
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup? - choogi
This has been done two other times before:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13139638 (2016),
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9799007 (2015)<p>Both threads generated a lot of really interesting discussion, and I was curious what the discussion would sound like if this were asked again in 2018.
======
kodablah
I'll take a startup in a box. I want Kubernetes, Elastic, Kibana, FileBeat,
Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, databases, HTTP gateways, etc all set up on on
the cloud (or set of servers) of my choice and a dashboard that lets me add
users (e.g. like a modern Webmin/cPanel+WHM) and make minor config changes if
I don't want to run these myself. I want those things HA and I want stable
hostnames for them (e.g. Consul DNS on every box). Then I want an empty app
template where I can provide a few things: commands to build my app (including
dependencies), a systemd conf for start/stop of my app, a config value to tell
you where the logs will be, a config value to tell you how to consume metrics
from me (e.g. a local HTTP path for prometheus), etc. I feel like we're close
with Helm and Kubernetes but I'll be damned if coordinating and setting all of
this stuff up HA, getting notified of failures, getting notified when I need
to add more servers, being cloud-independent, etc isn't an extreme burden to
entry.

I want to write code and deploy, not spend most of my time on ops or marry
myself to a cloud vendor. I started my company as the only tech person and I
feel like I have to be more admin than dev even though I'm doing the same
thing as everyone else.

~~~
franciscop
I don't think for a _startup_ you need K8s and most of the things you have
outlined! Maybe for a late-stage startup, but then you are already doing
something so a generic slap-it-there solution might not be the best idea.

You are describing a large-scale setup boilerplate, far away from what I'd
call a startup in a box. Slap in a simple server like my own project [1] or no
server at all until product-market fit, and then but only then start scaling.

[1] [https://serverjs.io/](https://serverjs.io/)

~~~
kodablah
Of course you don't "need" them. However, I don't believe I'm describing a
large scale boilerplate. You can get this with a few servers and a couple
hundred a month these days. Heck, you can do it on a laptop w/ minikube
probably (though obviously not ok to do in prod, just goes to show the costs
are not the problem here). Sure it's easy to run an app. But it's not easy to
admin it as you grow (even though you are not yet "big" and still may be only
one or two people).

~~~
atmosx
Who will troubleshoot when shit hits the fan?

It seems to me that you are introducing technical debt from day one because
it’s cool.

~~~
merinowool
What technical debt?

~~~
BjoernKW
The kind of technical debt otherwise known as premature optimisation. If you
don't even know yet that your app has to scale - and in which way - preparing
for that contingency is a waste of resources.

~~~
merinowool
I wouldn't qualify that as a premature optimisation. Kubernetes is de facto
standard of running applications now and you get all the benefits for almost
free. Premature optimisation in this case would be over provisioning -
throwing more servers than you need.

~~~
vimal7370
K8s is "de facto standard" already? When did that happen? No doubt that K8s
has a great future and I personally like it a lot as well. But to call it a
standard requirement itself is premature.

------
dyim
I do B2B sales (specifically, customer support for consumer-facing
businesses), and I'd pay ~$1,000/mo for a service that solves this problem:

 _Which warm intros should I ask for?_ There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal
customer profile. I've got ~500 friends who I'd feel comfortable asking for
warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After
deduplicating, that's ~100,000 second-degree connections, some of whom are
decision-makers at companies I'd like to sell to.

I'd want someone to go through my LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc.,
and tell me something along the lines of: "Ben might know decision-makers at
Companies A, B, C, D, and E." And, conversely, I'd like to know all the
possible warm introductions that could lead me to Company A (e.g. "Ben, Max,
and Jennifer could possibly introduce you to Alice, Bob, and Cameron at
Company A").

All of this information is available to me; it's just a total O(N^2) pain to
clean and aggregate it. Like, I can certainly spend an hour listening to
podcasts and looking through Ben's LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends,
Instagram followers - and seeing if any of them are COOs at CPG brands. But
I'll run out of podcasts eventually, and then it's not a very high-leverage
use of my time to repeat that process for Max, Jennifer, Nate, Christy, et al.

~~~
aerovistae
You have 500 friends?

~~~
dabockster
I have about 20-30 people I still stay in contact with and it's super tough to
schedule activities as it is. :(

------
dmode
A next generation internal / corporate portal. Everyplace I have worked at had
either a really bad implementation of an internal portal or had a bunch of
wiki pages clubbed together. It was incredibly difficult to get even basic
info, such as where is the conference room, who works in the security team,
what is the expense policy, so on a so forth. In my current multi billion
dollar company, when I am meeting with someone new, I have to actually go to
LinkedIn to understand what they do in the company and in what is their focus
area.

~~~
idax
I agree. I think if you could branch off what stripe has done with their
'home' feature, you'd have a real business on your hands.
[https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home](https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home)

------
Thriptic
Software development infrastructure in a box plus strong training materials /
guidance for scientists. Increasing numbers of scientists are writing code
without any formal CS training, and the outputs are predictably awful and
unreliable. It is very common to find no testing, no acceptance criteria, no
version control, no formal planning, no code review, no style guide being
employed, sparse commenting, fragmented development environments / dependency
hell etc. People frequently know that what they are doing is suboptimal, but
it is hard to convince them that they should put in the work to use industry
best practices for a variety of reasons.

If someone could create a product (probably infrastructure plus a Python IDE)
which made doing things the "right way" easy for these users, and which would
provide case studies or tutorials to show them WHY doing things correctly is
beneficial using analogies to good lab behavior, it would be hugely valuable.

~~~
jgamman
i can't see a business model - the scientist is already paying with their time
to get something working that is just good enough for publication. all the
problems you describe are down the road and scientists kick that to
'industry'. unless your 'right way' is also easier to boot, why would they add
to their time?

~~~
Thriptic
I think that is indeed the perception, but that the time savings would
actually be quite pronounced if people did things correctly. I've seen many
projects get immediately bogged down by bugs / feature creep / lack of
planning and end up taking far longer than if people had done things
correctly. Also, many labs hand off code bases when post docs or students
leave, creating chaos for the next person that is tasked with working on them.

