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Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund (2008) (old.ycombinator.com)
242 points by evsamsonov on Feb 21, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 176 comments



My take (just the first five):

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.

Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)

2. Simplified browsing...Grandparents and small children don't want the full web...

Apps. Remember this list is from just one year after the iPhone launched, so everything was still "the web". It was almost unthinkable that native, installed apps would have such a resurgence. But the iPad is exactly this, a simplified computer that young kids and grandparents love to use.

3. New news.

Still in flux. Nobody has figured out a business model. Over the past century consumers were trained to expect free, ad-supported news. Surprisingly, online ads have not worked out well for publishers.

4. Outsourced IT. & 5. Enterprise software 2.0.

AWS. There's a lot of higher-level SaaS packaged services too and it sounds like that's what pg was envisioning. But the real hero here is AWS and its "primitives"-based, bottom-up approach to outsourcing all computing.


> 3. New news.

NY Times topped $1 billion in subscription revenue last year. Quite a feat and definitely an indication that money is to be made in digital news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...


There's a lot of evidence that a large part of the NYTimes revenue surge is a "Trump bump", and that, more broadly, there are way too many media outlets offering free content for the same limited number of eyeballs, and they're burning a lot of VC dollars in the process:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-...


My take is it costs a lot of money to become worth any money in the space. The story breakers matter a lot more than the story regurgitators, and people see the value enough to pay for it. If you want to shoestring and cost cut your news room, your core value goes to none.

Biggest problem I find is the local news space. There’s nowhere for funded investigative reporting at the local level - I feel like some type of local club or community organization needs to start growing to get it back.


The question is whether that's zero-sum consolidation (as competitors close) or sustainable.


It can be both. Indy bookstores seemed to have reached an equilibrium point after the onslaught of both the big boxes and Amazon. There are many fewer stores, but those that remain are often profitable with loyal followings. They had to innovate to branch into things like becoming half-coffee/half-bookstores, or become better big-boxes themselves, or focus on community events and authors.

Perhaps we'll see a collapse of local news (which really has already happened) and the resurgence of quality national news on a smaller, less competitive, but sustainable basis?


Impressive but digital only subs were $340mm.


That only counts digital-only subscribers (people like my parents still get the Sunday paper with their digital subscription) and if you add in digital advertising, their online-only business is nearly $600M. That's pretty substantial.


Number 3 isn't just in flux, I'd argue it got worse. Companies like Facebook trying to act as definitive platforms while trying to keep their hands clean of being sources or generators means that we have even more fragmented news sources, but significantly more centralized distribution. This means that not only does the quality and veracity of news articles decrease, but the likelihood of someone believing something from a "trusted" platform increases. It's the worst of both worlds.


I'm particularly interested in #23 since it is clear that Wikipedia is even more dominant now than it was in 2008: More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.


The advantage of deletionism is that users can have some confidence that anything they find on Wikipedia has received some attention from editors. Without deletion there'd be an unlimited number of pages, (100-𝜀)% being crap.

If you search and don't find it on Wikipedia, you can look elsewhere. That's a better experience than finding unmaintained crap.


But with deletionism an unknown (yet significant) number of pages are still crap. One of the sad aspects of wikipedia is that their idea of "maintenance" enshrines crap and their idea of "sources" makes it incredibly difficult for experts in a (sub)field to improve an deficient article. That's orthogonal to the number of pages, though.


wikia.com sites? There are non-wikipedia wikis for tons of stuff there, mostly entertainment-related, but nobody would also prevent one from making something like that for everything else. Also, Wikidata is much more permissive than Wikipedia I think, but this one is mostly for data, not narrative descriptions.


"Spotify & Apple Music" --> Rhapsody/Napster already had this in 2001. I was a subscriber soon after. So many thought music subscriptions were a strange concept, from mainstream media to TWiT, and that it would never work. I think Rhapsody/Napster was too far ahead of its time, and faced too many technical obstacles, especially when they switched their DRM too many times (they eventually used one from Microsoft, forget the name, which Microsoft discontinued in favor of their own Zune service, and Rhapsody/Napster had to scramble). When Apple and Google jumped in, and Netflix showed the possibilities on the video side, Rhapsody/Napster already was stretched too thin to compete.

(Of course, the incarnation of Napster referenced here is very different from the original Napster concept.)

EDIT: Windows pre-Zune DRM was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure (PlaysForSure) -- it was "anything but". So many synchronization problems with devices, it was painful.


""Spotify & Apple Music" --> Rhapsody/Napster already had this in 2001"

Yeah but neither of those had a billion+ smart phones to deliver their subscription service to. Not really their fault, but clearly mobile streaming was what really made this type of product skyrocket in popularity.


I don't know how much spotify & apple disrupts label's biz model, they still have to pay enormous amount of money to the labels for songs being played.

They supplement record label's core business more than they disrupt.


> (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly

Lately seems to be going into an opposite direction. I.e. I have TV subscription, Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime subscription... but what I have to do to see Start Trek Discovery? Get yet another monthly subscription. Not exactly "one umbrella $10 subscription covers all" but rather "everybody has its own $10 subscription in which you probably are only interested in one thing ever, but you have to get the whole thing anyway". That, or just download it from torrents...

> to expect free, ad-supported news

Same problem here, btw. I wouldn't mind another $10 subscription, but I am surely not going to subscribe to 50 different news sources of which I read 2 articles a month from each, and I am surely not going to buy subscription to only one and trust it to actually give me full, deep, unbiased and untainted picture of the world, not sure if such unicorns ever existed but for sure they are extinct now. So again, 50 subscriptions or... other ways.


Indeed, film and TV are very much not in any sort of "pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music" situation, due to fragmentation. That said, they could be undergoing a transition towards it - the current models are clearly frustrating for some users, so there is an opportunity for a company that can make the supply chain work to clean up.

But, as with news, i would much rather have an à la carte model. I don't watch enough movies for a subscription to be worthwhile, but i'd pay 2 or 3 pounds to watch an old Bob Hope movie every now and then.


> 3. New news.

For this one, I would definitely say Twitter. As an example, my first info about the recent school shooting in Florida was a tweet by a scared student. Anything that happens anywhere in the world will spread on Twitter literally in an instant, and the same goes for non-realtime content published elsewhere.


