

Ask HN: If you had ready to use real time technology, what would you do? - andr

Building something like Skype, Google Talk, or even Twitter is hard to do right at large scale. What real time service would you build if the technology was not a challenge?
======
SandB0x
Custom reality tv. Users pay to see a day/hour in the life of another user -
possibly a celebrity, though other fun people would be popular - who wears a
tasteful camera strapped to their head or neck.

Witness an afternoon as Michael Schumacher. What's life like as an Oxford
student? My name is Joe and tomorrow I will go free running in the city - join
me.

~~~
aristus
psst: justin.tv

Justin used to run around with a helmet camera and a laptop+ 4 bonded wireless
modems in his backpack.

~~~
SandB0x
Madness! I guess my "idea" depends more on engineering advancements then. When
I wrote the parent I'd just finished watching a series of the excellent Peep
Show (filmed mostly via helmet cam), and I was thinking how I'd like to be
able to jump into anyone's head and observe their life in that way.

~~~
TrevorJ
Being John Malkovich?

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cjoh
I'd take on shipping. It seems to me that UPS could be in-part replaced with
intelligent routing of people's ordinary daily routines.

~~~
hop
Was thinking that exact thing yesterday when I had to go to the mall for last
minute presents - had major crowd/chaos anxiety, turned and bailed. If Amazon
could do real time shipping, it would be a miracle. Happily pay a premium for
it. They could have distribution hubs in all major cities...

~~~
cpr
They're offering same-day shipping in major cities now.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200105970)

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BrentRitterbeck
As of right now, I can find out a lot of information about a company by paying
for the data from a data provider like Bloomberg or Reuters. This data,
however, should be free and well-organized.

I would like to build a search engine that indexes and organizes regulatory
filings, investment message board posts, investment blog posts, the portion of
a company's website dealing with investment relations, and economic news.

You input the company's trading symbol to bring up all the relevant
information about the company. Furthermore, there should be an API so that
people can use the index in their own applications. I have no idea where
revenue would come from.

~~~
andr
Why is something like Google/Yahoo Finance not good enough? Apart from 10-K
and 10-Q's?

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
Have you ever used Bloomberg or Reuters? Google/Yahoo Finance are far from
useful for anything but an overview of a company. The service I am talking
about would be aimed at more professional users.

~~~
andr
Yes, I have used Bloomberg quite a lot, although I spent most of my time with
its painful API. I just wanted to get your perspective on what Bloom feature
you'd like to see in a web site/search engine.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
Well, to start, if I could get correlation data from Yahoo/Google Finance that
would be a great. In addition to that, if I could get my hands easily on data
concerning pending lawsuits, better industry data, and better regression tools
(though this may tie in with the correlation data requested above), that would
also be wonderful. Those are just a few key things that would be nice for
equity. Also, the data concerning anything outside of equities is severely
lacking in Yahoo/Google Finance.

------
DaniFong
An automatic, voice based translator: talk in one language on one end (to an
iPhone or something) out comes another language and subtitles in another :-)

One thing that's interesting about this is that it's not too far off. We have
speech recognition technology, computer voice technology, and translation
technology. They need to get better, and faster, but they're there.

------
patio11
Nobody pays you money because you solved a technology challenge. Solve
problems for people who pay money for solutions to problems.

Some time later, you may run into scaling issues. You can cross that bridge
when you come to it. (Or you can pay other people to cross it for you.)

~~~
andr
I agree with you completely. My question is what would you build if the
technological barrier of building a massive, reliable real time service was
not there. Everyone is talking about the Real Time Web (even organizing
conferences) but Twitter is the only near-real-time service that comes to
mind.

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ntoshev
I've thought about making a real-time forum: basically the same thing as an
ordinary forum software, but with presence capability and posts happening in
real time without reloading. Or, if you look at it in another way, it would be
a chat room with persistence, result is searchable, possibly threaded.

The hope is that conversations in such a medium would be something in between
regular chat and regular forums, and they could be compelling enough.

The technology is not a big issue for building this, the Tornado framework has
a chat example from which you can start. Text messages are short, they can be
kept in memory and saved to disk once in a while either DIY or using something
like Redis.

~~~
witten
You've just described Google Wave. However, I think there's plenty of room in
this space to come up with alternate implementations and interfaces.

~~~
ntoshev
Yes, Wave has all the features, but seems focused on collaborative editing,
rich media, send and synchronize individual keystrokes etc. - so I imagine a
lot of the design decisions would be different.

I don't think I'm going to build it though - the type of forums I am
interested in actually benefits from the perception that you have time to
think through what you are saying.

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staunch
I'm not uninterested in building something like Skype, Google Talk, or Twitter
because of the technical issues. I'm uninterested because I have no good ideas
(or passion) about solving a significant problem with them.

There are lots of things I'd do if you gave me technology that does not really
exist. Stuff like speaker independent speech-to-text that's as accurate as an
expert human could transcribe. Or language translation that was as good as an
expert human. Or almost anything that let me have the power of a human brain
for free (no, not MTurk).

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ThomPete
One that solves this

[http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-
realtim...](http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-
weve-been-looking-for/)

------
zpoley
Text to speech so that I don't have to consume realtime data like RSS,
Facebook, Twitter, etc. while actively using a device. I'm just gonna wait for
Google or someone else to solve that one.

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nir
"two chicks at the same time, man"

~~~
thesystemis
(for those who don't know the reference:
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/>)

~~~
jksmith
Of course I know the reference. Sorry, but a downvote is no defense against a
levity injection attack.

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rokhayakebe
AVATAR. Plug into a clone of me and watch him do everything I think.

------
tybris
IRC