As an example, I wrote a proof of concept script to show that we could
automate some basic image analysis in my lab three years ago. That was
immediately grabbed by an investigator and put into production without any
further thought. Because it was a proof of concept script, it was of course
very buggy and required substantial feature addition. This was added without
any thought for design etc. Fast forward to today and this code base is a
sprawling shit show which is being rewritten for the THIRD TIME. Each time has
ended in failure because people failed to observe basic best practice, and
this attempt will likely fail too. That is an ENORMOUS waste of investigator
time. Another project I can think of involved a model which had a 10,000 line
function. No one could trust what was being outputted by the thing, so they
eventually abandoned it. That's hundreds of investigator hours down the drain.

------
sdiq
I work in the humanitarian field in a poor country ravaged by war and famine.
We have a number of humanitarian actors currently working in this country and
no one actually has access to accurate population statistics. Well, none
exists. The last census was conducted in 1975. I believe someone could use
technology to get a much better estimate of the population. One thing that
always springs to my mind is the possibility of using aerial imagery. It
doesn't have to be exactly that, though.

I think this need, a real need that is, can potentially make millions for the
enterprising type, here.

Why don't I try the same, you might ask. But, while I have some ideas, I am
may not be able to raise the resources needed, at the moment.

~~~
herlitzj
How much penetration do cell phones have into a lot of these countries? May be
a way to tease out a rough population from cell phone use statistics.

~~~
riezebos
What I can tell you from my experience in the Gambia is that there many people
have cellphones (not smartphones), but most have 2 or 3 because provider have
lower rates when calling to the same provider, so one phone for Qcell, one
phone for Africell,... Not sure if it's like that in many other places, there
is a lot of tourism on the coast and returning tourists often bring their old
phones to give to the locals.

------
rayiner
Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required.
Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last
year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in,
dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers)
have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no
account creation, registration, or software install required, get an extrwmely
high quality low latency (comparable to FaceTime) voice/video conference.

~~~
simon_acca
I have been using jitsi for the past year or so and the experience is pretty
much what you describe.

[https://meet.jit.si](https://meet.jit.si)

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I used to use this in my company and while joining and creating meetings is
pretty painless the audio/video quality was pretty crap. Perhaps they have
improved in the three years since I've used it.

~~~
jokh
It's pretty good now.

------
Semkas
I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator
who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create
block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of
blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot
easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes
making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists without 3d experience.

~~~
eerikkivistik
You can give [https://3dc.io](https://3dc.io) a shot. Disclosure: developer
here.

------
kichuku
I am a network engineer for a medium size company (I have worked for very
large enterprises too) and there a a lot of opportunities for startups in
network engineering.

1)Simple network automation platform that works for "My" custom environment,
simply and effortlessly and also it should not break any existing network. (I
don't mean like HP Network Automation)

2) Network diagram software - Seriously, any experienced network engineer will
agree that this one needs a lot of disruption. Visio is very expensive and
even then it is a pain to use. And Lucidchart or Cacoo or draw.io or other
online tools too have their flaws/drawbacks.

3)Network monitoring tools - It is a pity that CA Spectrum, which is a ugly
and non user-friendly tool, in my opinion, is among the most used network
monitoring software. Network monitoring tools are bread and butter of NOC
(Network Operation Center) teams.

4) Network devices configuration management tool and Change and topology
visualization tool - Netbrain seemed promising in the start. But it seems to
do too many things and has still room for improvement.

It is high time that more and more programmers should start building and
contributing in network engineering field. There are numerous tools for each
and every function. But there is lot of room for improvement in making those
tools more elegant, easier to use and more reliable.

Yes, there is Software Defined Networking (SDN) where the vendors (Cisco,
Silverpeak, Riverbed etc) themselves provide a nice visual dashboard. But the
current "non-SDN" devices are going to stay for quite some time. And also why
do we need to depend on one vendor and hence the Vendor provided dashboard?
There will always be customers who would want vendor agnostic architecture and
common tools to manage the infrastructure.

Note: A lot of the current tools (especially the ones I have mentioned above)
do work very well and are used by large enterprises for a reason. But Tesla
did disrupt the market of cars in its own way when reliable Toyotas and fast
Ferraris already existed.

~~~
irundebian
I'm not a network engineer, rather a security-focused guy, and I'm also very
interested in this topic because the basis for a secure network is a well
managed network without any unknown/undocumented assets (network equipment
incl. layer 2 as well as network participants). Few months ago I attended a
talk of Ivan Pepelnjak, the author of a network engineering blog called
ipspace. He talked a lot on network automation and enumerated some success
story. I remember he talked about people setting up several data centers in a
relatively short amount of time by using a lot of network automation /
configuration management.

[http://blog.ipspace.net/2018/03/presentation-and-video-
real-...](http://blog.ipspace.net/2018/03/presentation-and-video-real-
life.html)

------
eksemplar
A tool for managing software development that doesn’t suck. Especially if your
developers are doing a lot of small projects, that while too small to have
their own sprint or their own kanbanboard are too big to fit into a single
card on Trello.

Possibly something that mixes business and process models into it, but again,
something simple where you attach a single bpmn drawing and maybe an
architectural sketch to the process. Add time management, deadlines and maybe
a tie in to the web services of an ESDH system and it might even work for task
management in case working.

Everything is build for theoretical approaches. Like we do SCRUM, but really,
we’re doing scrumish things. We have an odd schedule, we work on multiple
projects at once, depending on what resources are available and what has
higher priority, sometimes something breaks and then we’re all doing
operations rather than development, sometimes the mayor has a direct request
and so on. I think we’ve tried all the tools from atlassian to trello and
nothing fits, it’s all too textbook for a messy place like ours and often I
think we should go back to postits and a fucking excel schedule but I really
don’t want to ever print an excel sheet ever again.

Interestingly I do a lot of networking with other managers in the public set
for, and everyone had this problem, not just in digitization. There isn’t a
single efficient tool for managing your workforce in the public sector.