I am not sure Twitter is "new news". It's like saying "everybody screaming at once about everything they want is the new opera". Surely, among that screaming there would be opera singers, and among Twitter noise there would be news. But Twitter is not news. Maybe something that could be used as raw source for "new news". There are several projects aimed at that, but mostly very National-Enquirer-like kind of news (more looking to shock and entertain than to deliver information).


And yet from a business perspective, Twitter is doing terribly. The news platforms we seem to gravitate to don't end up being profitable.


Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M. What’s your definition of a business failure?


Twitter is profitable as of 2 weeks ago, and with just $91M in profits. Let's wait and see where this ship goes over the next 2-3 years before claiming victory.


Twitter has wracked up 2.5B in losses over like 11 years. Only now have they turned a profit. That is a failure in the time frame of its existence. http://time.com/4241716/twitter-losses-twtr/


Twitter is almost certainly worth more today than their historical losses, making them a success.


Is it? The opportunity cost of that $2.5B is what to compare to. You could have acquired instagram for half that, for example.


Is Twitter now profitable? It was my understanding that throughout all of 2016 and 207 they were operating at a loss. And for a long time before that. If they're profitable this year it could be a turning point and I'd be wrong, at least going forward. But do we have enough data to support it at this point?



So... a simple yes would have sufficed. They were not profitable, now they are. They may not be later, we'll find out.


You were already told they were profitable, in fact it was the comment you were replying to:

  "Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M". 
What more did you need?


Fundamentally, we refuse to pay for content. As long as we continue to do so, they won't be profitable.

The issue is that we also complain about the dumbing down of online info, and decry the lack of quality content.

The advertising model does not work for valuable content creation. Period. Until someone figures out what its replacement is, news (and all non mass-produced content) will continue to slowly die online.


Some people, myself included, pay for some online news content. But just by virtue of being paid doesn't make news content creators more valuable. I had a NYT subscription until their OpEd board started churning out Nazi apoliga like it was their job. The world of paid content is still pretty terrible and stuck carrying water for their corporate overlords just as much as ad-supported groups. Maybe that's the future, but if all it took for quality to go up was for paid subscriptions to exist and people to want to buy them, it would have happened by now.


Do you happen to know what Quartz's business model is (qz.com)? They seem to have no subscription model to pay for even if you want to, nor do they seem to serve ads (as far as I've noticed, but maybe they serve a few), and yet they seem to have decent quality content.


They are a subsidiary of Atlantic Media Group that are explicitly advertised as no pay walls, no registration, and no app downloads:

https://www.atlanticmedia.com/brands/quartz/

Atlantic Media is owned by David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs invested in The Atlantic recently (but I think all of the subsidiaries are still owned solely by Bradley).

Before he was in media, he founded and sold a few advisory companies that went public, where he made a few hundred million dollars. So I guess Quartz's business model is live off the largesse of very wealthy benefactors?


Oh wow, thank you! It very much did remind me of The Atlantic -- makes sense now!


>But the real hero here is AWS and its "primitives"-based, bottom-up approach to outsourcing all computing.

I'm not sure 'hero' is the right word. AWS has created culture of lock-in and closed source products being acceptable in many otherwise open source pipelines. Additionally, people funnel significantly more of their money into AWS than they would with dedicated hardware.

AWS is a plague on infrastructure and a black spot in open computing history on the level of Microsoft. Kubernetes is showing promise to fix some of this.


aws has made infrastructure easily accessible to many without large outlay of capital, but with capabilities comparable (or even exceed) to any physical infrastructure you can buy.

this has made software services much easier to sell. in a world without AWS, only monied interests can hope to bring a service in any scale. even in the face of vendor login, AWS has increased the democracy of starting a new business.


In my experience, its actually at real scale (tens of millions of concurrents) that you want to move off of AWS, and at smaller scales where it makes the most sense.


> 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.

> Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)

The disease that the RIAA is a symptom of is not piracy. Piracy doesn't have a negative impact on music sales. The disease is an industry that makes success (i.e. financial sustainability) inaccessible to most, and excessive (lucrative beyond need) to few. Spotify/Apple Music do precisely nothing to change this.

Beats and Google Play Music are closer to the mark, but still a good bit off.


Winner take all is something freakonomics talks about: why do workers for drug dealers work for low pay and high risk knowing there's a higher chance of dying than getting on top? Why do so many high schoolers aspire to become NFL players knowing the chances are so slim?


It's a problem that occurs in a lot of industries, but one that's definitely significantly more severe in some than the average.

I wonder if there are common cross-industry causes, or more specific contextual reasons this occurs. I suspect the latter.


> Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy.

Did artists make more money as a result?


> 3. New news

I think this is where blockchain tech will prosper. Integrated wallet in you browser and nano payments to purchase access to articles. I don't want to subscribe to FT or New York Times, because I only read one or two articles per week. But I would happily pay 50c per article to get a few days access


Micropayments as an idea have been around for maybe 20 years. The technology isn’t really the problem and you don’t need blockchain. You just need a centralized frictionless payment system that everyone uses. Clay Shirky wrote off the problem to transaction costs. It’s too much mental energy to decide whether to pay 10 cents to read an article.

I don’t disagree it would be nice. $100 per year subscriptions are a pretty high bar for me. But the evidence that people will consume digital news and other articles transactionally just isn’t there.


This a-la-carte model is quite dangerous, because there's a difference between readers' willingness to spend money, and both the amount of work and the importance for society an article has.

These sorts of decision are currently in the hands of editors who, despite all the growling, are still inclined to allow vast, expensive, investigative goose-chases.

If you introduce per-article payments, it becomes just too easy for the business department to explicitly see which articles bring in more than they cost. But you want the cross-subsidies that are necessary for a well-rounded publication.


+1.

The sad thing is that this is what Ted Nelson has been advocating for since the late 1960s (amongst with many other things that made his vision of a worldwide web much more compelling than the one we have now, but technologically unfeasible until very recently). If it ever materializes, it'll just be half a century+ late :)


We should consider how this would incentive editorializing and reporting by the news organizations.


Fix news? it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs

Yeah, we now recognize that as propaganda. Maybe the web is finally helping people wake up to the fact that news was never really working.


It works a lot better than the comments section. You include this comment and yours in that.


This comment lacks both an appreciating for the nuance of international diplomacy, as well as journalism.


Then my hometown newspapers, whose "investigations" of local concerns consist of these same perfunctory recapitulations of representatives from the area politicians, and whose revenue by large comes from the full page ads paid for by those same politicians campaign bank accounts and even the taxpayer under the guise of questionable "public service" expenditures, must be brimming with the subtleties of diplomacy and journalistic excellence, I'm sure.


