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Food Subscription Service. The natural extreme on the Just In Time pipeline applied to food. This means less wasted food at every stage, and gets you all the benefits of buying/ selling in bulk, meaning the potential for lower price and other gains from trade.
In response to
Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
http://www.amazon.com/Subscribe-Save-Grocery/b?ie=UTF8&node=251482011
Came up after a quick Google Search, I also know that Amazon Fresh is serving the Seattle area.
I am going to rehearse saying this in a robotic voice, while spinning round and round flailing my arms in a mechanical fashion.
Can you put it up on Youtube when you're done?
In response to
Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Wanted to save this one for the Reverse Kickstarter, but it's too important to be kept in my brain without a backup, so here's my ace in the hole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
This tech exists, it is out there, I have tried to contact some of the people at NASA to no avail. (Should probably give them a little longer than 24 hours, but I only found out about those experiments yesterday. I did email them, and that's what counts.) Make this a pick up for stream of consciousness logging, allow me to parse it, or add stuff to the calendar or draft up an email by thinking about it, <give my phone psudotelepathy,> and I would owe a blood debt, probably a couple digits or a limb to whoever brings it into reality, because I think a lot faster than I can verbalize things, and something that can take my wandering thoughts and let me put them together after the fact would be a quantum leap in organizational skills everywhere.
Free free to contact moocow1452@gmail.com or under the post, and I'll keep an eye on how to move forward.
In response to
Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Betting
I’d like to encourage betting under this post. Zvi has agreed to advise someone on how to set up the market if a volunteer wants to take this on! Zvi is an expert on betting markets, and having him as an advisor is an awesome opportunity. If you think this sounds like something that you would like to capitalize on, and you are willing to commit to putting in the effort to do the project justice if you are chosen, please fill out the the form.
Bets could be on things like:
- minimum number of projects that will get started as a result of this post and when
- measures of success for various projects over various periods of time
Basically, whatever measurable aspects of success or failure people are interested in.
For bets, I encourage people to keep in mind the mission:
Let's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.
Thus, my request is that you only bet against a project if you think you can prevent yourself from sabotaging people’s efforts as a result. Negative bets are quite valuable, they help give people more realistic expectations and give people something to bet positively against!
The rules for bets that projects will succeed are different in this context than in a lot of standard games. Because the mission is to win the game of making humanity awesome, as opposed to a more restricted game, everything that is ethical and legal is fair game for influencing the outcome of your bets. You can offer resources to increase your odds of winning, such as personal time/money investment in the projects, counseling, connections, office space, or any other resources that seem like they might be useful.
I'm going to Thumb Up this post specifically for introducing me to Wufoo when I was looking to hack together an order form that could talk to an API in Google Docs. Thank you, Shannon, and thank you Wufoo.
In response to
Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
First, a meta-discussion ... I think when a lot of people hear the word "startup" they think two things: long hours in an under-funded environment, and the hope of a short-term payoff (or at least an exit strategy). This may be incompatible with the idea of pulling a bunch of hours away from a bunch of bright people already involved in other things. It may also be counter-productive to the goal of benefiting people: one of the shortcomings of established corporations is the focus on near-term gains, even at the cost of long-term viability or benefits -- that mindset is exponentially worse in a time-accelerated enviro with a burn-rate that implies a near-future mortality for the corporate corpus.
Personally, if someone told me I had to do just 2 more years of what I went through with a startup in order to never work again, I'd say "no thanks". And while I'm happy to pitch in some time on concepts that either help humanity or personally enrich me (and am extra-eager if we can tie the two together), I'm not leaving my 30-hour-a-week, slippers-&-bathrobe-dress-code, commute-to-the-livingroom business any time soon (although I would if I got involved in something hugely beneficial and moderately profitable). So, I think some of the ideas already mentioned about marrying interests and abilities with different classes of start-ups need implementation if this is going to move from some sort of communal stew to a concrete business with distinct individuals making discrete contributions. [Aside: I think that's a start-up possibility right there ... a mechanism that allows arbitrary-sized contributions to a project (think open-source), but has some (community) basis for valuing those contributions, so when the cash starts rolling in, people can be compensated roughly in proportion to their contributions (yes, this is probably a harder problem than most of the startups suggested here). Thought exercise: if someone gave $1B "to Linux" (sic) for contributions to humanity, how would that money be doled out to contributors?]
Ideas with long payoff time frames are generally not good candidates for startups (unless the founders are willing to light their money on fire just because it's something they just want to see done), which limits the scope of things that can be done in a "non-philanthropic" enviro. I think you also need to delineate classes of businesses: some people will see the philanthropy angle as a mere selling tool to generate funding/interest; other people are interested in "doing good", and have ideas for companies that won't work any better as non-profits than for-profits.
So, for me: I'd like to contribute SOME time to a project with public benefit, and if I happen to get some money out of it down the road, I can decide to commit more time and/or consider that gravy. I've had a web design/hosting business (mostly LAMP) for about 15 years, and do a little bit of most things tangentially associated with that.
Was going to make this it's own post, but what about a micro job placement center? A Job-Starter?