There are excellent tools, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t have our workers
spend hours on them because we can’t sell those hours to anyone.

~~~
jakebrereton
What you're saying here really resonates, and it's something that we, at
Atlassian, have heard from many of our users. The Jira team has been hard at
work on a brand new project type that aims to give teams running "scrumish"
the perfect opportunity to build a board and workflow that will truly fit any
style of work (even work with an odd schedule, multiple projects at once, and
that requires a mixture between operations and dev!).

We've gotten a lot of feedback that often times the strict structures of scrum
and kanban are overly burdensome, yet teams still want and need some basic
guardrails (as well as the ability to modify their processes on the fly). Our
Product team is still testing and iterating on this new project type quite a
bit, and if you're up for it, we'd love to give you an early demo and get your
honest thoughts and feedback.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email and we'll find some time for a
demo: jake@atlassian.com

Jake

Jira PMM @ Atlassian

------
AutoEngineer
Working for a German Big four Car OEM. We need the following for measurement
data and we simply have no solution (except matlab, which is not good enough).

We want to plot big data (up to terabytes). Columns should be selectable by
gui and nameable. The Data then should be be added to database with an ID.
Everything should be usable without use of a scripting language.

Right now the terabytes of data have to be loaded in to ram just to see the
first few lines and determine what the columns stand for. Now I know that
there are editors that can load data partially but these have to be
reinstalled which requires admin rights etc. This is a huge burden in a big
company! The process of simply plotting, selecting and storing data takes a
huge amount of time. The solution should be web based because no admin rights
are availabe.

Often I am impressed how many tools and hacks exist simply to get one thing
done: visualize measurement data. Excel is not enough because even the import
of dot vs comma vs tab etc takes too much time and everytime has to be
relearned. Engineers have to plot the data sometimes every few months and then
you have a new excel version that autocorrects measurement data to dates or
whatever.

In my opinion this would solve an obscene amount of work. Right now every
engineer is hacking together some scripts that are extremely inflexible. When
just csv-type data has to be handled.

Edit: this also applies to smaller amounts of data of megabytes. How can we
plot them more robust than excel and then select x and y axis? I am pretty
sure that we would love to buy a product that solves these issues.

~~~
AskewEgret
If I am understanding your problem correctly, I did that for a large American
automotive electronics supplier back in the 1990s - though back then 30-40
megabytes of data was pretty big. We trained a bunch of American and Japanese
engineers on how to do that, but I don't remember any Europeans.

I think I have an email address in my profile; feel free to send me something.
I am fairly certain that your needs can be satisfied with existing Unix tools.
Then again, the reason I worked on the problem in the 1990s was to free up
engineer time so they could do more valuable things. A gui and other tools
could be worth paying for if the bosses have that mindset.

~~~
AutoEngineer
Thanks for your answer. Currently engineers can:

a) try to plot their data alone and spend time on hacking the stuff together.
This takes time as the guys doing it aren't accustomed doing it daily. This
happens accross all kind of divisions.

b) ask another team (with data scientists) for their support. Maybe the
engineer has to write a ticket, or the person who should be doing it has other
tasks, is in vacation, not willing, not replying to the request etc.

Either way hours are easily spent on solving this seemingly simple task. The
amount of time spent is simply staggering.

Unix would also be my personal choice. But getting the right to put a unix
machine into the network for a single user is extremely difficult. Windows,
Internet Explorer and temporary admin rights are the work environment that
almost everyone has to use. That's why I think a web based solutions is the
only viable option.

~~~
ilikeatari
I work in a similar space and one of the tools that might solve your problem
is exploratory.io.

------
rb808
I'm on the board of my condo building's HOA which has a number of things that
would be helpful.

* We pay $200/mo for a basic website with forum, some billing things, some file storage and other stuff I never use. It looks like it was written 20 years ago. (If someone can recommend something already out there that would be helpful)

* Doorman accepts dozens of package deliveries each day which get sent email and tracked in above system when picked up. Needs to write apt number on box and have its own tracking system

* I have to approve lots of expenses not knowing what fixing the hvac unit should cost

* we're getting screwed by insurance company - I have no idea if our policy is good or not

* Insurance claims for damage is a huge s __* show

* Energy management is horrible, we dont know where our electricity is going or how we can cut down

* Contractors are unreliable - I want to know who is blacklisted from neighbouring buildings because they suck

* How do our expenses compare to others? I have no idea.

~~~
warriormonk5
What exactly does that website do?

~~~
rb808
Website for residents

Forum

Document storage

maintains emails lists

Track who's paid

\+ more I don't really use it

There are a bunch here

[https://www.capterra.com/hoa-software/](https://www.capterra.com/hoa-
software/)

~~~
herbst
I don't know much about hoa's but this sounds like something that would work
with a common stack like WordPress + Stripe

------
hunter23
I work in health tech. Here are some problems: * Helping patients select the
right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or through referrals. The problem
is that Yelp has little correlation to quality of care. It's very difficult
for patients to evaluate a doctor - usually what they end up doing is
evaluating the customer service aspect of the doctor (did they speak to me
nicely, did they make me wait for an appointment, etc.) but no one is able to
evaluate doctors based on the quality of care. * Helping doctors and patients
estimate costs - Neither doctors or patients understand costs. it is very
routine for a doctor to suggest getting a lab test from X place because they
have experience working with the center. They have no idea that for your
specific insurance plan this will cost you 2x another place and so you with an
unhappy patient who blames their doctor for ripping them off. There should be
tools to patients and doctors estimate costs. * Helping patient select a
health care plan from their employer or a marketplace - most patients have no
idea what health care plan they are best on. However, theoretically if you
have their history of claims and some guess on their future behavior, you
should be able to tell them which health care plan makes the most sense for
them * Helping patients manage their chronic conditions. Most people are very
lax about managing their health conditions, they skip appointments, choose
brand names over generics, ignore refills, etc. Technology should be able to
nudge them in the right direction and help them optimize on quality and costs.
* Building technology that encourages health behavior - A majority of the
diseases attacking Americans are caused by lifestyle issues (diet, stress,
drugs, exercise). If you could build technology solutions that help nudge
people to healthier behavior, you would make solve a billion dollar problem
for insurance companies; they would love to reduce the risk pool of their
patients. This is a tough battle because even people who care about health are
inundated with false information (think Dr. Oz or anti-vaxxers or people who
insist every person in the world is a celiac and should go gluten free).

As you can see the bulk of the problems in the health care industry is
understanding how to navigate the huge mess of the US healthcare system. A
longer term solution is for us to build a single payer system and incentivize
patient care over patient procedures but I doubt that will happen.

~~~
Thriptic
> Helping patients select the right doctor. Currently most people use Yelp or
> through referrals. The problem is that Yelp has little correlation to
> quality of care. It's very difficult for patients to evaluate a doctor -
> usually what they end up doing is evaluating the customer service aspect of
> the doctor (did they speak to me nicely, did they make me wait for an
> appointment, etc.) but no one is able to evaluate doctors based on the
> quality of care.