It's interesting to read the list and contemplate among other things the ideas that have arguably been solved (or at least partially solved) but in ways that weren't obvious.

For example, #1 about RIAA, I'd argue that it was never solved but with streaming stations in particular, it's just not such a pressing issue today.

Some certainly haven't happened (e.g. fixing news).

The list also seems to assume a lot more replacement of incumbents (Craigslist, Ebay, Wikipedia) than has been the case.


Regarding the RIAA one: I find it interesting how similar the streaming services are to the system of Voluntary Collective Licensing advocated by the EFF starting in 2003 [0].

Video content is moving in another direction with more walled gardens supported by original content. Maybe it's because of the costs required to produce quality content, or the size of the total library. Maybe it has something to do with how we watch video vs. listen to music (i.e. I may listen to a song or album 100x, but rarely watch any movie even twice).

[0] https://www.eff.org/files/eff-a-better-way-forward.pdf


There was also a fairly long-standing set of licensing and royalty practices in the music industry that you could more or less use whatever you want so long as you pay the appropriate royalties for it. Of course, this could have all broken down with the shift to digital but it didn't. I expect the market position and determination of Apple and Steve Jobs played at least some role in this.

Of course, the dollar amounts involved are a matter of ongoing debate. But, for the most part, if you want to setup a music streaming service or store, you could probably get access to at least a very large library at rates comparable to your competition.

The basic problem with video seems to be that the content owners by and large aren't jumping to broadly license content, even much of their back catalog, at rates that would support an all-you-can-eat subscription service. So all the services are basically doing original content that they pad out with the mostly mediocre stuff that they can license for a reasonable rate.


I think the replacement of incumbents is interesting. You have the classic AirBnB from Craigslist. I think that's in their founding story. I also use an app called Reverb. It is basically a sliver of Craigslist or Ebay. I'm not sure what other examples are out there but I bet there is still more meat on that bone. :) Certainly these sites are one-to-one replacements but they are taking out a section of the incumbent site.


Catawiki certainly is.


For #8. Dating, it has progressed pretty significantly with the likes of OkCupid, swipe-based apps (Tinder, Bubmle, Hinge), CMB to name a few. Heck it has done so well that IAC spun off its dating group as a separate business entity with its own IPO of The Match Group.


Tinder has changed everything here. Top grossing app last year. Real genius is not the swipe interface it’s the double opt-in that solves a lot of the signal v noise problem on old time dating sites like okcupid, match, etc.


Dating is still pretty broken for minorities or people who aren't into the heteronormative scene. Grindr has been great for gay men, but for minority folks (whether they be part of a minority group or have minority preferences), dating is still very much unsolved.


HER (https://weareher.com/) is dating for lesbians and other non-heteronormative people.

Color Dating (http://www.colordatingapp.com/) lets you match by race/ethnicity.

Muzmatch (https://muzmatch.com/) has features needed by Muslims.

[All 3 are YC-funded]


Oh yeah I love the fact that there are startups in this space, I just meant that dating is not yet solved in the minority space.


That's a problem with more demand than supply, fundamentally.


That feature reminds me of what they had in Logan's Run. A lot of stuff feels like people trying to implement an idea from one of their fav sci-fi books or movies.


The part where at 30 you're deemed useless to society?


That definitely sounds like Tinder to me.



Next step to make it more efficient is to accept rank lists and to federate, solving the matchmaking problem globally.


No, the next step is to tie in with DNA and ancestry services like 23andMe to help find a real mate for long term relationships and bearing children, and not just short flings or one night stands.


> 23andMe to help find a real mate for long term relationships

Wait. I thought long-term relationships were due to love/care, sacrifice, hard work, a common goal.


The DNA thing sounds dystopian. Maybe that’s where we’re heading, anyway, but it doesn’t feel right.


To me it sounds like the opposite, a utopia. All throughout history, genes have been passed down through natural selection based on short term traits. If we can select partners based on things like longevity, cancer resistance, disease risks, IQ, we can produce a better world filled with better humans, slowly but surely.


> better humans

Ah, sounds like you’re into eugenics. Do you believe humans are wise enough to determine what traits are favorable?

Increased longevity, for instance, seems short-sighted. We already have extreme population growth. While natural survival instincts strive to fight death, what’s the net benefit to society of helping more people make it through their 90s?

Phases like childhood and parenthood would become smaller fractions of life, does extending old age make your overall life experience better? Would society progress as quickly with more old people around?


I think lifespan is only worth increasing if there is a corresponding increase in health span. My grandmothers are both in their 90s and quite lucid and healthy. I would love to be at least in their condition when I’m in my 90s, but I also am serious about exercise and nutrition so I would hope I’d be even better off than them. They do nothing of that sort. Likewise, I’d like to be with a woman at that age who would also be just as healthy, and retain her faculties. Unfortunately, unless I extensively investigate a woman’s family history, I have no way of knowing if she’ll really be capable of living that long. What good is being a very old age if my partner is disabled and limits me from certain activities?

This inequality between lifespans is going to become a much greater concern for humans in the future, you will see. Perhaps it will become most noticeable as the baby boomers begin to die.

Also, I think society could progress even faster if the wisdom and experience of old people can be harnessed and not just tossed aside as “antiquated”. We need to rethink the way we think about the elderly, because one day those elderly will be us.


Right, it's better to be healthy at 90 than in chemotherapy. However, I question the societal and individual benefits of enabling everyone to live to 100.

> We need to rethink the way we think about the elderly, because one day those elderly will be us.

I find this Western fear of death to be toxic. One day we'll grow old and die - and that's ok, that's how life works.


If you feel everyone shouldn’t be enabled to live to 100 because there is little benefit to society, you are not that far from thinking maybe everyone shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce unless their offspring benefit society.

I personally don’t believe either of those things should be limited, I simply believe people with good genes should have an easy way to match with each other and form a relationship. That’s it. Society will take care of the rest.


> One day we'll grow old and die - and that's ok, that's how life works.

That's status quo bias [1]. If you want to die, nobody will stop you – but don't force your decision onto others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias


> We already have extreme population growth.

Actually, many Western countries have the opposite and need large-scale immigration (along with all the societal problems this brings) to maintain their population numbers.


Part of Stephen Baxter's book Ring describes a large scale (as in population) interstellar trip and engineering the population making that trip for a long lifespan via eugenics.

