

Ask HN: A product you would like to see built? - ideahacker

Hi,<p>I have been doing a consumer Internet startup for last 3 years and have reached a point where I wanna try out something else. The startup is Ramen profitable so I can work on another idea without worrying about money.<p>My strengths are coding, usability and interaction design (for consumer facing sites). I don't know much about enterprise software etc. I wanted to ask the community what product they wish existed. Since I am a bootstrapper, monetizability is important. Ideally I should be able to charge people a subscription fees (monthly/yearly).
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jay_kyburz
I want to know what is going on in the world, but don't want editorial spin on
my news. I want to have a better perspective about what is important.

Perhaps it's that I want to make up my own mind about what's important rather
than trusting it to the current news organisations.

How about some kind of fact based news service where stories bubble to the top
based on the "severity" or impact on the world or my community.

So for example, on the front page of the international section, global events
of the last 7 days are sorted in order of "severity".

We may have to make some assumptions about what severity means, perhaps lives
lost, financial loss, environmental impact. Perhaps a user can sort by a
preference. Users could also filter by Global, County, State, City ect.

Clicking on one of these news events could present a nice collection of links
to standard editorial content on the net, or relevant Wikipedia pages.

I guess the content would be community driven, and you would add some game
mechanics to encourage adoption. (Karma ect)

I'd like to do this myself for fun, perhaps as a side project one day.

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Flemlord
My wife would like an iPad/iPhone app for tracking baby milestones. When is
the first time she rolls over, smiles, holds her head up, makes eye contact,
etc. Keep a centralized (anonymous) database so we can compare to the average
stats of the other users.

She's downloaded several apps so far, paid $4 for one, $6 for another. They
were all unusably bad. I wish there was a return policy for apps.

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chubs
What were the apps she already downloaded? Is there a market for baby-related
iphone apps? This could be interesting, in that i've recently started dabbling
in making iApps, and i've recently started being a dad.

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mahipal
I would love to hear more too. I'm not in the target market, but I think
there's a large market for baby-related apps (and, equally good, apps for
young kids). I had some thoughts about how a "baby milestone" app might work,
but the lack of a camera on the iPad is a big obstacle.

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adrianwaj
Build a Sin Bin for articles with bad or mis-titled headlines. I've posted
something along these lines already:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283954>

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tjmc
High bandwidth proxy service. I can't watch Hulu in Australia and free proxies
are too slow. I'd pay to use a proxy service along the backbone somewhere.

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nzmsv
You could run a proxy on a VPS. A basic Linode has 200GB bandwidth (which is
the same as the monthly cap on my home connection). Tinyproxy is easy to set
up.

But this is an interesting idea for a service.

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maushu
Wouldn't it be illegal to serve hulu content to the outside of US?

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nzmsv
This is probably why most businesses offering proxies, newsgroup access, etc.
have very shady looking websites :)

That's the problem with such a business. You can't advertise "get Hulu from
outside the US". You can only advertise "fast proxy servers", which only the
technically inclined people will now what to do with.

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petervandijck
OS forum software (simple, think vanilla forums, not phpbb) that I can easily
run on google appengine so it's basically free to host.

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SudarshanP
<http://sudarshan.posterous.com/proxypc>

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rms
$5000 a year for a virtual personal assistant that only helps you deal with
email overload.

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jasonlbaptiste
im drawing a blank (its late), but don't worry about us. What would you like
to see built?

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ideahacker
I always find it hard to organize my reading (for most part technical
reading). Do you think a service can help there? Like I can keep a track of
books and papers I want to read and also get ideas from other people based on
what I am currently reading/learning.

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bhousel
amazon.com, shelfari.com, anobii.com?

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ideahacker
I am thinking more like a site that can help you stay focused and also provide
motivation (by hooking you up with real people who are learning/learned what
you are learning right now).

So yes .. its like shelfari but more focused on learning than casual reading

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ochekurishvili
If not relate to the internet then it's a time machine...

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dumb_account_
Do you have a resume / credentials? I'd like to make sure my idea reaches a
capable person.

