

Ask HN: Donate your inactive Business Plan/Service/Product - sushi

The thing about entrepreneurs is that they are full of ideas. Sometimes they pursue those ideas and sometimes they don't.<p>I have come across some entrepreneurs who have created around 90% of their product/service but then decided not to go ahead with it for any reason.<p>Do you have any such plan/service/product which you probably created but have no time to pursue it?<p>Mention it here so that others might adopt it and take it ahead.
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mindcrime
Sounds cool, but none of my inactive ideas really have much value... either
because they've been done, are being done, or have been obsoleted.

That said, a couple of things I toyed with, in case this sparks a useful
thought for somebody else:

1\. A decentralized, federated social-networking platform that would allow
individual sites to include social-networking features, but where all the
"social stuff" could be federated through API's, so that a user had access to
his/her entire social graph, no matter which site he/she was logged into. This
was a semi-novel idea 3 years ago, but now everybody and his brother is
writing a decentralized social-network. <shrug />

2\. This has maybe be done, not sure, but I was intrigued by the idea of a
robotic avatar that could be used for remote conferencing. That is, a small
robotic device with a camera, microphone, and speakers, where the head could
pivot to scan the room and look up and down, etc... the idea being, if I'm
hosting a teleconference in my conference room, and 3 people are "virtual"
attendees, I plug 3 of these things in, and the remote conferencing software
attaches a session to 1 per remote user, and lets them interact with the other
people. Didn't really put much thought into what it would look like or what
other functions it might have... but it wouldn't be fair to let the virtual
attendees shoot at the others with frickin' lasers, if the others can't shoot
back somehow. Which leads to the idea of a series of satellites, in
geostationary orbits... wait, just kidding about that last bit.

3\. I think there was another one, but I forget... I'll edit it in later if I
remember. :-)

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sbe
Food Recommendation Engine

Create a "Taste Genome" comparable to Pandora's "Music Genome" and let people
select which foods they like, then recommend foods with similar taste
profiles. (foodgenome.com appears to be an abandoned attempt at this.)

Alternately, let people enter the foods they like. Using an algorithm similar
to Facebook's suggested friends one, treat the food as friends. If a lot of
people who share your taste also like something else, offer it as a
suggestion.

This would help picky eaters (e.g., me) venture out and try new foods.

~~~
photon_off
ThinkCook.com is apparently the "pandora or recipe sites". It's not bad, but
their database of recipes is quite small.

Along the similar lines, I was thinking of making a site that would take
uploads of your grocery receipts (via iPhone app, or SMS or something) and use
OCR to scan and determine which ingredients you've purchased. Then it could
make a database of items you have in stock and recommend recipes based on the
ingredients you have (and recipe ratings).

Also, it'd be able to determine which ingredients were likely to spoil soon,
and thus suggest meals which make use of those ingredients.

My conclusion after a long while surfing recipe websites is that there is
really no shortage of good recipes online. Also, receipts can be long and
require more than one photo which would be a pain in the ass.

I do think the receipt concept has something to it, though. It'd be amazing to
keep tabs on everything I own.

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Random_Person
I've got a life-hack product that I designed about 15 years ago and I have
always been convinced it would sell if someone could mass produce it and
produce an infomercial for it. You see, it is a very simple and cheap product
that plays to american laziness while also fixing a problem millions of people
have:

Automatic Toilet Handle Jiggler

There is a total of 1 prototype in existence in my parents basement. I
installed it when I was ~14. It consists of a flat piece of spring steel about
5 inches long with a weight at the end and a clamp for attaching to the handle
of the toilet. No more leaking toilet. No more getting back up to go jiggle
the handle again. No need to spend the 15 minutes and $20 to actually fix the
leaky toilet-- you know, because that's "hard." Slip on a springy weight and
disaster averted!

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mathgladiator
The 90% is the cheap part; the final 10% costs the most money.

I had an idea of building of an API data service-programming-language-cloud-
management-tool-of-awesomeness that maps amazon cloud services to language
primitives. Imagine using S3, SimpleDB, and SimpleQueueService as language
primitives (the SimpleQueueService really works well when sending a closure to
the queue).

I had most of version 2 working too (and a really good start on version 3),
but I had to kill it. :(

<http://www.mathgladiator.com/projects/kira>

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teyc
Create Illustrator-ready infographic elements, e.g. shapes sized according to
percentages, or provide "more-like-this" infographics. This is as an
alternative to powerpoint slides. I noticed my kids enjoy the "Pick-me-up"
book, which is a book of infographic pages. I thought grown ups might just
like it too.

~~~
sushi
I have also been wondering about creating something like that. I am a designer
and I can make decent infographics (mainly CSS based) but I needed the data
used to be dynamic which would mean getting data from some external source
through API's or something.

I am in process of learning Django now (which is awesome) and I might do
something on those lines in near future.