If I recall correctly, the described humans were living spans greater than 400 years, among other traits, after a handful of generations.

If something as ambitious as Deep Space is your goal, you're probably better off engineering people to make the trip rather than waiting for technology that may never materialize.


That's terrifying. Every project that aimed at "producing better humans" so far wasn't just terrible - it is ones that are brought up when somebody needs to bring up so terrible no discussion is possible after it, the ultimate peak of terribleness. And yet, there are people still dreaming of breeding "better humans". I hope at least this will be voluntary? Because the logical next step is if you choose "unsuitable" partner, your kid's healthcare will cost 10x (because it's your fault for loading the healthcare with unnecessary costs) and you face deep contempt from your social peers for not helping to improve the human race. At the best case, of course. We all know how worst cases look like.


I don’t understand why it’s such a taboo. Sperm donors are already selected based on favorable traits. If you’re a loser with no job or have a family history of diseases and cancer they do not want your sperm. And there’s nothing stopping people with poor genetics from breeding promiscuously with multiple women anyway, leaving behind single mothers in their wake. The Darwin Awards are a dark celebration of people dying in stupid avoidable ways and thus “removing themselves from the gene pool”.

People with excellent genetic traits need some sort of advantage to meet each other. The movie Idiocracy may have been a satirical comedy, but its message is actually not far from the truth of where we’re heading if someone doesn’t do something about improving the gene pool. To me, that is way more terrifying than genetically conscious dating.


> And there’s nothing stopping people with poor genetics from breeding promiscuously with multiple women anyway, leaving behind single mothers in their wake.

There's nothing that stops any people from "breeding promiscuously", provided they find suitable and willing partner. It is when you start talking about who is worth access to reproduction and who is too genetically inferior to be allowed that is where trouble starts. The humanity has terrible track record with this. Surely, you say, this time it would be different - we have The Science on our side which won't lead us astray! Which would be very reassuring, if only that wasn't the same thing, word for word, that was said in all previous attempts.

> People with excellent genetic traits need some sort of advantage to meet each other.

Why? If they're so excellent, they may find each other using their own excellent facilities. While it still sounds terrifying and offputting, I have no problem with people trying things that are terrifying and offputting to me in their own bedrooms. It's when this is proposed as some kind of societal norm where the really terrifying part begins, because we've been on that road, and not once, and we know it leads to hell.


The poster hasn't said anything about people not being worth having access to reproduction, or being allowed to.

I can't help but think people are reading some form of government mandate argument from their preference when they haven't mentioned one.

I like swimming. I don't think anyone should be forced to swim nor that its the governments business to increase swimming.

That guy wants to filter partners by their long term health potential. I don't see any reason to believe he thinks people should be forced to do the same nor that he thinks it's the governments business.


As I said, as a personal preference, it's personal business. If it's advocated as a societal norm, the government will inevitably come in, if not as direct coercion, then as softer means - subsidies, preferences, financial incentives, propaganda, etc. That's how it has always worked - maybe in theory the government shouldn't be in the business of enforcing societal norms, but it very much is in practice.


There are already personal preferences in partners that are so common that they're basically norms. I don't see a world where people take longevity of a potential partners health in to consideration on top of height, face, class, etc; and the government decides to get involved, to be all that much worse than the one where people just take height, face, class, etc in to consideration and the government decides to get involved.

To me an appropriate analogy would be if burkas were the norm for everyone, some guy was all "I wish we could easily see peoples faces when trying to date. I have a really attractive face and I'd like a partner with the same", then someone was all "the government will get involved!"

How and why? Prevent uglies from dating hotties? The market already does a decent job of that.

There's no department for "dating profile height fraud".

No one cries "eugenics!" at being able to see how attractive your partner is.


No one needs to cry anything - the OP admitted he's into eugenics. He just thinks it's completely logical and natural thing - after all, don't we want to better the human race?


good thing that chances are you're not in charge of anything major (hopefully)


I have been interested in eugenics for a long time. At any moment I could really only be a seed round away from putting together a founding team and building out a dating service.

Maybe the time is not quite yet. Maybe genetic mapping services have to improve a bit more, and public opinion has to shift somewhat, but if the conditions ever align, I’ll probably take a shot at it. Biotech is the next great frontier after all, and that’s where I’d like to be.


OkCupid was founded in 2004. But Tinder definitely changed the space.


My main problem with this list is that in most of the cases it's basically asking for "faster horses". Most of the items are not problems themselves, but traditional and long existing solutions for problems: news (for the problem of being informed), dating sites (for the problem of meeting romantic partners), auctions (the problem of buying and selling unwanted items), advertising (for the problem in making money when publishing content) etc. The WebOS, really? Sir Tim solved that long ago.


I solved #16! If you are "searching" for a food or recipe based on it's nutritional contents (for example: I want foods/recipes high in potassium and selenium, but low in sodium), check out https://kale.world/c You can search by over 20 different nutrient types, weight them, and filter them to your hearts content.


Where is that data from?

Also, it looks like you republish recipes from other websites. Do you have their permission to do so?


i don't have the actual recipe, just the ingredients. With a link to their recipe. there are no instructions on our site, except their description which they publish through JSON+LD. Basically all the info we show is just stuff they publish through JSON+LD


So all these recipes are from sites that publish recipes from JSON+LD? How do you discover them?


It's the same way that google discovers them. The JSON+LD is on the recipe page. They place it there for search engines to discover it, so that they appear in a search result with the JSON+LD data: this data enhances the result, instead of just having the name of your recipe, the result contains description, image and ingredient lists.

You can see this in action on google search: type in something like "Chili soup", then it'll return the image, description, some parts of the recipe, etc.


You make it sound like somebody gives up their copyright by using a certain data encoding.


What copyright? Maybe I'm missing a section but nothing on his site looks like it would fall under copyright protection.

Lists of ingredients aren't protected by copyright. Hell, neither are basic instructions and he doesn't even have those.

Photos are but this looks like it would fall under fair use. If you have a fashion blog you're allowed to use a photo of a dress from the makers website when you're writing about it. It's hard to comment on a product if you can't share a photo of the product. This guy is commenting on various foods by showing their nutritional value.


The whole point of JSON+LD is to make that information more accessible to the outside world (like to search engines), why else would they publish that?

is there any reason to think any site wouldn't want their recipe showing up in a search result?

the 2 sites I talked to were overjoyed to have their recipes shown in my search results.


