
Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing. - ivankirigin
Having trouble thinking of an idea for a YC application? Thursday looming near? You can take a few of mine.<p>Each day this week, starting today, I'll post an idea that I'd like to see implemented, but don't have time to work on myself.<p>Please join me in this empirical study of the value of ideas and post your own!
======
h34t
Non-Profit Tobacco.

Find a way to give that majority of smokers, those who don't like what they do
(but do it anyway), the ability to purchase high-quality cigarettes whose
'profits' go to cancer research and as-effective-as-possible anti-smoking
campaigns.

~~~
ivankirigin
Natural American Spirit helps native americans, right?

"[they] purportedly donate a portion of their revenues to Native American
charities." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_American_Spirit>

That isn't too far off.

Either way, with taxes, lots of money goes to government mandated campaigns
against smoking, tort damages, and miscellaneous government pork. You can't
really control that.

~~~
h34t
Certainly taxes help, but this would target the money that _isn't_ going into
taxes -- I think there's still enough profit in the tobacco industry for a
project like this to have a shot at working.

Thanks for the interesting link. I like their idea a little, but I see
donating some portion of revenues to Native American charities as a far cry
from hitting the nail directly on the head with a "real" mission-driven non-
profit.

~~~
gscott
The tobacco taxes have been misspent. In San Diego none of the tobacco tax
money went to health care. Zero, not one percent of it.

------
tristian
I've always wanted to be able to write notes on top of emails I receive. So
say I receive an email about a new bug, I could just jot down more details
into another layer on top that email in transparent font/colour. I've noticed
other people often print out emails and do something like this with a red
marker.

I use Thunderbird and I've thought about digging around in the source to see
if this is possible. It's not something I've found time to do though.

~~~
SwellJoe
That's a pretty nifty idea. I frequently use email as my todo list (though I
really shouldn't...I've been trying to do the email zero thing, but I'm back
up to 1000 or so messages in my box again, two weeks after starting).

~~~
jgrahamc
I do use email as my TODO list, but I publish the length of the queue for all
to see. Makes me deal with stuff just knowing that anyone could be looking.

[http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/06/measuring-my-inbox-
depth.htm...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/06/measuring-my-inbox-depth.html)

John.

~~~
SwellJoe
I didn't know about TB-QuickMove, but have wanted that capability forever.
Thanks!

------
ericb
Here's one, but if no one does it and it's feasable, some day I might. I'd
like to implement a large continual self-report study via email for the public
good. Via an email every day or so, data is slowly gathered from participants
--all anonymized in a number of ways. The emails would be questions proposed
by researchers or lifestyle data to look for correlations with product use,
habits, physical traits and disease incidence. For example, looking back in
time, thalidomide use and birth defects would be one type of correlation that
you might hope to pick up, or perhaps more recently certain shampoos (with
ingredient X) might correlate with infertility. Yes you would have to be
thorough and careful about the anonymization, but I think the benefits could
be there.

Correlation is not causation, though, and the nature of correlating a number
of factors dictate you would get many false alarms. However, like a metal
detector, the clues for new things to look at would be worth the false alarms.
The idea of all this would be to give researchers new targets and areas of
research, all free and open.

