Ask HN: If you had ready to use real time technology, what would you do?
Building something like Skype, Google Talk, or even Twitter is hard to do right at large scale. What real time service would you build if the technology was not a challenge?
Witness an afternoon as Michael Schumacher. What's life like as an Oxford student? My name is Joe and tomorrow I will go free running in the city - join me.
Justin used to run around with a helmet camera and a laptop+ 4 bonded wireless modems in his backpack.
Bruce Sterling has described a beautiful society functioning along these lines:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
It's basically UPS entirely staffed by bike messengers. It's realtime and it's awesome.
I would like to build a search engine that indexes and organizes regulatory filings, investment message board posts, investment blog posts, the portion of a company's website dealing with investment relations, and economic news.
You input the company's trading symbol to bring up all the relevant information about the company. Furthermore, there should be an API so that people can use the index in their own applications. I have no idea where revenue would come from.
One thing that's interesting about this is that it's not too far off. We have speech recognition technology, computer voice technology, and translation technology. They need to get better, and faster, but they're there.
Some time later, you may run into scaling issues. You can cross that bridge when you come to it. (Or you can pay other people to cross it for you.)
The hope is that conversations in such a medium would be something in between regular chat and regular forums, and they could be compelling enough.
The technology is not a big issue for building this, the Tornado framework has a chat example from which you can start. Text messages are short, they can be kept in memory and saved to disk once in a while either DIY or using something like Redis.
I don't think I'm going to build it though - the type of forums I am interested in actually benefits from the perception that you have time to think through what you are saying.
There are lots of things I'd do if you gave me technology that does not really exist. Stuff like speaker independent speech-to-text that's as accurate as an expert human could transcribe. Or language translation that was as good as an expert human. Or almost anything that let me have the power of a human brain for free (no, not MTurk).
http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...