You might want to research the legal cases regarding copyrighting recipes.


the Data comes from the USDA Nutrient Database which is open to the public.


Ah yes, I came across that DB once. Cool.


I have until now always used http://nutritiondata.self.com/tools/nutrient-search which has lots and lots of variables.


this one's much more comprehensive and contains all the foods: for example cream of tartar for highest potassium. Kale.world limits the food search to less esoteric choices, mostly primary ingredients, rather than including everything under the sun.


Sliders do not appear to work on iPad.


Thanks for the heads up, I'll fix that.


pg is Nostradamus, this list is amazingly prescient

- #5 explosion of upstream SaaS

- #6 tons of higher-res components of CRM software

- #9 instagram

- #11 google drive

- #22 smartsheet

wonder if the few on here that haven't been solved (wrapper for customer service) are simply unsolvable, or something has to shift for the economics to make way for them.


Id almost argue that intercom/drift are making customer service a lot easier. The chat bubble lets you connect with users of your product a lot faster than a phone call and paired with some other softwares can do a lot of what you need.

This probably is more meant to challenge bad customer service like ATT/Comcast but the (non legacy) software world is doing better with this I think.


Arguably, we've either automated or made self-service a lot of the things that you'd have historically had to talk to a customer service rep about. The problem is that, with a lot of companies, if you do need to deal with a human, it's at least as bad as it ever was.


#17 New payment methods - Cryptocurrencies


The Bitcoin whitepaper came out just three months after this post, if I'm not mistaken.



I would love it if someone tackled the auctions market better. Ebay continues to focus more on being a marketplace, and promoting buy it nows. A real auction house should extend the time limit as long as people are putting in bids.


I'm amazed auctions have not taken over live show tickets. Scalpers skim off millions of dollars every year that events/middleman startup could capture themselves if only someone designed a proper live show ticket auction.


The artists don't want this. They want fans long-term, and for the fans to not feel excluded because of monetary reasons. They believe that keeping the tickets at a below-market rate achieves this. Whether this strategy has the effect they desire I have no idea.


So create a double selling strategy which sells low priced tickets for super fans and sell the rest at auction.

Let's be honest, the "long-term fan" strategy is generally just a profit maximizing strategy due to repeat sells.


Stop being amazed and start building! I think that is a great idea.


Haha, I'm already working on something else but maybe I will put it as one of my "other ideas" in my y combinator application.


TicketSwap is very popular in Amsterdam.


There is a great Freakonomics episode on exactly that.

tl;dr was that people don't like buying stuff via auctions.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...


But will they deal with the extra hassle of an auction to see their favorite artists when their artists are incentivized by millions of dollars in extra profit by using an auction based system?

I bet so


I wouldn't mind seeing an auction site with a far more limited scope, and a limited number of auctions.

Say, like, a site for old video games. Anyone who wants to sell Street Fighter II for the SNES submits it to the Street Fighter II auction, and anyone who wants to buy it bids on it there. There aren't 500 Street Fighter II auctions, there's just one, creating a more efficient commodity market for Street Fighter II.

Maybe the answer here is a service where people can build their own auction sites around product categories they care about. The service, the auctioneer/curator, and the seller split up the proceeds of each sale.


What could possible result by marrying Reddit and Ebay?


So an exchange like you'd see for stocks or commodities, but for specific real-world goods?


The trick here is to make auctions seem _fair_. Every economist loves the idea of an auction because it is inherently more fair to sell a good at the price convergence of what someone is willing to pay with the scarcity of the object. The problem is that it often leaves all of the buyers unhappy. Either you got outbid and are annoyed that you need to keep looking for that good, or you won the auction and potentially feel buyers remorse that you overpaid for that good.

I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for. Instead of tackling those problems, they just opted for the "buy it now" button.


You can filter to Sold Listings to see what the average price is. The problem is that in many auctions for similar items are actually not so similar.

I search for camera gear a lot. When it comes to camera bodies, there's a lot of variation. With lens or without, with battery grip or without, what's the shutter count? What's the cosmetic condition? etc. etc.

But generally I just end up with a range by manually looking for the highs and lows, and then try to nab one at a price I think would be a "good deal"


>I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for.

I'm pretty sure you used to be able to search on completed auctions. I seem to remember doing that. But you seem to be correct that there's no way to do it now that I can see.


You still can; Advanced search > “Completed items” and/or “Sold items”.


Ah. Thanks. I hardly ever use eBay any longer and I didn’t see that. Good to know. It’s sometimes useful.


The big problem here are bots that bid on stuff at the last minute. That's why I filter out auctions most of the time and just find "Buy It Now" items.


I use Yahoo Auctions a lot because it’s the only place to get certain goods and sellers have the option to turn on a feature where every time someone bids with less than 5 minutes left, the timer extends to 5 minutes.


The pros and cons of ending at a specific time were discussed ad nauseam back in the day. There isn't a clearcut "right" approach.

To the broader point, I do wonder to what degree participating in eBay auctions was something of a fad. eBay was a bit of a hobby of mine for a while. In part, my buying habits have changed but I'm not sure you can separate out the "thrill of the hunt" from the more utilitarian aspects of using eBay to buy and sell.


eBay has become actively hostile for individuals selling. All their policies now heavily favour the buyer, and the scope for getting scammed is too high to make it worth the bother. Little wonder it's becoming more a marketplace.

Oh and not forgetting their 10% + Paypal fees, which makes them damn expensive.

Think there is a lot of scope for someone to do it better.


I've been working on something related to 7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist.

I built FormAPI [1] because I used to work at a company that needed to fill out a lot of forms. (Gusto [2])

Turns out there's not a huge number of programmers that need to fill out PDFs. But there's a big market for things like online forms and electronic signatures, so I'm looking into some different directions. But I think 7. is a great place to start.

[1] https://formapi.io/

[2] https://gusto.com/


I wonder how this list changed in the past 10 years. Time for a new list PG?



thank you!


#13: "One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there's already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests."

This is what we're trying :-)

Especially the paragraph:


that was a good paragraph


The best ever. Copy and paste fail.


#1 Spotify #2 Facebook #3 Facebook, Buzzfeed #8 Tinder #9 Instagram #10 Alibaba? #12 Facebook #13 Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy #14 Fitbit? #17 Stripe, crypto #19 AWS #27 IoT #29 WIX


>#13 Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy

All have fallen very short IMO. Coursera's courses are generally pretty watered down compared to the real undergraduate versions with a few exceptions here and there. Udemy focuses more on skill-based courses and they also have a huge issue with enforcing copyright. A lot of people are uploading pirated materials to the site and masking it as their own creation. The courses aren't that high quality compared to a traditional university setting. As with coursera, there are a few exceptions but overall most courses are low quality.