Thoughts? Impediments?

~~~
LPTS
Thoughts? The correct analogy is not a metal detector, but a needle in a
haystack. I think you misunderestimate the amount of false leads you get doing
this by several orders of magnitude. If your system generates too many false
leads, it will be (to borrow an analogy from Bruce Schneier, who you should
read every week, and writes about false alarms in the context of airport
security) like adding more hay to a haystack with a missing needle.

Impediments? People lie about their habits. People do not accurately remember
things throughout the day. How to deal with missed days? If people miss days
for different reasons, how do you deal with those gaps. You have to assume
that the days they miss would be different enough from days they don't miss to
invalidate the data of people who miss days.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I'm not sure whether you are referring to the same argument, but I think I
remember that Bruce Schneier talks about the lack of correct positives that
makes the application of data mining methods to terrorist incidents useless.
He makes the point that very few positives for the system to learn from
combined with a very large number of variables causes a huge number of false
alarms (not sure if I remember all he said correctly).

So it's all about how many confirmed positives you have and whether you have
reliable data on them. It works very well for credit card fraud because there
is a sufficiently large number of actual fraud cases, you have reliable data
about them and false alarms do not cause major disruption.

I agree with your concern about the reliability and completeness of data. I
still think it's an interesting idea if there was a way to extract the data
from a reliable source instead of working with what people claim to be the
case.

------
aschwo
A web-based interface for building and managing shaders for 3D apps and
renderers. Features would include a node-based shader builder, plugins for the
various 3D packages (Maya, Max, Houdini, XSI, etc), suppport for the various
shading languages (RSL, VEX, mental ray, Cg, etc), and user groups and
permissions. Think sourceforge for 3D artists, small studios without the
ability to roll their own management solutions would like this.

Workflow is like this: user creates shader using node editor (think Maya's
Hypershade, but Ajaxified...), then sets permissions for the shader. Any user
with permission to use the shader can see it from the plugin for his app of
choice on his machine and use it. The user sets the renderer that he wants to
use, the shader is compiled on the server and sent down the pipe to the user.
That way, source code is kept in the hands of the people who created it. Scene
renders.

I would love to build something like this, but it requires a lot more CS
knowledge than I have. So if you think it's cool, roll with it and invite me
to the private beta.

------
myoung8
We were going to build a web service to make the college application process
easier for students, but don't really have the time right now.

If you like the idea, check out sites like prstats.com or mychances.net (very
poorly implemented, but good ideas IMO). Also, let me know and I'd be happy to
share our early research with you.

~~~
yubrew
One of my friends working on this, <http://www.peerdecision.com/>

~~~
myoung8
This isn't quite what we had envisioned. This doesn't really do anything
new...

------
staunch
Socratic Blogging. Two or more (real or fake) people have a conversation about
a topic and it's posted as a blog entry. I think it'd make for a really
interesting new genre of blogs very different from the traditional essay
style. A web-based Ajax chat style writing system and an IM client plugin as
well, would make it super convenient and painless to create new posts.
Traditional bloggers might occasionally do these coop posts together, others
might do this type alone.

I had this idea because friends and I sometimes talk on IM about a topic and
the chat log turns out to make quite interesting reading.

~~~
brianmckenzie
I tried to implement this into a blog engine I wrote at my last job, but
management didn't get it and directed me to stop working on it. I quit to work
on my startup a month later.

------
alaskamiller
My idea is a web service that lets you date Jessica Alba.

~~~
rickcecil
Wouldn't that be one that you sell for $50 million?

~~~
rms
Depends on how many Jessica Albas your site comes with...

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm pretty sure it's a severely limited resource.

~~~
breck
Not if you use EC2.

~~~
SwellJoe
The Jessica Alba instantiation feature of EC2 must be new since I last read
the docs. What's the API call for that?

~~~
breck
I'll send you my instance.

------
yters
I still think Web 2.0 is missing some kind of app aggregator. Something that
would both improve the findability of applications, and allow them to be
plugged together similar to what yahoo pipes does with RSS. However, without
some kind of standardization amongst the apps, this is way too complex to
implement.

And creating a trusted distributed computing system on facebook, where clients
would compete to have users give their programs highest priority. On a simple
analysis, while this would not be a very dependable system, it seems cheaper
than Amazon's service at $1 an hour per core. Plus, this could be made more
complex by integrating a contract system - clients can promise a certain
payout based on the results of their program, kind of like the lottery.

~~~
Kaizyn
You mean like diffle.com?

~~~
yters
No, not quite, it's missing the pluggable architecture. It would be analogous
to yahoo pipes, but apply to general apps, not just rss feeds. It'd be kind of
like gluing together stuff in *nix, except in a way the web savvy crowd can.

------
samueladam
Here's one for a FireFox plugin.

The aim is to record articles where you submitted a comment and to be able to
track follow-ups.

The plugin has to detect HTTP POST. It could ask the user if he wants to save
the page or have an automated process that removes logins and other unrelated
actions.

~~~
danw
<http://www.cocomment.com/> is what you're after I think

~~~
cstejerean
does this work with YC?

