Ask HN: What problems are you working to solve? Why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5018548

by rblion • 14 years ago

2 5 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just curious. I hope 2013 will be a big year for technological innovation and scientific discovery. I'm tired of hearing about smarter smartphones and bigger social networks all the time.

mflindell3• 14 years ago

You probably don't want to hear this but..

The whole issue with doing work on the internet, it seems like everybody is just OK with using multiple products to do their work.

Even google has very segmented products like drive, google docs, tasks etc and theres no project management included.

I have been building a desk on the internet, where all your work is in one place and I am very VERY close.

a_macgregor• 14 years ago

a desk on the internet eh ? Sounds like an interesting concept, care to elaborate?

mflindell3• 14 years ago

I'm building des.sk with tasks management, document editor, calendar (with sharing between teams), contacts and project management. Everything I need to be productive online without going to external services. Seems though students love it too.

rblion• 14 years ago

Sounds interesting. I'd like to hear more if you're willing.

mflindell3• 14 years ago

Id love to!

At around March this year, I was sitting at home thinking to myself, "Hey, everyone has their own cloud service, why can't I have my own?" So I started building Mitch's Cloud. It started with a task manager, contacts list, music streaming and calendar, you know, because iCloud.

Mitch's Cloud was only my own project but it seemed to bring about ideas from others. I had suggestions to add email, documents and other apps. Everything changed when I had a visit from my very good friend, Jack, a student at University of Sydney.

Theres a huge hole in university life in Australia and at the bottom of that hole is a software package that all uni students have to use called Blackboard. The frustration expressed by Jack on behalf of his peers was incredibly interesting and brought about lots of ideas on how to build something better. Mitch's Cloud soon turned into Dessk, providing uni students a single point where they can organise all of their studies.

Where's the place that you do all of your work? Your Dessk.

There's an injustice in the software industry where people have just accepted more interface as the truth and from what I can see, most people here share similar passions in wanting to create great software that people love.

* It has to have minimal loading times (its now almost instant) * Must be easy to collaborate with peers and lecturers * Communication and sharing must be instant * Without a doubt, it has to increase the users productivity

It seems students aren't the only people who use the internet either, so we have things like teams, project managment (called workspaces) for more business oriented power users.

TLDR: built a platform to ease productivity loss between common things activities you do on the internet. Launching soon @ http://des.sk

Ask HN: What problems are you working to solve? Why?

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