We actually explored this for a startup idea. The problem is that it is
difficult to find a group of people who can do the evaluations in a truthful
and holistic way:

* Hospitals will never want to give out outcome data because outcome data will be used against them for ratings by people who don't understand it (for example, some community hospital in Montana may be rated higher than Mass General because of case complexity issues). Or worse, it will be used by people who DO understand it :D

* We explored having doctors rate other doctors in a variety of ways (which I think would reflect the "truest" measure of quality). Residents and fellows could rate attendings, but they might not know how attendings in their hospital compare to attendings in most other hospitals. Additionally, attendings or hospitals might apply pressure to these groups to provide good ratings. Specialists could rate other specialists in their field, but then you might see collusion, false negative reviews, or retaliation. How you would avoid these problems is not immediately clear to me.

* As you point out, patients are really only able to evaluate bedside manner and not quality of care.

One way we thought about it is having a rating system which would have public
profiles for physicians and anonynmous reviews from other physicians and
members of the care team. Ratings coming from other physicians in the
specialty and providers at their institutions would be weighted more than
ratings from other physicians. The highest rated physicians would also have
more weight within their specialty than an average rated physician. You could
bootstrap the system by asking specialists to provide the names of the top X
people in their field. These people would automatically be rated highly.

Patients could log in and provide comments about patient experience; hospitals
could log in and provide outcome data if they wanted.

I am not entirely sure how you would really monetize it. It's the equivalent
of the dating app problem; the better you are at matching, the less money you
make as users exit the platform. I do agree that it would be great if osmeone
could solve this problem though.

> Helping doctors and patients estimate costs - Neither doctors or patients
> understand costs. it is very routine for a doctor to suggest getting a lab
> test from X place because they have experience working with the center. They
> have no idea that for your specific insurance plan this will cost you 2x
> another place and so you with an unhappy patient who blames their doctor for
> ripping them off. There should be tools to patients and doctors estimate
> costs.

We had a startup that came at this in an indirect way. We were trying to make
it easier for labs and other providers to perform eligibility checks and
facilitate prior auths in real time. Our proposed solution would have involved
running the check during ordering, and then having the phlebotomist or lab
tech at the hospital doing the sample collection contact the doctor and inform
them that something would or would not be covered by insurance. The provider
could then talk to the patient about out of pocket costs etc. I think this
actually could have worked; our team imploded before we could prototype it
however :(

While I like the other ideas, glhf trying to get people to practice lifestyle
management or be adherent to a treatment regimen XD

~~~
Arete31415
As a frequent patient, I see such incredible need for "disruption" in
healthcare, both in terms of transparency/ empowering the patient, and in
terms of cost suppression. However, anyone who tackles this space has to be
aware that there are some _huge_ entrenched interests who like the current
inefficiencies and cost opacity very much, thank you. Breaking into this space
would be 1 part technical know-how to 10 parts legal jujitsu.

As an example, look upon the bloodied corpse of the failed startup Remedy,
which was actually doing something really good -- helping users find billing
errors and getting money back for them on bad charges. But incredible amounts
of pushback stymied them:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/40483774/remedy-wanted-to-cut-
pe...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40483774/remedy-wanted-to-cut-peoples-
medical-bills-but-the-health-care-system-wouldnt-let-it)

------
gimlids
Journalism needs a WYSIWYG editor for stylized content -- content that is more
visually diverse/interesting than the linear text+image+embed format, but not
SO so custom/new as to truly require a developer to build it.

~~~
seige
What is a good live example of this stylized content?

~~~
kamarg
Not op but The New York Times has some interesting layout options available to
their writers and editors. You can see a small sampling of it in
[https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-
digita...](https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digital-
first-newsroom-f1cb8367fc21) which is written by one of the developers of
their new news room text editor.

------
Pinbenterjamin
We run background checks, and there is definitely a space for public record
aggregation.

We directly interface with those interested in the results of the check, and
there is an overwhelming amount of work in building integrations with schools,
applicant tracking systems, hospitals, public records, courts...

We spend most of our time building XML and JSON parsers to cram their data
into our models.

If there was a company that provided a single interface to this data, you
could write your own ticket. I know we aren't the only company in this space
with this issue.

~~~
tixocloud
Interesting problem to solve - guess the pain will be when all the data
sources change their endpoints and everything sort of breaks. At least that's
been my experience with aggregating public economic data feeds.

------
stevesimmons
What is the current state of the art in financial modelling in corporate
finance departments?

I used to be a management consultant. We often built financial models of
company operations or parts of their value chain, and then looked at the
change from process improvement, restructuring or bolting on new business
lines. Everything was done in Excel. For the annual strategic planning and
budgeting cycle, large companies used expensive proprietary systems to
aggregate divisional financial plans.

I now work for a big bank, building out a Jupyter-based data science and
machine learning platform. We have hooks in to SDLC with code reviews, commit
history, and all the good stuff that software engineers nowadays take for
granted.

So what if Finance departments dropped Excel and instead used our dev tools
and methodologies? I'm genuinely curious if any companies are doing this, or
if any startups are building such solutions.

~~~
contingencies
The cost of achieving new tool literacy is very high. What does this degree of
rigor really add?

Many spreadsheets are used as disposable report tools to support management
level business decision making. While there are exceptions, in general perhaps
they are more like one off report-generation shell scripts than unit
operations in a larger business process. This distinction is significant,
because rigor adds more value on automating processes than one-off reports,
owing to increased lifecycle complexity.

At the management level, time is gold. These are people who have enough money,
lots of responsibilities, and no time. They already have a tool that works.
You would be essentially asking them to waste their most valuable resource
investing in a new tool that may disappear tomorrow without a strong/clear
ROI.

I don't doubt you could get some customers for such a product, but I'm
skeptical it's going to change the paradigm. Platform-for-everything
businesses (Google, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) tend to have a large minimum
snowball size.

I see things developing differently: an open source financial gateway will
become the standard accounting interface to many businesses as trade moves
toward greater transparency, predictability, speed and automation, and we see
features like arbitrary asset settlement, multi-hop transactions, banking
automation and multicurrency accounting becoming standard. Accounting
departments will begin to thin out as forms on such a system become input to
generate figures and reports previously generated manually. It will probably
be hosted. We see a little of this now with cloud accounting systems, but I'd
wager it will go a lot further with Germany's _Industry 4.0_ vision and a
similar result in China. Supply chains will be the driver, there's just so
much fat to trim.

------
ryanSrich
Technology adoption. I'm not necessarily talking about change management
(although that could be a feature), but technology adoption in the broader
sense. For example: if I'm a Health IT executive, how can I ensure the
adoption of say, Kubernetes is the right path for my organization? I may have
20+ stakeholders, from actual practitioners, to finance pushing me in various
directions. It's almost like there's space for adoption assurance, or some
type of 3rd party integrator that sits in front of the bleeding edge of
technology and helps dinosaur industries move faster through adoption. A layer
that could understand my IT footprint, and recommend tools/improvements/etc.
Like CreditKarma, but for IT.

------
austenallred
This is a really simple but basic one. Market size might not be billions of
dollars, but a basic learning management system along the lines of
Teachable/Udemy that allows for code with built-in testing would be used
overnight by a dozen code bootcamps and would pull a lot of people out of the
other platforms.

Maybe it's just a feature, not a full product, but it makes any "learn to
code" MOOC unusable.