~~~
danw
news.YC has the threads feature which does a similar thing

~~~
cstejerean
well, if I understand correcty the cocomment app lets you track comments to
threads you are following on multiple sites. i was wondering if it can pull in
data from YC and so I can check comments across wordpress, blogger, yc, etc.

------
rms
An aggregator for social news sites with a recommendation engine to feed you
stories you like.

~~~
tmitchell
This is something I've wanted for a while too. Interestingly enough, Guy
Kawasaki posted this just the other day (he's on their advisory board):
<http://www.feedhub.com/>

Disclaimer: I haven't given it a thorough evaluation yet

~~~
Tichy
I wonder why this needs to be a web service, unless they do the "people who
liked x also liked y" thing. Otherwise, I'd rather have this as a local app.

------
leila_c
I'd love to see someone create a virtual lock-box for emails you're tempted to
spend too much time re-reading and analyzing (like those from past/future
romantic interests). You'd forward the email to another address, which would
somehow remove it from your inbox and return it to you after a standard amount
of time (two weeks to a month, say).

~~~
iamwil
I would have never guessed that this is a problem. I have a problem with
reading hacker.news and other websites too much, and have resorted to editing
my etc/hosts file to route those URLs to localhost

you'd want a hosts file for emails? interesting.

~~~
brlewis
The solution isn't to block the distractions. You need to talk yourself up on
whatever it is you should be spending time on. If you can't persuade yourself
that the other activity is more worthwhile, then maybe it isn't.

~~~
leila_c
i think the idea is more funny than self-helpy. i know scores of women who'd
subscribe, if only to banish ex-boyfriends from their inboxes (temporarily).

------
yters
Could this be a regular feature of YC? Even with Google, it's hard to find
some of the articles in the past, and this is a valuable thing to keep track
of.

------
byrneseyeview
Duelnode: Structured debate. [http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/duelnod...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/duelnode-another-free-startup-idea.html)

------
whacked_new
Just for fun: a graphical lisp editor where instead of () you use div and /div
with different color. Something like turing-complete divs. (Then write a lisp
tutorial called divintolisp)

------
zeka
Permanent relief from the password hell. And it should NOT be a "keyring
solution".

~~~
paulgb
It isn't perfect, but I swear by GenPass for this ->
<http://labs.zarate.org/passwd/>

------
ks
What about a "Windows Update" service that works with 3rd party software. Like
apt-get for Windows?

For the software developers who won't change to the new installer, you should
at least provide a feature that notifies the user when an update is available
and downloads it in the background.

------
pi3832
CoMP

Collective Music Patronage

A website that allows listeners to make donations to support musicians.
Donations can be directed to specific bands/artists, or to a collective fund,
which is allocated to bands/artists based on downloads of free music directed
through the site. (The site is a bittorrent tracker.)

The website also promotes communities of music fans, allowing them to suggest
new bands/artists to each other, trade news, schedule meet-ups, etc. In
theory, the forums could also allow artists to interact with their fans.

The middle-man in music, the record companies, are a Dead Man Walking. CoMP
wold be the new, almost invisible, interface between artists and consumers.

------
trekker7
Some sort of Web application to actually help with coming up with startup
ideas. I knocked at this for a month or two, but couldn't come up with a
decent solution. The best I got was some sort of database of user-generated
customer pains, which would be ranked (social news style) by users at large.
The theory was that once you knew which pain you were targeting, coming up
with the solution (second half of the idea) would be easier.

If anyone thinks this problem is even solvable, and wants to work to come up
with a good solution, send me an email at keshavs@berkeley.edu - I would
actually love to implement something like this.

~~~
prakster
Hi trekker, if you are interested in pursuing a subset of your idea, I might
be able to provide you a canvas for testing it.

We are developing an app that solves a narrow but significant pain point for
ecommerce merchants, As we deploy the app to our beta testers, they will all
want to add new features. The dilemma we will face is this: which feature
should we pick? The answer - and your opportunity - lies in coming up with an
algorithm that picks the right feature based on analyzing three factors: (1)
the pervasiveness of the pain across the user base, (2) the magnitude of the
pain, and (3) our own resource limitations.