Khan academy is more for short tutorials where you need help here and there. It does play a role though but I don't think it is anywhere near possible to replacing traditional university education.

I think most people would agree that they want to see some sort of online learning system that can actually compete with a traditional university. As in, if I want to take physics 101 I can take it either at a traditional university or this online university. The online university would offer cheap/free and high quality courses such that you would basically be learning the same thing as the traditional course. It would also be possible to have a better overall learning experience thanks to internet/computer enhanced features (simulations, interactive videos etc.). Ultimately it would have some sort of certification, verification system that employers would place value upon, similar to the value currently being placed on BA degrees.



For #26, we got chatroulette. Be careful what you ask for.


I'd say that almost everything besides #1 has been well addressed by new companies or the big 5 since 2008. But the RIAA is a symptom that went away - the problem is still there, and streaming is only part of the answer. Spotify may seem like a solid solution to end users, but artists can't earn much from their content alone, and that means less people can work on creative projects.


I have the answer to #3, New news, I really do. It's been percolating in my mind for 12 months now, I know how to build it too. However I am not a business man and I have a family to feed so I'm working on someone else's software to put the kids through school. - every-dev-ever.


Still largely unsolved, or poorly solved issues. Seems less precient than timeless.


For bad customer service, I'm curious if he meant services that the corporation can pay for to outsource quality CS, or a concierge approach where the user calls the concierge, who then messages the relevant company.


About "8. Dating". I think over last 10 years, online dating has not been solved at all.

Here are typical problems which nearly all dating sites run into:

1. Women got way more attention than men. Such environment stimulates aggressive strategies on both sides. Men must spend a lot of effort to reach as many women as possible. Women must filter out males as hard as possible. Men are discouraged to carefully read profile of women because probability of particular woman responding a message quite small. By the same reason, men are discouraged to write personalized first message. Such economics create hostile environment for both genders. Men got upset that women don't respond them or respond lazily (i.e. on your long sentence or question, she may just say - "nice"). Women got upset that they have inbox full of messages from men but nobody seems have deep interest in them. And I didn't even mention the case when lots of sexually unsatisfied men may harass women because it's cheap (i.e. no consequences). And just banning those men isn't viable long term solution. An apps like Tinder, where you can't write a message till you get mutual likes don't change dating economics at all.

2. Both genders are encouraged to participate in aggressive photos contest. I've had countless personal disappointments on the first date when I've seen completely different woman in real life than on pictures. They can use Photoshop, they can take selfies under specific angle. It's very often that pictures does not show real person at all.

3. Similarly, I've had countless personal disappointments because she turned to have completely different character in real life. The problem is that you used text messages in order to know each other. Dating is very subtle area and you cut off a lot of information if you rely only on text messages and 2D photos. There are much more information in non-verbal communication about your possible compatibility.

I've never seen a single serious attempt to solve this problem. Tinder doesn't even try to solve these problems, they just used mobile apps hype in order to get traction. I've seen the same model (mutual match before you can write message) in 2006.

Dating is area full of stereotypes and political correctness. It's easy to take side. Either feminist side and blame men for being sexual predators or you can blame women as being harsh filtering out men without giving any second thought.

Instead we should think for game theoretic data driven approach.

Now, we have advanced ML algorithms and big data. We can use ML, we can use game theory. Why not create online dating startup which encourages people to know each other well. And discourages aggressive behaviour on both sides. In other words, we should create totally different economics of online dating.

An online dating site which promotes quality over quantity and personalized behaviour.

P.S. I have no idea why I gather downvotes as problems with dating sites are very obvious. They are pretty hard to solve but it doesn't mean these problems do not exist.


For your point #1, the reason you have this problem is ultimately supply and demand. There's certain subsets of demographics that are highly uneven due to many factors: 1 of which is that men date younger women, hence women in greater demand than younger men, and older men in greater demand than older women, etc. A dating site won't be able to fix this.


It's true that it's supply and demand problem. However, I noticed that problem #1 is much more acute in online dating than in real life. I personally had much greater success in real life dating than online dating. It's strange since online dating supposed to make dating easier, not harder!

There should be a way to discourage quantitative behaviour (i.e. when you play statistics game) and encourage qualitative behaviour (i.e. when you are more focused on speaking with less people).

In other words, in real life, you don't try to talk with 100 women in one evening. However, it's cheap in online dating to spam many people.

So online dating should be closer to real life.

It should be more expensive to reach and even like more people in short timeframe. On the other hand, somehow we should guarantee that pictures (and probably video) should give maximum of information about appearance. It should be encouraged to provide as many high quality pictures as possible.


Online dating is only an accurate caricature of real life. It's a pure numbers game. Instead of 10 guys hitting on the girl you think is cute, now hundreds of them are.

I don't know what it means to be closer to real life. The reason your have social less momentum in your day-to-day is because you just don't meet that many people.

Also, I'm not sure what increased qualitative behavior would mean in online dating. Sure, there are bozos who just say "hey" to everyone, but those are trivial to filter out. Online dating is a vessel for quickly escalating to a meet-up. I think you should put less importance on the quick-fire internet game because most people don't want to languish there either. People want to meet, fuck, make connections just like you.


This list is worth to recall and consider because it is actual in our days.



As I was on HN in 2008 and paying attention to these sorts of things, I'll pretend I'm qualified to offer opinions.

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom - Streaming, both paid and ad-supported seems to be the answer here. It's prone to monopolies and music streaming doesn't seem to pay artists very well, but Netflix is producing quite a bit of original content.

2. Simplified browsing - mobile ate this.

3. New news - appears largely unsolved. A few big national newspapers are are doing serious reporting, some newcomers (blogs) are doing the same without a print version and local newspapers are still mostly bad. Social sharing of news mostly hasn't made things better.

4. Outsourced IT - "the cloud" hasn't replaced everything, but increasingly, companies do seem to like software that stores data on someone else's server and gets delivered by a browser.

5. Enterprise software 2.0 - not a field I have enough contact with to comment on.

6. More variants of CRM - as above, I'm not very qualified to comment. I know there are startups doing things in this space.