~~~
kaicianflone
Stephen Grider on Udemy uses Jest to create automated tests for his JS and
React courses that you can run while you watch and code his videos.

Jest and Mocha both have a watch feature that will test a file each time it is
saved for "continuous testing", much like using Gulp watch or any type of dev
live server environment.

Also Jest features Snapshot testing which will take a picture of a UI and test
all changes made to the UI, as well as alerting you in tests if the UI has
changed. I could see this being used in bootcamps as well.

~~~
austenallred
Yeah, I just want that built into the LMS itself

------
javiramos
The process of getting quotes, sending POs, receiving invoices, paying them
Net30 etc. is an extremely manual process. Companies have dedicated employees
that all they do is send quotes, receive POs, and receive payments. The
process is so painful.

Edit: I am in the industrial space. Basically all large equipment purchases
work via a [Quote > PO > Pro Forma Invoice > Final Invoice > Payment >
Receipt] process.

~~~
moftz
Add government red tape on top of this and it can take a week or more to get a
COTS part ordered from a vendor that sells all of their stuff online. Heaven
help you if the vendor isn't in the approved vendor list, that's another week
to get all the compliance paperwork to them and get signed. It's agonizing
when you need something quick but still need to go through all the hoops
because the item is technically government property.

~~~
solveeng
I was working on a solution addressing this problem during my undergrad inside
our university incubator (in India). Although I left it due to unavoidable
reasons. But do you think the problem is big enough to worth exploring again?

~~~
Procuriffy
The problem grows in scale as organizations grow in size or spending increases
and is applicable across most industries.

The biggest challenge is finding a solution that fits workflow needs, has the
necessary features, and is user friendly enough that the solution will
actually be adopted.

------
kaicianflone
In healthcare billing with patient insurance companies, hospitals and doctors
are contractually prohibited (and sometimes illegal) from sharing how much
they get paid per procedure unit (RVU) from insurance co's. However, if you
are a third party for the hospitals and have access to the billing info of a
metropolitan area you could create some kind of price comparison system for
all of the hospitals.

------
nulagrithom
Will someone _please_ convince the trucking industry that "communicating" by
swapping text files over FTP in an absolutely incomprehinsible, proprietary
format is simply no way to live?

Especially with the recent push by the fed to put electronic logging systems
in every truck, this system is absolutely ripe for disruption. Downside is
you'll be fighting entrenched companies like IBM for ground.

~~~
dchuk
I work in the trucking (telematics) industry. I've dealt with a decent amount
of ftp file transfers, but most stuff I've seen has been some sort of API
based (SOAP, REST, etc).

Can you give a few more specific examples? Are you in the industry now?
Working at a carrier?

~~~
nulagrithom
I work in intermodal. Whenever one of our larger customers wants to give us a
load to move, we use X12 EDI. This is standard throughout at least the
intermodal industry, though from what I gather that may also be true of over-
the-road as well.

An example 204 EDI (Load Tender) looks like this:

    
    
        ISA*01*0000000000*01*0000000000*ZZ*ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO*ZZ*123456789012345*101127*1719*U*00400*000003438*0*P*>
        GS*SM*4405197800*999999999*20111219*1747*2100*X*004010
        ST*204*0001
        B2**XXXX**9999955559**PP
        B2A*04
        L11*NONPRIMARY*OK
        MS3*XXXX*B**M
        NTE**FROZEN GOODS SET TO -10d F
        N1*PF*XYZ CORP*9*9995555500000
        N3*31875 SOLON RD
        N4*SOLON*OH*44139
        N7**NONE*********FF****5300
        S5*1*CL*27800*L*2444*CA*1016*E
        L11*9999001947*DO
        L11*9999670098*CR
        L11*9999001866*DO
        L11*9999669887*CR
        G62*69*20111218
        N1*SH*XYZ CORP*9*9991555550000
        N2*TERMINAL FREEZER
        N3*5555 TERMINAL RD
        N4*CLEVELAND*OH*44023
        S5*2*PU*3042*L*312*CA*146*E
        L11*9999001866*DO
        L11*9999595358*PO
        L11*9999669887*CR
        G62*70*20090728
        N1*ST*1 EDI SOURCE*93*9990055555
        N3*31875 SOLON RD
        N4*SOLON*OH*44139
        OID*9999669887*99999595358**PC*312*L*3042*E*146
        L5**FREIGHT
        G61*IC*FEEDBACK*EM*FEEDBACK@1edisource.com
        S5*3*CU*24758*L*2132*CA*870*E
        L11*9999001947*DO
        L11*9999008881*PO
        L11*9999670098*CR
        G62*70*20111218
        N1*ST*1 EDI SOURCE*93*9990055555
        N3*55555 5TH AVE
        N4*MAYFIELD*OH*44244
        OID*9999670098*999608881**PC*2132*L*24758*E*870
        L5**FREIGHT
        G61*IC*FEEDBACK*EM*FEEDBACK@1edisource.com
        L3*27800*G*******1016*E*2444*L
        SE*46*0001
        GE*1*2100
        IEA*1*000002104
      
    

I haven't proper parsed it, but I believe that's going from Cleveland to
Mayfield. One of those L11 segments is probably a reference number. There's no
MS1 segment so it's likely over the road? Anyway, it's not exactly descriptive
or even human readable...

