

Ask HN: What web services should exist that haven't been developed yet? - abiekatz

List any top ideas that you have. It is an interesting exercise to come up with startup ideas.<p>Back in 2005 Fred Wilson said &quot;Last year, when Brad and I were on the road raising our fund, we used to talk a lot about web services that should exist but don’t.&quot; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;avc.blogs.com&#x2F;a_vc&#x2F;2005&#x2F;08&#x2F;indeed.html<p>This exercise helped them target indeed.com as a potential investment and potentially others.<p>What services are missing from the internet these days?
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anywhichway
A reddit/HN clone that customizes the content you see based off your voting
history. This has been tried a few times before, but I've just never seen one
take off. In fact, reddit had this feature when it started but couldn't scale
it well enough so dumped it.

I feel like it would increase the quality of upvotes generally because people
would know that their votes will impact the future content they see so it may
slow the rate at which people up vote just to show they simply agreement and
reserve it for actual high quality they we to see more of. That is just my
theory, perhaps in practice it would reveal that people just care more about
only seeing content they agree with anyway.

~~~
skellystudios
StumbleUpon sort of does this, although it's more attuned to drag up older
content than new stuff. I guess this is because the older the content is, the
more data you have to make statistical associations.

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ereckers
Product Configurator (eCommerce Web Stores)

Basically, the visual deal where you select a t-shirt, change colors, change
patterns, etc.. Toys, computer parts, boat parts, shoes, cheerleading outfits,
you name it...

I was asked to build a product configurator a year or so back for a a store
that sold customizable backpacks. I looked into building one and thought "hell
no". I turned the job down.

During my research I found some Enterprise level solutions, I saw 1 service (a
manual thing with a couple guys), a TON of posts on outsourcing websites
asking for the same, and I believe a complicated piece of software (it's hard
to remember).

I offered to build the thing for much more then they wanted to spend thinking
I could turn it into a product, but obviously they passed.

I think there might be a market out there for small and medium sized eCommerce
store developers/designers/owners for a plug-and-play product configurator. It
would have to tie in with some popular carts; X-cart, Magento, (a few others),
but at least for me I thought there might be a business there.

Or there could be a reason why it was never done.

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jsiegz
A data ETL tool. Now that lots of companies are moving to MPP databases like
Vertica, Redshift, Teradata, and Netezza, it's incredible that there is still
no straighforward way to do so without extensive systems and data engineering
experience.

Every time a customer asks us to recommend a tool to do this, we are baffled
that nobody has taken this on yet (and wonder if we should do it ourselves).

The opportunity to build the Stripe for ETL is only going to get bigger.

~~~
sehrope
You should check us out[1]. We're haven't quite got to the full ETL stage as
we've focused on individual databases first. If you've got a decent
imagination though then you can figure out what we're trying to get to.

[1]: [http://www.jackdb.com/](http://www.jackdb.com/)

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ghostdiver
Poo Analysis as a Service

Upload image of your poo, computer program will tell you if you have any
health problems or you should change your diet.

~~~
jahde
This would be a great addition to a "Smart Toilet" where it analyzes your
urine as well. Through wi-fi it uplaods the results to the website and checks
if you have any health issues.

~~~
trafficlight
How is this not a thing? This should be a thing.

~~~
ig1
There's a kickstarter for that:

[http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/uchek-universal-the-
medica...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/uchek-universal-the-medical-lab-
in-your-phone)

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Cyclosa
Anything that recognizes and encourages the good behavior of people.

~~~
turbojerry
That would be... people, e.g. the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina memes, you
could I suppose do a RL version, GGG t-shirts with individual QR codes for up
voting people.

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keshy
Android and iPhone dev environments exposed as a web endpoint. This would help
ease development of opensource applications and improves portability and reuse
of components.

We could harness the power of the cloud and free developers from having to
worry about hardware performance issues to run the heavy dev environments. If
the app has to be debugged on a device, the apk file can be downloaded and
injected. The apk can have an default injected script to automatically
communicate with the cloud dev set up (sending over logs etc.) to create a
really simply environment to work with mobile applications and collaborate
efficiently across the world

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apphrase
SaaS model all-in-one marketing toolset service for bootstrapping apps. The
current ones are either to much data analytics, or too dumb mail-list
management tools.

~~~
atldev
We're currently working on this and would love to get some feedback. With just
5 min of your time you can help shape the roadmap and get early access. Survey
here: [http://bit.ly/15GpvsD](http://bit.ly/15GpvsD)

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incision
The first thing that springs to mind for me is natural language search that
really works. Along the same lines, reliable transcription.

~~~
X4
+1 for natural language detection and transcription. Current systems are too
fragile or completely closed. The ones available aren't better than what we
had in 2004.

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rada
Speech recognition: send an audio file, receive text.

~~~
bobbylox
AT&T offers this:
[http://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId=...](http://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId=12500023#link01)

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erastothenes
A solid natural language processing API.

------
stephenp
hemmingwaymaker.com. Makes long sentences short. An online de-obfuscator and
English to English translator. Helps me finally read Finnegan's Wake and Of
Grammatology.

slantrime.com. bends user provided words to make unlikely rhymes, with seed
capital from slim shady.

