’ll get there soon enough. Some people will be obsessed with adding
more data"

And therein lies a potential headache. What if the API for those 100 services
break? What if just 10 of them change their API every month? Are you going to
update them? And oh btw, you're gonna keep doing this before you actually have
paying customers.

~~~
ivankirigin
There is brass in the muck:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/06.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/06.html)

------
luos
I'm slowly creating something similar to learn rails.

I want to track how much spend, consume electricity or gas, what are my goals.

The problem I found that I forget to enter the data into the app so it is
fairly sparse. I can only get meaningful data on a monthly base.

I imagined it would be capable to compare gas (heating) consumption with the
weather on the same day but it is not really working (without some automatic
data input, that I don't have).

Among others I though about adding mood tracking, attaching 1-3 picture/day so
when you want to watch back on your vacation you are not overwhelmed with 5000
photos, tracking locations. I would like to think about it like a social
network where I am alone or something like this. (Codename: Track My Sheet :-)
)

Showing trends, adding watchers like "you now need 1 year 3 months on your Y
Account to reach Z amount at your current rate +Q USD / day, but these kind of
things are faster with an excel sheet. Here is a dashboard mockup:
[http://snag.gy/OozTi.jpg](http://snag.gy/OozTi.jpg)

It is similar to the reportr.io app, actually I started mine on the same week
before I first saw it on HN. :-)

------
theboss
I wrote a chrome extension to analyze the websites I visit on certain days and
track how long I spend looking at each one and graphs it. It's called melytics
and it is pretty buggy but it does the job.

Honestly I think this is too much data to make use of. I'm just one person.
How much meaning can you get out of what I do? If it is a lot, do I really
want that platform to exist on the web?

~~~
driverdan
Have you considered using RescueTime[1] and pulling data from their API
instead of tracking it yourself?

1: [https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/)

~~~
theboss
Didn't know it existed (the whole reason I wrote the dang thing). Ill check it
out thanks.

------
phelmig
I worked on a concept for this for a while. I ran into the following
contradiction I couldn't solve:

If the data entry is quick and easy, then I'm not gathering empirical usable
data. If I try to gather good data the user will become annoyed.

I think data gathering apps work for a small scope when the user is engaged
enough to provide the data. Fitness or body building for example. Or sports
car races etc.

This was making me think that maybe a generic statistics app with user
generated values/measures/timers might be interesting. But once again, non
technical folks probably aren't interested in statics too much.

Maybe gamification and a great UI is the answer here or maybe one should start
with a specific problem (workout, drinking, sex or whatever) and broaden the
scope as he analyzes user interaction.

I would give such an app a shot, but I'm not sure if I wouldn't forget about
it too quickly. Just as I forget about using Lift (the app) and other
interesting stuff.

------
ejain
I'm the founder of [https://zenobase.com/](https://zenobase.com/), another
startup in this space.

Completely agree that "graphs without the ability to manipulate data are worse
than nothing"\--it's hard to gain much insight without being able to drill
down and filter the data. Simple questions such as "how strong is the
correlation between room temperature and sleep" end up having to be refined
e.g. with "ignore weekends" and "correct for different amounts of physical
activity".

Being able to "get as much data as possible" sounds good, but garbage in,
garbage out applies...

Finally, I don't think it's possible to create a single mobile app that suits
everyone, which is why Zenobase has a flexible, generic data model and an API.

------
scott_karana
In case anyone hasn't already seen this amazing article by Stephen Wolfram
about his own analytics...

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-
analytic...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-
my-life/)

~~~
ivankirigin
Those phone records are a great example of visualization without insight

------
bello
Personal analytics is indeed a very interesting topic (cool article from
stephen wolfram: [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-
analytic...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-
my-life/)).

The biggest challenge imo is privacy and security: How do you safely collect
and process everything (from emails to texts)? While I could implement
something for my personal use, would anyone give access to all their
communications to a third-party service? I wouldn't.

Maybe there is some better way to collect this information (just metadata? do
some analytics and store results instead of raw messages?).

------
SamyPesse
Check out [http://www.reportr.io/](http://www.reportr.io/) It's open source:
[https://github.com/SamyPesse/reportr](https://github.com/SamyPesse/reportr)

------
conroy
My biggest issue with personal analytics is storage. I want to track
everything, from browser history to keystrokes, but I don't want to share this
information with a third party. I think solving the data problem is the first
hurdle.

------
stanleyyork
Quite an ambitious idea. I started small (by focusing on personal reading
analytics):
[http://www.clarelegere.com/profiles/1](http://www.clarelegere.com/profiles/1)

------
thelsdj
There are already too many of these services that don't interoperate with each
other, or sources of data in an open way.

[http://activitystrea.ms/](http://activitystrea.ms/) is a good first step in
opening some of this stuff up for consumption.

The way it is now, each front-end service has to do a ton of work for each
data source they want to integrate with. There should be services that
translate data into a shared format. And then front-end services can focus on
their idea instead of having to parse all the data.

------
mayankkumar
I think social media platforms are slowly building towards generating massive
personal data. I thought with the advent of Facebook timeline, user events
(both macro and micro) would be well documented in an aggregate consumable
form.

Where do you get your revenue for personal analytics like this? Therein comes
super targeted ads with pinpoint accuracy, using predictive analytics at a
personal level. If you buy a brand of milk only on Saturdays, rivals have a
higher incentive to strut their wares on next Saturday.