A reply accepting a load looks like this:

    
    
        ISA*01*0000000000*01*0000000000*ZZ*ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO*ZZ*123456789012345*101127*1719*U*00400*000003438*0*P*>
        GS*GF*4405197800*999999999*20111219*1742*000000003*X*004010
        ST*990*000000003
        B1*XXXX*9999919860*20111218*A
        N9*CN*9999919860
        SE*4*000000003
        GE*1*000000003
        IEA*1*000000003
    

These are commonly exchanged as text files over FTP sites.

Some of our more forward-thinking, larger customers are considering moving to
AS2, which I believe is sent over HTTP vs FTP. A cursory Google search doesn't
really turn up any clear examples on AS2, which doesn't exactly comfort me,
but at least there's an RFC[0] for it, whereas for the X12 spec you have to
pay[1] to see certain parts of it.

Not that anyone follows the "spec" anyway. We code special handling for every
single one of our customer's EDI transmissions.

I wish everything was REST, or at least JSON. That would be 10x easier.
Instead we spend weeks going back and forth on silly things like what a 07
means in the ATS segment, or what character to use for line endings (wish I
was kidding -- we've been blocked for two months on the line ending
character).

What's more is with the ELDs in all our trucks, customers are increasingly
wanting GPS updates. I'd love to offer them a streaming socket with GPS data
-- it's completely feasible considering our ELD backend. Instead everyone is
wondering how we can send updates in 15 minutes increments over FTP,
especially when these transactions are often batched in 5 minute loops on both
ends in the first place.

It kills me a little. We could be doing so much more. I can't believe we
aren't pushing for _real time_. I can't believe five to fifteen minute
batching loops are acceptable.

[0]:
[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4130.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4130.txt)
[1]: [http://www.x12.org/x12-work-products/x12-edi-
standards.cfm](http://www.x12.org/x12-work-products/x12-edi-standards.cfm)

~~~
dchuk
Thanks for the reply! That certainly does look like a pain in the ass. Being
on the telematics side specifically, we deal less with EDI stuff, but I'm sure
down the road I will have to, and I agree that a structured API would be much
better.

If you don't mind me asking, what ELD are you running? My company specifically
builds one of those, amongst the rest of the productivity suite necessary for
a driver to do their work.

~~~
nulagrithom
We started out using XRS. We run almost 100% independent contractors. Started
out putting our own tablets in all the trucks. We discovered drivers can run
up _enormous_ data bills when they figure out how to circumvent the MDM... It
apparently was also a pain to physically install XRS (I don't know the details
of that). We also have nearly 50% turnover per year. The whole situation was
really untenable.

We've since switched to GeoTab and a BYOD model. The GeoTab devices are a lot
cheaper, so a contractor walking away with one isn't that big of an issue.
Rollout was much smoother this time.

~~~
dchuk
I would really like to pick your brain a bit more if possible. We directly
compete with both XRS and GeoTab, so getting insight into your fleet's
decision making process would be super helpful if you're willing.

Also could potentially talk about our ELD offering (amongst a bunch of other
stuff) if you're interested.

darrin [at] platformscience.com

------
CM30
Well, I guess journalism needs a way to be profitable again, and creators in
general need a way to sell their work without requiring long term
subscriptions or ads. But given the many, many companies who've tried to fix
this issue (by allowing users to pay for certain bits of content via
microtransactions or bundling subscriptions together ala Blendle), I'm not
sure what the answer would be.

I also feel game development needs a way for creators to commission help with
various aspects of the process too. Oh sure, there's the odd forum where you
can pay for graphics assets or music, but what if your problems are code
related? Or game design based? It's a lot harder to request that sort of thing
online, let alone find a way to pay for it. Where can I say, hire a level
designer or game programmer independently of a studio?

As far as I can tell, nowhere, which makes it awfully hard when I'm stuck and
just need a bit of help to finish a mostly complete project.

Anyone who solves that would get a lot of my money, I'll say that much.

~~~
herbst
What you describe were by far my favorite kind of jobs on Upwork. People who
have a idea what they are doing but stuck with individual questions.

Upwork is by far not optimal but you can easily find talent for quick
questions there.

------
moorhosj
Secure internet for people who travel frequently or work from coffee shops.
Filter the “free” internet connection through a TOR router and protect your
network/browsing.

~~~
shakkhar
Anything wrong with just using a VPN?

~~~
moorhosj
No, not at all. I view it similar to the classic Dropbox discussion. There
were existing alternatives, but Dropbox took off because "it just worked"
without having to use FTP and Linux. In this case, you eliminate the VPN step,
by linking the router to your devices and using that single device to connect.

Secondly, with VPN, I first have to connect to the open network in order to
activate the VPN. I also need to do it for each device I want to connect
(phone, computer, tablet).

~~~
tenzo
[https://www.expressvpn.com/](https://www.expressvpn.com/)

------
lkrubner
A huge problem with CRMs is the lack of staff engagement. A company will spend
$30 million to customize their Salesforce workflow (or their SAP workflow, or
any other workflow or CRM tool) but the staff will hate it and so the
investment seems wasted. That’s why Natural Language Processing seems like it
could be a win for this space. A salesperson should be able to write a quick
text message on their phone, and that message should be parsed by an NLP
script and then put into Salesforce. The promise of this idea, as well as the
problems, I detailed here:

[https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/0998997617/)

------
aaavl2821
just wrote a blog post on this exact topic for the biopharma industry:
[https://newbio.tech/blog/bio_charts.html](https://newbio.tech/blog/bio_charts.html)

its a $600B industry that is in decline because its traditional R&D engine is
sputtering out, and big pharma has been amazingly acquisitive the last five
years to replace off-patent blockbuster drugs (more IPOs and big M&A than
software the last 5 years despite getting 1/5 of venture funding)

tons of really interesting new tech for startups to explore: synthetic
biology, cell and gene therapy, bioelectronic medicine, many many others

------
canadianwriter
Digital marketing and programmatic advertising - TRAFFICKING. Everyone hates
it. It's 100% required but no one has solved the issue. It can eat up so much
time and if you make a mistake can cost valueable data.