7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist - kind of too vague to respond to. AirBnB was an example of this.

8. Dating - Tinder is the main winner I'm aware of. I'm not quite sure how they solved the chicken and egg issue, though it appears they were helped by Facebook-based login and doing their initial release to students at a small set of universities.

9. Photo/video sharing services. Instagram seems to be the biggest winner here. Imgur, started as image-hosting for reddit is trying to offer reddit-like features and keep the users on its own site.

10. Auctions - I think this one missed the mark a little. People don't want to auction things for the most part, they just want to sell things. As an online marketplace accessible to individuals, nothing has really displaced Ebay. Facebook is doing a bit for some niches with sale-oriented groups and built-in payments, and there's Etsy. It's possible to sell on Amazon as an individual, and a few people do, but Ebay still dominates.

11. Web Office apps - Google ate this, and Microsoft has entries in this space too.

12. Fix advertising - Facebook and other social platforms have at least made the problem different by having businesses interact with customers directly and paying for reach. This is not a solved problem by any means.

13. Online learning - massive open online courses are improving access to education, but the fact that a lot of situations still demand credentials from more traditional educational institutions is keeping this approach from being too dominant. I expect more development here long-term.

14. Tools for measurement - this seems like a feature more than a product. A lot of productivity tools have metrics built in, e.g. github.

15. Off the shelf security - there seem to be some things available here, but nothing really dominating the market.

16. A form of search that depends on design. I'm not certain, but I don't think there's anything here. What people seem to be more interested in is something that's not big, scary and delivering tailored results. That's not a huge market, and DuckDuckGo seems to have most of it.

17. New payment methods - Paypal is still big, Facebook handles payments now, mobile OS makers and device manufacturers are doing things. Stripe and Square helped with credit card processing, but that's not really a new payment method. Cryptocurrency is a thing, but nobody's been very successful actually using it as a payment method.

18. The WebOS - stuff like Zapier and ITTT are providing some plumbing, but nothing very OS-like.

19. Application and/or data hosting - "the cloud" is obviously huge and dominated by AWS and Google.

20. Shopping guides - I'm calling this a miss, with most of the exceptions being niches too small to be more than supplemental income for one person (http://flashlights.parametrek.com is a neat example, and the creator has an account on HN by the same name). Most people just shop on Amazon. There's low-quality content/affiliate marketing in this space, but that's arguably just SEO spam.

21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses - I'm not sure what's going on in this space. I haven't heard about anything making big waves.

22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid - Unless Google Sheets counts, I don't think this has panned out yet.

23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia - Deletionists still seem to rule Wikipedia, and nothing has displaced it.

24. A buffer against bad customer service - I'm not sure there's been much movement here. I suppose you could use something like Taskrabbit to hire someone to talk to Comcast for you.

25. A Craigslist competitor - Facebook groups have displaced Craigslist a bit and Ebay has experimented with some local marketplace stuff, but I think that's mostly it.

26. Better video chat - Google and Apple built better Skypes. There's appear.in, Discord offers video, etc.... There's a lot happening here, but it seems essentially evolutionary, not revolutionary.

27. Hardware/software hybrids - smartphones ate a lot of the applications for this, but Arduino and various single-board computers enabling DIY projects are cool.

28. Fixing email overload - I'm not seeing a single overarching solution here, but things like Gmail priority inbox, in-browser notifications and such seem to be chipping away at it.

29. Easy site builders for specific markets - I'm sure there are a few of these that are more niche. Shopify is kind of Viaweb 2.0. People in some niches seem to prefer to just have accounts on social media and have little interest in standalone websites.

30. Startups for startups - I probably haven't been paying attention to the right things to list these. A lot of stuff that's not very startup-specific like CRM, "cloud" services and finance software can, and probably does make inroads by being startup-friendly.


Is 24 not a personal assistant? :) Yes, taskrabbit seems appropriate for discrete tasks (wait from 12PM to 3:27PM for my repair window)... but I'd insist on bonded people, not randos, even ones with lots of 5-star ratings, to be in my home.

Maybe something in a chatbot for text-based interfaces? Make it speak/listen with text->speech and voice recognition? Since most of the human interactions on the other side of bad customer service are scripted, should be possible to build counter-scripts.

But after all that I don't think I'd pay anything just for this on an ongoing basis. So who is the market? Impatient wealthy people? We're back to assistants!


Hi! To expand on #20 there is a lot of stuff going on but like you said most of it is SEO spam.

It is further hampered by planned obsolescence and the increasingly fast pace that new products are released at. It is very difficult and expensive to maintain actual experience with everything in a product space.

It can't be crowd sourced either because most people are overly attached to their purchases and can't give objective comparisons between something they don't own.


I think the closest thing to shopping guides is review sites like Wirecutter or magazines/blogs that run end of year Best of... issues. I do have to some go to sources for gear in particular categories. And for some specific electronics that I need, I find that Wirecutter won’t steer me far wrong.


Those are still pretty spammy and often full of misinformation. Wirecutter's flashlight recommendations have always been terrible and so I have no faith in them at all.


They came up with surprisingly good recommendations for lights: Thrunite Archer 2A, Manker E12, Mini Maglite Pro. Their general advice was also reasonable: adjustable focus is overrated, use rechargeable batteries.

It's not perfect. I'd have liked to see a recommendation for something more powerful with an 18650 battery and USB charging and perhaps something more pocket-friendly. They only mention color temperature briefly, while I consider it important (most people prefer neutral white after trying it outdoors). 2xAA is not a battery configuration I'm fond of. All that aside, these aren't bad recommendations. Maybe the Maglite is a little questionable, but you could do worse.

https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-flashlight/

Outdoor Gear Lab on the other hand did a terrible job - so bad that they pulled their article after it got an extremely negative reaction on /r/flashlight.


In general I think that people with very specific perspectives and points of view on a narrow category don't care for general review sites. I never liked Consumer Reports for high-end camera reviews. But I've generally found Wirecutter to do a good job and they provide enough rationale for their choices to help me decide if they're making their decisions using the same criteria that I would.

Review sites mostly have various conflicts of interest but the best ones seem to manage them reasonably.


In regard to comment #13, I agree but companies are slowly starting to change. Just look at the rise of these coding "boot camps".