Once you apply your algorithm successfully to our app, you should be able to
extend it to other apps. If you succeed, this could be boon to the beta
community all over the world, and a major success for you.

~~~
trekker7
Thanks prakster. Your comment got me thinking again... a subset like this may
be feasible after all. Shoot me an email if you'd like to stay in touch.

------
Hexayurt
Domestic disaster response (i.e. Katrina II, Bay Quake) using the internet and
commercial supply chains to provide sheltering:

<http://disastr.org>

Lots of room for mapping apps, GIS, route finding, and an __enormous
__capability to handle traffic spikes.

Slashing the risk of financial transactions in the developing world through a
free-market inclusive biometric digital ID standard:

<http://guptaoptions.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php>

Just too big for a start up - they really need BigCo involvement to get going.

------
catalinist
aggregating the aggregation sites. Basiclly a site where you can make an
account and have the news from digg, reddit, pligg and whatever other sites
delivered to this one service. basicly I'm thinking about the user registring
on this one site, and then this site registring to all other sites specific
users that link back to the main-user. Kinda lika a pyramid ... don't know if
this make sense (or if I'm expressing it well in english). This would also be
used with social bookmarking sites (apparently 300 of this kind of sites
exists - here is the list : [http://www.ajaxflakes.com/web-20/social-
bookmarking-sites-un...](http://www.ajaxflakes.com/web-20/social-bookmarking-
sites-uncovered-listed-300-all-tested-and-live/))

And if I'm going there : this site should provide web services that link to
user's blogs.

This is my 2 cents.

------
agranig
I'd like to see a web service and plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird to
synchronize message filters, junk settings, mail box settings etc. among
different Thunderbird instances (running on different computers or on
different OSes) - similar to foxmarks for Firefox bookmarks.

------
dpapathanasiou
Spam attack software: identify the toll-free telephone numbers in spam emails
and automatically call multiple times using Jajah (or similar VoIP service).

Unlike spam (which costs little to send), the spammers or their clients have
to pay for all those telephone calls.

~~~
Tichy
Same problem as usual with that kind of idea: what stops companies from
spamming in the name of their competitors?

------
ryanspahn
A Firefox plug-in like FoxMarks, but for your FF plug-ins and not bookmarks.
When you download/install a fresh FF copy, instead of installing all your
plug-ins, just install the one in which you sign in and boom it starts
downloading and installing your favorite plug-ins.

------
yters
Combine email, chat, blogging, etc. into one real time system on facebook.
Everyone's going to want to start communicating there anyways, since the trust
network keeps out spamminess. (I think someone said something similar last
time)

~~~
BrandonM
Isn't that just a description of Facebook itself? The message system is the
e-mail, the Notes is the blogging, and the Wall is the chat...

~~~
yters
my point is that they should be one system. Similar to how email and chat are
the same in gmail.

------
ivankirigin
[http://ikbot.blogspot.com/2007/10/server-side-video-
processi...](http://ikbot.blogspot.com/2007/10/server-side-video-processing-
of-life.html) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65320> "Server-side video
processing of life-casting robots"

I love iRobot's history of openness. The roomba API is completely open: anyone
with a serial cable and some know-how can control it. The ConnectR should
eventually be open as well.

I'd like to see this taken to the next level with live-casting from a robot.
Justin.tv meets ConnectR.

The robot would either have to be managed by a human when in public, or it
could wander alone in a private space. Community voting could control where
the robot goes and whhere it directs its gaze. Ideally, the robot would be
placed where average people can't be, like back stage at a concert or fashion
show. Dangerous places are also ideal. Let the robot go where the humans
shouldn't.

Robots with internet enabled cameras can do more than normal robots. Server-
side processing means the robot doesn't need to have expensive hardware on
board for the intelligence.

Obstacle avoidance, mapping, localization, face & pedestrian detection, object
detection, object tracking & motion modeling, etc. can all be done using
today's technology with a single camera stream. Some processing would need to
be local given the constraints of network bandwidth, but plenty could be
offloaded. It is also a good model for premium services: pay more to get
faster connections, fast processing, and more capabilities.