~~~
raleigh_user
What do you mean by this? As in, people hate doing marketing or they don't
understand how to advertise? Plus, a mistake can cost valuable data? Where are
you losing data?

~~~
awshepard
Not OP, but worked in the field for a time. Trafficking usually means
configuring your ad in the campaign management system. What are your targeting
parameters, what are your tracking tags, uploading the ad itself, entering in
lots of custom information that while conceptually similar across ad platforms
usually has different names and often has to be manually entered. A lot of
platforms do offer APIs of some sort to help with bulk campaign/ad creation,
but there's often no "one stop shop" to be able to set up a google campaign
and facebook campaign at the same time. There are some companies working on
this, I think usually referred to as (or in conjunction with) "marketing
automation".

A mistake can mean - misconfiguring your target (wasting money on ads that
won't give you an ROI), misconfiguring your 3rd party tracking (letting data
like conversions go unaccounted for, or not having your auditing tags setup,
meaning you show ads to fraudulent users that you otherwise wouldn't have to
pay for), etc.

~~~
chrisfrantz
Another ad guy here. The problem is best practice on one platform doesn’t
equal best practice on the other. Additionally, there are many ad formats that
don’t overlap on multiple platforms. Even GDN vs FB is a huge disparity. I
would be interested in the product though if one existed.

Alternatively, one place to manage creatives and language as well as targeting
for each campaign might be helpful as we use google sheets, excel and Trello
for this now.

~~~
hackerews
Do large agencies have systems for this? Or is everyone using Excel?

------
Joeri
An app for installing and maintaining mixed fleets of lora/sigfox/... IoT
sensors.

When installing these at scale in existing buildings you have to be able to
send out local workforce to properly install and activate thousands of
sensors, as well as maintain them afterwards, without prior training. It’s one
of those things that sounds easy on the surface but is riddled with
complexity, like how to register which sensor is installed where in a
foolproof way, or how to easily locate faulty sensors for replacement.

~~~
mlevental
what's the market for this? how many people are installing iot fleets?

~~~
Joeri
The price of sensors is dropping and starting to reach the point where cost of
retrofitting buildings is outweighed by savings in more efficient building
use. That trend is going to cause most buildings to be retrofitted. You can do
things like occupancy detection of every workplace which are very valuable to
building managers.

There’s plenty of competition in people selling the sensors, providing
connectivity, or doing data analysis, but I’m not aware of any solutions for
installing the damn things which aren’t tied to a vendor.

------
Raj7k
I am working on content AI platform (preadr). Preadr brings to you Internet's
finest stories/content. It is a content discovery platform that helps you
discover quality content that is relevant to you.

The Problem

There are currently three main ways we discover an ever-growing amount of
content on the web: news, social networks, and search. There is a fourth
category that is missing: relevance—a break from the noise on the Internet to
discover what's relevant to us.

News delivers what’s happening in the world right now. Social networks let us
know what’s happening with our friends. Search is great at finding the needle
in the haystack. But how do we discover things from around the web that are
new and relevant to us?

Incentives on existing platforms are such that new and entertaining content
wins. We need a better system that can filter the signal out of the noise.

The Solution

We’re building Preadr to tackle the relevance problem and bring forward
quality content. A platform that helps you discover most relevant content
based on your interests, for both, leisure as well as learning.

Every day we analyze an ever-growing amount of new links and create a
storyline of the most relevant ones. We curate content from the most trusted
sources on the internet and let our algorithms do their work to filter the
relevant from the non-relevant. Since quality is not limited by the format of
content, we offer a mix of different formats i.e. articles, videos, podcasts,
etc.

------
basch
ctrl+f "construction" = 0 results.

[https://angel.co/construction](https://angel.co/construction)

small construction companies are still in the stone age. plangrid and
submittal exchange exist but not much else is popular.

textura is owned by oracle, and everything else is owned by trimble and
autodesk.

theres a plethera of attempts at field document management, and timecards, but
0 great medium-large business size erps. procore is like half an erp without
an accounting system.

there is a huge untapped thirst for something that "just works" regarding
labor productivity tracking and document management.

construction is one of the places where I think an enterprise blockchain could
actually apply better than a traditional database. imagine a construction
project with one blockchain, and every general contractor, sub, and vendor
participating. shares, payments, todo, gantt charts, drawings, the model
itself. they can all access the database from whatever supported client their
firm uses (think email clients all working with each other) but on the backend
working on one shared distributed database. I think you could turn down the
bad actor security a bit, similar to [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/blog/announcing-microsoft-...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/blog/announcing-microsoft-s-coco-framework-for-enterprise-blockchain-
networks/)

~~~
LukeB42
Engineer behind REBIM here. I've spent the last one and half years developing
an AEC SaaS platform that includes

* A project-based document management system that has baked-in version control.

* Issue and Task trackers.

* Soft realtime features such as notifications when models are converted, when anyone comments on an issue or task you've logged and a realtime chat system.

* A browser-based model viewer with the ability to:

* Federate multiple models from various project disciplines into one scene.

* Take screenshots of the scene, mark them up and log issues and tasks on model assets with the marked up screenshots straight away.

* Associate documents with model objects.

* Hold conversations on model objects.

* Store / review feeds from the built counterparts of modelled assets.

Video tutorials:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8xrkI2ZaSm-5s_aJnnGpeA/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8xrkI2ZaSm-5s_aJnnGpeA/videos)

API documentation:
[https://app.rebim.co/static/docs/index.html](https://app.rebim.co/static/docs/index.html)

Intro for small to medium sized design studios:
[https://rebim.co](https://rebim.co)

Intro for enterprise customers:
[http://rebimenterprise.com/](http://rebimenterprise.com/)

We've only just started beta testing this February but you're welcome to sign
up for an account at [https://app.rebim.co](https://app.rebim.co)

I can be reached on lukebrooks [at] azurelope [dot] com if you need any
assistance and we would also love to hear your thoughts on REBIM if you have
any suggestions for improvements!

------
raleigh_user
Some sort of enabler for content. I work in content marketing (not click bait
shit but helping b2b companies tell their story without hiring a full
design/marketing/dev team).

Our process and system is super efficient recording video + sending
notifications to team members to edit, add captions, strip audio for your
podcast, set up your podcast, set up your alexa flash briefing, etc.

But it takes hours to do all of this if youre on your own and thats ONLY if
you know how to do it all. Content is the black box most have no idea how to
do. If you don't pay our agency to do it for you you are kind of out of luck.

We sell a book on our process now and sell about 50 copies a week. These
people are validated and want to learn how to do it, and are willing to pay to
learn.