No 1 isn't a startup problem: it's regular political corruption. An industry cartel looking to preserve or expand on billions in revenue paid politicians to ensure that with stronger copyright laws. That's on top of their business practices they control. The combination keeps them rich on monopolies in an industry they control rather than the artists the laws are supposedly there for. Similar claims can be made for US patent system as well with big companies suppressing innovation with them or trolls draining the economy. Similar concepts. The people did nothing to counter these with many not even knowing companies were paying for these laws or with what effects. One result among many on copyright side is the legitimate buyers of content might have to deal with the experience in the link below since it can be a felony to do otherwise.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1ToS1gYD3wQ/TlxUHSp-uKI/AAAAAAAAFw...

So, the solution to this very political problem might be one of the following:

1. Creating non-profit organizations that collect dues to lobby on behalf of voters against corporate interests. They'll need to have focused legislation and marketing to reach a lot of people. They'll need a lot of money to outspend the plutocrats who have piles of money. The competition will at least be happening where the root problem is to eliminate some things like bans on reverse engineering, the severity of punishment for filesharing, or changes to copyright itself that limits labels control over business models. The rest will follow after root causes are solved at level of corrupt politicians introducing them.

2. They eliminate all politicians doing that in ways that cause consumers harm. This might take a combo of political campaigns for replacements plus media campaigns about harms predecessors were/are doing. Copyright/patent system would be but one. Might also try to get the new politicians to pass laws limiting donations by private parties with corporate ones eliminated entirely. Taxpayers themselves will pay whoever wins a fortune plus subsidize various stages of the election process so they work for us. Bribes will be felonies leading to life in prison.

This is all kind of like how we say certain things like governments banning encryption are political rather than technical problems. The people's action in legal system and media are needed to solve them. Lawmakers that will constantly do what's in incumbents' interests, even imprisoning innovators making alternatives, have to be fought at their level for best results. I mean, do combine as many methods of resistance as possible. Just startups or tech alone aren't the solution if problem starts with laws paid for with bribes.


A 10-year followup to this could be interesting.


We are fixing 12 (Advertising) all the way down to the fundamentals, with sprinkles of 16 (A form of search that depends on design) and 20 (Shopping guides) in the mix.


for hi-res CRM I encourage people to look at Tenfold, which is a startup in Austin


just realized this was originally posted 10 years ago...


Cloud may have done some these like 4 5 7 9 11 18 22


1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.

Music became irrelevant.

2. Simplified browsing.

The web became irrelevant. Replaced by Wikipedia, Amazon, and Facebook (none of which YC funded).

3. New news.

Journalism never covered itself in glory, but approximately half of the separation between the NY Times and Weekly World News has been erased since PG wrote this. Reddit probably didn't have anything to do with it.

4. Outsourced IT. 5. Enterprise software 2.0.

These two items seem to be the same. It's one area where I would say startups have been tremendously successful. If you can call thought-terminating technologies like Slack successful.

6. More variants of CRM.

Interacting with customers hasn't got much better.

7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist.

I'd say this has been a success. Everything from corporate formation to payroll to office space is now plug-and-play.

8. Dating. 9. Photo/video sharing services.

The iPhone existed when this was written, but that the smartphone represented a shift at least as large as the original PC revolution is nowhere on the radar.

10. Auctions.

Everybody hates them. The last 5 times / 5 years I've used Ebay, it's been with the "buy it now" feature. I can remember at least two smartphone apps that promised to get rid of unwanted stuff through auctions, which no longer exist, but I can't remember their names.

11. Web Office apps.

The Windows desktop world was already looking dire in 2008, and its slide continued. Web apps, mostly from Google and Microsoft, picked up some of the business. Rich text documents (Word) are also a lot less important today.

12. Fix advertising.

I've been blocking them since this was written, so I'm not sure. In general, I'm skeptical that "paid human discourse" is something that can be fixed.

14. Tools for measurement.

I think he means SEO, aka "machine learning".

15. Off the shelf security.

Doesn't exist, but a lot of it is sold. Did YC get any of that action?

16. A form of search that depends on design.

?

17. New payment methods.

Apple Pay has potential but has so far been disappointing. Same with cryptocurrencies.

18. The WebOS.

Nope.

19. Application and/or data hosting.

Sure.

20. Shopping guides.

Stores are so 2008.

21. Finance software for individuals and small business.

Mint was acquired I guess, but nobody uses it.

22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.

There was a good try at this, which existed when this was written: Dabble DB. It went under in 2011. Silk shut down in November,[1] leaving Airtable and Fieldbook...

23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.

Doesn't exist, and at this point we're lucky to have Wikipedia. It's clear to me that our society could not presently create it from scratch.

24. A buffer against bad customer service.

While good customer service is not more common than in 2008 (see #6 above), really really bad service is much more rare. Not sure who gets credit for this. Twitter and other platforms that let word about bad service spread easily may deserve some credit.

25. A Craigslist competitor.

Pretty much every startup ever. Still no overall competitor for the general case (online classifieds) though.

26. Better video chat.

Video chat is too intrusive for many applications. Apple Facetime, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Skype own the market.

27. Hardware/software hybrids.

?

28. Fixing email overload.

It wasn't fixed but email has become less relevant.

29. Easy site builders for specific markets.

Again, websites are less important now. Squarespace isn't more specific than Weebly.

30. Startups for startups.

See #7 above.

[1] http://blog.silk.co/post/167155630197/its-time-to-say-goodby...


>17. New payment methods. >Apple Pay has potential but has so far been disappointing. >Same with cryptocurrencies.

Stripe has probably been important for a certain class of businesses. You could also argue that paying through apps more generally (e.g. Lyft) are, in a sense, new payment methods.


please enlighten us on how music is less relevant than it was in 2008


i'm imagining the better statement is 'music ownership became less relevant'


I assume he means that downloading music is less relevant--with which I'd agree.


Use words, not list numbers, people. You're not doing yourself any favors.


Hm?


> 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.

Airtable founders: "Hold my beer."


>2. Simplified browsing.

Midori is the simple browser I have ever used.

http://midori-browser.org/

>17. New payment methods

This one has certainly come true! Cryptocurrencies have absolutely exploded.

>28. Fixing email overload. A

Astro tries to solve this problem. https://www.helloastro.com/product/ Know what to focus on and what to clean up

Astrobot’s AI-powered Insights remind you to follow up on important emails, questions, time-specific requests, and @mentions.

Plus, Astrobot makes suggestions about lists to unsubscribe from, emails to archive, and emails to move to folders.


Arguably, things like DoNotPay are a response to 24 ("A buffer against bad customer service")




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