Based of AltonSun's reverse Kickstarter, this would be more of a converse Kickstarter or something on par with Craigslist or Fiverr, where people can be sign up to be notified about opportunities for PayPal cash, gift cards, or equivalent wealth for work done that they are skilled in. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, this would allow for a semi-sustainable income through bigger job prizes, and more variety of work then "transcribe this" or "take data from here to there" for pennies on the dollar, where the jobs can come to you and are further incentivized through gamification or whatnot in the name of prioritization. Maybe I'm asking for too much for nothing, but it is crazy insane hard to find a job where I live, let alone one that won't take a crap on you for minimum wage and you can easily be replaced as a crap receptacle by someone more agreeable.
Maybe take it in a different direction, something like Wealthy Affiliate where you can get the resources to self start, but instead of paying per month and letting it fall into Gym Membership Stagnation, make a bootable usb or an app on your phone that locks you into better productivity habits and out of bad habits, where you can pay your own bills, and toss away the key. About anyone who procrastinates has a market in that, either to make better use of their time, or to bully and coach people who aren't.
To be honest, I'm not even sure what you're asking.
Though, it's not clear that it would be valuable to convince you either?
I'm asking how you plan to market the Reverse Kickstarter to people who have an idea, want to see it come into reality, but do not want to have their brainchild run away from them and have it's own life /without them/. Maybe I'm looking at it from a more entitled direction than I should, but as far as ideas having little value without execution, the Great Patent Wars speaks otherwise.
You'd be "a smidge paranoid" to publicly "disclose ideas" to a party you couldn't afford -- or couldn't find -- as a dev team, anyway? The goal of this ReverseKickstarter, in my eyes, is to get those ideas out of people before they die! The alternative to this marketplace is a) be a dev, b) pay a dev.
Those are both pretty high barriers to entry. They discourage a lot of people from contributing meaningfully or significantly to this revolution.
How can we lower the barriers to contribution? I think AltonSun has an answer.
Maybe I don't understand your ideas of "who owns what" , "marketplace for hire" or "pear shaped".
For the sake of argument, lets say I'm a somewhat greedy bastard who would like some compensation for bringing my spark to your kindling, and I am afraid of this system because while I can only give away my idea once on the internet for it to be infinitely copied and modifiable, you can package it hundreds of times to hundreds of different people to make a mint. Common good can wait for me to produce it myself and be the flamebringer to the masses, because If I give it to you, you get the glory, financial security, and reputation that means you can live to develop another day. How do you sell this to me?
EDIT: So we don't ninja each other anymore, I'll just leave it at "this is going to be a hard sell if you want idea people to play along." But for all I know, that may be part of the plan to get more people intrested in pitching in and being responsible idea parents.
In response to
Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Better bra sizing.
It's an idea I've been kicking around for a few days. The technical and marketing-based obstacles towards getting it to work have turned me off pursuing it, but I figured it was worth sharing.
I work with operational databases for a luxury fashion retailer, and bra sizing as it currently exists (back size + cup size) makes absolutely no sense. I will sometimes ask female friends to explain how the size given for a garment can possibly be of any use in determining comfort and fit. Their answer: it doesn't.
Their actual answer tends to be a rant about inconsistency between product ranges and how contemporary bra sizing is next to useless. A couple have been both eloquent and insightful. A few times a year I'll have an idea I get excited about turning into some sort of web-based service, and in spite of its silly-sounding nature, this one is easily the one that's had the most philanthropic weight behind it.
The idea: a website containing a comprehensive list of commercially available bras. Users sign up, locate bras they own (or have tried on) and rate them along various measures of comfort/fit/support, etc. The service then locates clusters of users with similar preferences to them (exact method of analysis still up for debate, but a few likely candidates stand out), and suggests specific sizes and ranges that would meet their needs.
There are three sides to this. The first is users getting the service described above. The second is the option to license out the size/fit data to interested third parties, such as manufacturers and retailers, which would probably be the most sizeable revenue stream. The third is the possibility of using the data to produce a better sizing scheme that more accurately tackles the real-world problem.
I see two main problems with the idea. The first is encouraging user uptake (convincing women to spend time inputting details about their underwear into a website). The second, which is related, is giving them incentive to do so without the recommendation algorithm in place. I have no idea if k-NN or spectral partitioning or probabilistic classifiers or regression analysis will be any good at all in carving up the data appropriately, and I won't know until I get a sizeable set of data to develop against. There'd need to be an existing service provision for the users to encourage them to sign up and provide the data before the interesting work even begins. An existing comprehensive list of commercially available bras complete with a flat non-super-stats-enhanced rating system might be enough to get the ball rolling.
I should reiterate that I'm unlikely to pursue this idea. While I have a background in web dev, data analysis and technical fashion retail, I'm far from an expert in any of them. Still, if anyone wants to convince me otherwise, give me more reasons why it's a bad idea, or steal it outright, please go ahead.
What about a Maker-Bra, a CNC designed for rendering articles of clothing out of base fabrics and plastics?
In response to
Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Lendle's for sale...
http://lendle.tumblr.com/post/23184237439/for-sale
They're looking for low six figures afaik, but I figure I should at least bring it to the table.
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Dunno if I would be too much of a help but I work for a company that develops EMG amplifiers and recording / analysis software. I'm on the EEG line but am close with the clinical specialists on the EMG line. Ping me if there is anything I could do to assist.
That is fantastic. Consider yourself pinged.