------
drbacon
Sorry for the following unsolicited ad. I work for a company in the
Washington, DC area that is making almost this exact product. Reading this
article was like hearing a stranger talk about what I do at my day job.

In addition to the Quantified Self crowd, we are also (for now, primarily)
focusing on the educational space. We are currently hiring developers. Most of
the code is Python, but we need front end help also. Contact me at
personalanalyticsdc@drbacon.33mail.com if you are interested in learning more.

------
randartie
It sounds like everyone in this thread has built this app before.

------
pat2man
I've been thinking about this for a while. It seems almost impossibly easy and
yet no one has really done it.

Maybe it's because the consumer startup crowd and the data science crowd don't
overlap enough. If [http://prediction.io](http://prediction.io) supported time
series data you might see a few of these products pop up overnight.

~~~
driverdan
> It seems almost impossibly easy and yet no one has really done it.

How does it seem easy? If you just want to track one or two data points and
put them on a graph sure, it's easy. If you want to track 100 sources of data,
each in a different format with different types of data it becomes quite hard.
Then try taking that data and analyzing it. Try looking for correlation
between your manually recorded caffeine consumption and your sleep patterns
logged with FitBit / BodyMedia / another service.

It's a hard problem with a limited market and limited options for
monitization.

~~~
manjitjohal
>It's a hard problem with a limited market and limited options for
monitization.

I disagree; I think there is enormous potential in this market; having a set
of concise and insightful information that shows you are making progress with
a particular goal is something a large number of people would be interested
in.

------
fanssex
This sucks. We don't need some new "exciting" personal helper shit, what we
need on hacker news is exciting object recognition algorithms, better nature
language processing module, high accuracy text detection and recognition in
natural scenes. Why are there so many people building crappy stupid things
that no one really need?

~~~
dasil003
Uh-huh. And what, pray tell, are you building that's so goddamn important?

~~~
fanssex
you web dev people just won't get the big picture. that's why some black smith
can learn to build a website/app in a couple of month but he can't do machine
learning, numerical optimization or natural language processing or what have
you. because it not the same thing. anyone could build websites, wake up!

------
diziet
Someone is working on a lot of that:
[http://humanapi.co/](http://humanapi.co/)

------
kaa2102
I remember starting a company several years ago focused on using advanced
analytics to improve personal decision-making. This idea morphed over time to
a specific use: budgeting. Visualization and making the process quick and
super easy are of the utmost importance for "personal analytics".

~~~
ivankirigin
Visualization with insight in budgeting is pretty easy because you're trying
to answer "where do I spend my money?". Categorization needs to be good, but
then you just need a distribution.

Mint is surprisingly bad at automatic categorization (failing on things like
large transfers that trump all my other data), so I think there is an
opportunity here.

------
zy1t
I’ve enjoyed reading your post but I’d be more interested in seeing how you go
about fleshing your ideas out. I personally keep a similar list but have
trouble taking the ideas from rough works to completed business plans. I’d
love to see what processes/frameworks other people use.

------
mercurialshark
The quantified self movement should be far more extensive. I am linking to our
blog again!

The Secret Digital Ocean: The Data We Aren't Addressing

[http://thoughtly.co/Blog/thesecretdigitalocean](http://thoughtly.co/Blog/thesecretdigitalocean)

------
cicatriz
Many efforts underway already. To add to the list
[http://fluxtream.org](http://fluxtream.org)
[http://lockerproject.org/](http://lockerproject.org/)

------
shaunrussell
I built a website www.selfstats.com with this sort of thing in mind.

Ask yourself questions Receive email everyday with the set of questions Reply
to email with answers

Login to your dashboard for an overhead view (charts, lists, etc).

An API and Mobile support are in the works.

------
nomedeplume
Maybe the slow carb diet is a bad choice since it doesn't work... always
results in bouncebacks (2 data points for you; 1 for me). Maybe only useful
for a photo shoot or weeks leading up to a beach trip..

------
pkaler
I'm basically working on that idea, too. It's built API first and the first
iPhone App is almost done. [http://goaly.co](http://goaly.co)

------
Michael_Murray
Lots of us working on this problem. We're focused on the insight and machine
learning pieces.

[https://www.fitoop.com](https://www.fitoop.com)

Send me a note for an invite.

------
hauk1
My startup sympho.me is working on this challenge. Trying to help people get a
holistic view of their lives though quantified self. Please send feedback:D

------
bbenko
Here's yet another (mine) attempt of addressing this problem.
[https://pokelog.com/](https://pokelog.com/)

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joshbetz
I had pretty much this exact same idea a year ago. The people I talked to
didn't seem all that interested, not that it necessarily matters.

------
shail
Does [http://hmpgr.com/running](http://hmpgr.com/running) resonate with anyone
here? Invite Code: HN

------
xwowsersx
I'm seriously considering working on this. I can build the API/server side as
well as the mobile components (Android at least).

------
elg0nz
Surprised no one has mentioned
[http://thetempleapp.com/](http://thetempleapp.com/)

------
camus2
What about a startup idea(s) startup ? where non-devs can create startups just
by submitting an idea?

------
generj
I like the concept of re-centralizing all personal content.

Dispersed services, central location, central analytics.

------
lemiffe
Had a very similar idea 4 years ago, have been working on this for ages. Bleh.

------
chatman
NSA already has your daily data, make a wrapper service around it?

~~~
rspeer
Injecting the NSA into absolutely every thread on HN is not clever.

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glifchits
So how many other people have had this idea too?

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return0
my simple private journal can be used to track things

[http://journalcat.com/](http://journalcat.com/)