Automated surveillance with alerts for intruders could be a killer-app for
wifi/webcam robots. Today's choices for home security are immobile, cost
thousands, or both.

Server side image processing itself is a viable idea. It's the next step in
online video. Today, we just stream compressed pixels. Tomorrow, we'll
calculate and stream information about the scene. You can send a flickr image
stream to a service which finds faces, builds a corpus of data to identify the
people from context, and performs face recognition. Face recognition companies
like Animetrics could be tapped to do the hard part.

Motion detection for surveillance applications could all be online, with
companies like Intellivid and ObjectVideo already having optimized the image
processing component.

Street Views in maps can be combined with GPS tagged digital camera shots to
build super high resolution aerial imagery, and eventually 3D.

Services like Fauxto which aim to be photo-shop online could build an
interesting api where any image can be sent with instructions for processing.

The point is that all of these services require sending video and images to a
server, where some intelligent processing occurs. Often times, the processing
will involve the same software modules, so each problem is not unique. Tap the
long tail of software development and allow 3rd parties to build their own
processing streams that live on your servers. This could be made simple and
standard using tools like Python with modules for image processing like
OpenCV, PIL, NumPy, and SciPy.

------
hwork
Here's one I'm dying to implement: user-generated reporting website for the
wait times on the rides at Disneyland. I swear Disney distorts these for
easier crowd control.

~~~
karzeem
If you stay in one of the Disney-owned hotels, you get to skip the lines on
all the rides. It's a little more expensive, but it's worth it, since you wait
five minutes, tops, for any ride.

~~~
rms
No, if you stay at a Universal owned hotel you get to skip the lines on all
rides at Universal theme parks as many times as you want. Outside guests can
buy this feature for around $40 a day but you are only allowed to skip the
line in each ride once.

Disney's virtual queuing system, called Fastpass, does not create different
classes of users. The only people that get special privileges are those that
are doing something like Make a Wish or winners of a contest and these
extremely limited superpasses don't impact overall wait times. The advantage
given to Disney guests is that on each day a park will be open one hour early
and up to three hours late. This isn't that much of a benefit during peak
times because the park that was open early will have more guests than the
other parks and you have to get up an hour early for optimal touring. The late
hours aren't that much of an advantage because everyone wants to stay late in
the park.

A naive perspective on Disney's Fastpass is that it doesn't actually impact
total waiting time because the standby lines will take twice as long. This is
incorrect because Fastpass lets the Disney engineers redistribute traffic
however they want, which measurably reduced wait times for the most popular
rides right after the implementation of Fastpass. Wait times are still higher
than they've ever been though, because park attendance keeps going up. Disney
is a profit machine.

For more information about waiting in line at Disneyworld, I strongly
recommend Industrial Engineer Bob Sehlinger's The Unofficial Guide to Walt
Disney World, whatever the latest edition is. He also mapped out a
mathematically near-optimal plan for riding every single ride at the Magic
Kingdom in one day. I really want to try doing that one day.

~~~
karzeem
You're right. Funny how the Florida theme parks of one's youth tend to blend
together.

Slate has a good (though somewhat old) explanation of both Universal and
Disney's systems (<http://www.slate.com/id/2067672/sidebar/2067676/>). If its
numbers are still more or less right, using Fastpass reduces your wait time to
about 15 minutes when you come back to the ride during the window you've been
assigned.

------
ivankirigin
I realize some misdirection on my part. I should post my ideas in this context
too. This thread will be gone by Friday, so I'll continue to submit ideas as
separate posts like these: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65320>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65083>
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[http://www.tipjoy.com/our2cents/2007/10/real_liveblogging_li...](http://www.tipjoy.com/our2cents/2007/10/real_liveblogging_live_comment.html)
"Real live-blogging, live comments, and a comment API"

Live blogging is an interesting aspect of the blogosphere. Bloggers post in
real-time, often while attending an event, chiming in live with their thoughts
and views. This is a great way for bloggers to communicate with their readers,
but it's currently not well supported in blogging tools.

Live bloggers should be able to update their posts in some manner similar to a
chat client, or collaborative editing software. The system would take the
blogger's new content and appended to the post on the readers screen without a
page refresh. It would be entertaining to watch something so live, along with
a different take on the process of posting to a blog. Readers could see
sentences edited and thoughts refined.

Ideas come from writing them down, and this would be a live crystallization of
thought.

The stream could be synchronized to an event, and then later could be played
back to get the same experience.

Similarly, comment sections could be live. This is nothing new, with group
chat rooms updating messages to the whole group. But it would improve the user
experience of a comment thread, with new comments appearing on the site live.
For sites with comment modding, the votes could also be live -- watch trolling
comments nose dive and disappear.

Regarding comments - comment systems should have open APIs. For example, if a
blog post makes it to the front page of reddit, digg, and Hacker News, there
will be 4 disparate comment threads, one at each of the news sites, and one at
the original blog. Rather than forking the conversation, recommendation sites
augment it: grab from and push to a comment feed. Comments on Hacker News
should be visible on the original blog, and comments there should appear on
Hacker News. (Except YouTube comments; no one needs to see those.)

I already mentioned a few of these points to the Disqus folks. They certainly
have a good system on their hands, and any real competitor would have to do
everything they do, and maybe add a few of the ideas here.

