
Ask PG: 2012 Startup ideas you'd like to fund? - AznHisoka
There's a list of 30 startups you'd like to fund but it's from 2008. http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html<p>What startups would you like to fund in 2012?
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pg
I may write an updated version, but not today. (It's Christmas.)

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jpdoctor
Here, let me help:

1\. pg-bot technology for responding on holidays to posts about funding. The
bot should have sufficient business sense for pointing young entrepreneurs in
the right direction, but should also contain semantic sense for responding in
a witty and lighthearted way... for example, in Haiku.

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Tycho
Would it be possible for somebody to create cloud-based 'Reading as a
Service?' Like you pay someone to read an article to you so you can consume
information while you jog or drive or whatever.

Don't know if it would be economically feasible but obviously I'm thinking of
the leveraging the fact that billions of people can speak English and many of
them can get buy on a very small wage (by western standards).

Could also cache the recordings and make them available too. Although might
run into copyright issues at this point.

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cryptoz
It seems that you'd be better off using a text-to-speech engine, thereby
supporting not just one language but all languages. You'd be right in
suggesting that they're not good enough yet to be nice to listen to, but I
doubt that's more than a year or so away.

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Tycho
Well, I mean the reason I'm suggesting this is precisely because txt to speech
engines are so inadequate. And no matter how much they advance in the next
year, they'll still never be able to put things in context like a human reader
can (of course, many of the non-native English speakers won't be able to do
that particularly well either).

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wslh
Yes, TTS quality is far from real people reading. I think the service must be
something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk but with a SLA since recordings must
be quickly generated.

BTW, I played doing a voice recognition and TTS under .NET for Hacker News.
It's a code example but real people is the best option. If you want to check:
[http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-
extrac...](http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-extraction-
tts-innovative-web-browsing/)

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Broadcastic
Theoretically update should be done every year

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LetBinding
If the idea that you are pursuing is out of some list of "hot trends", then
you are already too late.

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danhodgins
That depends. Has the idea been implemented only in one country, or on one
continent? Do the creators have the ability or capital to develop strong
barriers to entry that would take tremendous capital and/or years of effort to
overcome?

Spotting an idea abroad and bringing it to your own geography is a perfectly
viable strategy.

Check out resources like SpringWise dot com or TrendWatching dot com (full
disclosure - I subscribe to both) to learn about new ideas being launched
abroad that you could potentially bring to your own country/city.

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robryan
Yeah this has worked pretty well in the daily/ group deals space as you really
need people on the ground in each locale to push it to business there. Only so
many people in so many countries someone like groupon on living social can
hire.

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ryanlchan
Instead of asking PG for ideas he'd like to fund, why don't we get back to
focusing on solving a real problem with a great team in a growing market?

What kind of unfair advantage can you get working off someone else's idea?

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HSly
we will apply for the summer 2012, we have great idea, i hope when you ask the
same question again the answer will be "Dz".

