Ask HN: What are other "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693178

by IgorCarron • 14 years ago

10 16 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In his recent essay, (http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.... ), PG discusses several frighteningly ambitious startup ideas. The question revolves around other ideas that PG did not discuss, Here are the one he discussed: 1. A New Search Engine 2. Replace Email 3. Replace Universities 4. Internet Drama 5. The Next Steve Jobs 6. Bring Back Moore's Law 7. Ongoing Diagnosis

DanBC• 14 years ago

People keep doing dating type websites. That market is frighteningly full. But I'm surprised people haven't seen the state of the "penpals for prisoners" market - there are lots of websites and they are all, without exception, appalling. Not just a bit clunky, but really really bad.

To turn that from a dull idea (it's been done, it just needs to be done better) you'd add in some human rights stuff, and some prisoner reform stuff. If you wanted to push some boundaries you'd use it to include schemes that befriend, and monitor, paedophiles.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11755527)

Add in some work / education programmes (using some disruptive technology to deliver the education; because you have a captive market.) and you've got a nice socially aware start up.

utunga• 14 years ago

fixing the monetary system - how about that for ambitious ;_)

michael_fine2• 14 years ago

What's wrong with the monetary system?

samstave• 14 years ago

The Fed, Central Banks, IMF, Fiat based.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Banks are broken today. They're more focused on reordering transactions to maximize fees than they are at "connecting customers that have capital deficits to customers with capital surpluses" (thanks wikipedia).

There are dozens of opportunities replacing the way that banking, credit cards, and insurance operate. Jeremy Liew's piece in Pando Daily is a good place to start:

http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/27/big-data-machine-learning-s...

kirk21• 14 years ago

Discover (the characteristics of) every item in the universe.

huxley• 14 years ago

Made me think of Douglas Adams: develop an app to personally insult every sentient being in the universe ... alphabetically.

bdr• 14 years ago

Replace eBay. Their interface is crappy, they don't help with fulfillment, and the reputation system could be improved. In general they seem stagnant.

karolisd• 14 years ago

How do you solve the chicken/egg problem with replacing ebay?

threejay• 14 years ago

There are tons of forums with a buy/sell board. Might be a nice place to start.

breathesalt• 14 years ago

Obtainable but challenging products I would pay for:

Transportation:

1. A two-seat, 80+ mi/charge, <= $5,000, autonomous EV. Should be simple and modular enough for self-assembly (basically Ikea for EVs). Insurance for this would be next to nothing.

The following should be franchises in every city that matters:

2. Co-working space, learning space, and living space franchises for <= $5/day each per customer.

3. A vertical, autonomous farm franchise for <= $5/day per customer.

4. An autonomous, scalable manufacturer-as-a-service with a simple API (like Heroku for manufacturing).

Web services, Hardware, and Software:

5. Email will change, but not on a deep technical level. The winning service will just let its users do everything they wish they could with email now but can't. If such an email service were created, it would replace most social apps/services and affect the rest profoundly.

6. I don't think we need another Steve Jobs--but a few more PGs wouldn't hurt.

7. A way to prevent talent acquisitions and to encourage entrepreneurship in a broader population outside of tech. The economy could definitely be more distributed and diversified than it is today.

8. An inexpensive OS and accompanying tablet tested and proven to work for old people. If any demographic needs the power and grace of the internet, it's old people. The interface and functionality should adapt automagically as you get older.

9. A subscription based service for the EV I mentioned earlier.

10. A web service that creates DRM/copyright free songs based on songs you like.

11. Every time I say this I get down-voted but I would like a search engine as good as Google, but lets you explore a realtime graph of anonymous or aliased queries passively or actively; collaborative searching would definitely be a feature. This solves "A New Search Engine" and "Internet Drama" at the same time.

12. Replace the FDA.

IgorCarron• 14 years ago

other ideas expressed on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Startup-Ideas/What-are-other-Frightenin...

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

Keyword popularity prediction. Not Google Trends, or Google Insights. They show what keywords are popular after the fact - months later.. I want a tool that scour social networks, Twitter, forums, blogs and gives you a list of keywords in a specific niche that have been mentioned a lot in the past 7 days or so.

spydertennis• 14 years ago

this is interesting. you could add alerts to show when something has an XX% rise in popularity. for example the explosion in keywords. basically creating stock market types graphs for keywords?

debacle• 14 years ago

Micropayments that actually work.

Ask HN: What are other "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas"?

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