~~~
bootload
_"... Live blogging is an interesting aspect of the blogosphere. Bloggers post
in real-time, often while attending an event, chiming in live with their
thoughts and views. This is a great way for bloggers to communicate with their
readers, but it's currently not well supported in blogging tools. ..."_

One start would be to create an opensource wordpress plugin + a client side
browser bit of js code to support it. That way each user could support their
own comment systems for each place they comment. The bit that currently
alludes me is the discovery bit. How do others know you have commented on a
particular site?

One way could be to publish say RSS feeds that link to sites you have
commented on allowing others to discover what others have said. That or some
sort of microformat that marks up some page that people read. This would not
be real-time though. Commercial sites have an advantage here as they have a
centralised place people can look.

Maybe the solution is to offer a commercial discovery site that acts as a
registry of comments. So for example:

\- user John writing using open source firefox plugin you make some comments
on a third party site say hackernews

\- plugin sends comments back to your open source wordpress blog, adds
comments to blog then generates new RSS feed of comment detailing comments +
discovery information (blog, url etc).

\- wordpress pings a commercial site _"CommentsRUs.com"_ that pulls the RSS
file, parses it and either creates a new entry for a particular site, adds
comment.

\- user Jane who has subscribed to CommentsRUs.com, HackerNews site is
notified by twitter that John has responded to a HackerNews article she has
also commented on

\- user Jane makes another comment and CommentsRUs.com either notifies user
John or makes an entry on his homepage
<http://commentsrus.com/person/john/hackernews/> so he can follow the thread.

Of course this is no substitute for the original site because the annoying
thing is the meta data is not captured. Then again if they did have some
mechanism to capture the metadata (
<http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/hackerid> ) you can do lots of
useful things.

------
sharpshoot
teleport

------
pageman
a site where you can use GIMP 2.0 plug-ins like fake lomos, holga effects etc.
Fotoflexer does this using it's Warholize effect but it's limited to that.
Maybe the site can have apps/plugins integrated into it by user ala-Facebook
so that you can have a library of effects after a few months built by the
users

~~~
nailer
There's a few online GIMP/Photoshop type apps already. Most are done in flash
and work pretty well.

One of their advantages is that plugins are (of course) run on their servers,
and thus even low powered desktops could have their filters be applied
instantly.

------
amichail
So what happens if someone suggests an idea but changes his/her mind later and
wants to implement it after all?

Perhaps it would be better to just ask people for ideas that they are willing
to share -- without any implication/suggestion as to whether they plan to
implement it?

~~~
chadboyda
They are forced to build a better, more useful, competitive product so that
they, their investors, and customers all benefit.

~~~
amichail
I mean the people who used the suggestion would be upset because it seems that
the person suggesting it said he would not pursue it.

~~~
ivankirigin
Isn't the point that almost everything is in the execution?