It only makes sense to build the platform that automates this process for
these people and offer it to them. They've already paid to learn. Might as
well offer the platform to do it.

~~~
abhimir
I would love to check out the book. Can you mention it here?

------
scrollaway
Patch distribution for games. Every desktop game does its own thing, with its
own CDN, incompatible with other engines.

~~~
dividuum
I don't really see a market for that. Most desktop games these days are
handled by store fronts like Steam, GOG, itch.io, Origin or the Blizzard
Launcher that already handle updates for you. But it's certainly an
interesting topic and itch wrote about it a while ago:
[https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game-
updates/](https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game-updates/)

------
tixocloud
From a technical side of things: \- data management \- faster analytics
software \- test and learn optimisation \- faster model deployment

From a business side of things: \- loyalty program/rewards \- pricing
optimization \- financial services to underserved customers including
entrepreneurs, families, millennials, freelancers, etc.

~~~
techsin101
im creating something for loyalty rewards but most small businesses seem
apathetic, too busy for anything new

~~~
tixocloud
Yes, that's typically the case for small businesses. You'll find much better
luck mid-market.

------
SteveNuts
Open hardware and software for PLCs for manufacturing.

~~~
fermienrico
Along with this, we need a better way to program robots. I program Fanuc i200D
and that whole industry makes my blood boil. Want more than 200 variables in
your program? Shell out $10k.

High level programming language to program robots with safety in mind would be
amazing. RoboDK is the only one that is doing this and they still suck.

~~~
Something1234
If you have arrays why don't you implement a turing machine and compiler to
turing machine so that you can have more variables without shelling out? Or
some other model of computation.

------
BerislavLopac
I want to see a good identity and user manager SaaS oriented towards smaller
customers. There used to be Stormpath, which was pretty amazing, but they got
bought by Okta, which is less friendly to small teams and more enterprise
oriented.

~~~
fiatjaf
I'm working on
[https://github.com/fiatjaf/accountd.xyz](https://github.com/fiatjaf/accountd.xyz),
which is basically a universal association of profiles (identified by a
username) with accounts on "silos" like twitter, github, trello and email
addresses in general. You can use it either for user login or to post-
association of accounts with profiles. There's no documentation, but you can
see it working on [https://sitios.xyz/](https://sitios.xyz/) and
[https://sitios.xyz/trello](https://sitios.xyz/trello).

Do you think it is interesting somehow?

~~~
BerislavLopac
This is not quite what I had in mind, but it's quite interesting. One
recommendation: don't use a username, that approach has a number of flaws you
can easily avoid here.

------
PerfectElement
Not necessarily an idea for a startup, but I want a Chrome plugin that changes
the click behavior of an email address. If I click on the domain part of the
email address, I want it to open that domain's website on a new tab.

------
karag
I work as a fitness instructor and I want to have an holistic control panel to
monitor my customers health and program, I want them to speak to each others
and share. I want them to see their historic datas too

~~~
solveeng
Healthifyme is doing something on similar lines but there are based out of
India right now.

------
eurticket
A startup in the multi media field would basically be tooling creators.
Innovation in the sense of just creating things easier to use, a jackknife
agency that can develop specific tools per department.

------
joddystreet
Replacement for - Login with Facebook.

------
chrisgd
The music industry as a whole. Who owns what song, what percentage, what role
(writer, publisher), who recorded it, who collects for which industry, who
collects mechanical royalties, performance royalties, would I make more money
with ascap, bmi, sesac or gmr? How about this publisher, vs this other one?
Tell me how often the music I own is played on radio, spotify, etc. Was my
royalty here calculated correctly?

------
andrei_says_
Modular template based responsive html email builder with version control,
comments and approvals.

Our marketing department sends 10+ campaigns/week, each goes through multiple
changes and compliance approval. It’s very time consuming, especially when
someone needs to touch the code.

~~~
khamba
This looks interesting. Is there any solution that you are already using?

> especially when someone needs to touch the code

Do you not generally touch the code? Is some kind of WYSIWYG editor used to
create an email or is the code human written?

~~~
andrei_says_
Right now using an in-house app to make edits to emails initially built in
dream weaver.

So, html email template (no unlined css) > merge word content in dreamweaver >
upload to custom web app > app uses premailer to in-line the specified css >
make changes to the content via ckeditor (which messes up the html in many
cases) > export in pardot-ready format.

The app versions the content changes and allows comments as well easy email
tests. We do 20+ revisions per campaign so that’s a necessity.

This was built 5 years ago and still works but getting inadequate for the
complexity of responsive emails.

I’ve looked at this: [https://beefree.io/](https://beefree.io/) but it does
not allow the creation of custom content modules. So looking into building a
new version of our own, again.

It’s a pain but nothing compared to debugging email markup.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
A new operating system that allows peripherals like network cards, monitors,
sata disks, bluetooth, speakers, fmri scanners, etc. to be used
interchangeably between machines, locally and over the net.

Edit: I'm in the computing industry. Have you heard of it?

~~~
wiml
There's Plan9.

------
Bombthecat
API Management and Api gateways for regulated industries like banking, finance
government etc. With an eye on governance, IAM, auditing etc.

All solutions out there are horrible....

~~~
zok3102
I work on product at TIBCO. Mashery plays in the broader API Management space,
but we haven’t traditionally targeted banking/govt/heavily-regulated
verticals. From Day 0, Mashery has been a multi-tenant SaaS with locally
deployable federated gateway and many buyers in these verticals get jittery
about SaaS, multi-tenancy, etc.

However, that SaaS-led model is changing fast and we’d love to hear about your
pain with single-tenant, on-prem solutions available today. Would you be open
to a no-strings-attached chat? mashery-pm<at>tibco<dot>com

~~~
Bombthecat
Sure, no problem.

I will write an email tomorrow.

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chirau
Out-of-wallet challenge questions or knowledge based authentication for
developing countries. There is a lot of money to be made there. LOTS OF MONEY.

~~~
CodeKommissar
Could you expand a little bit?

I'm from Venezuela, it is not a developing country right now. But it may be in
the future.

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aloukissas
Half-joke, but a real problem: quality documentation for AWS. I'd pay good
money for this.

~~~
hullsean
that’s called hiring a consultant... just sayin

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0xdeadbeefbabe
A messaging/texting device with a long battery life and decent keyboard.

~~~
toephu2
Try a Blackberry or Nokia device.

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fuzzfactor
In my industries, all of them.

~~~
techsin101
for example...

