Ask HN: What is your favorite startup that you are following right now?
There are so many awesome startups out there... what are some that people are consistently following?
Highlights:
http://are.na (private and collaborative research platform)
http://un1verse.co (mobile card-based programming)
https://www.notion.so (powerful collaborative documents)
http://mine.nyc (z-axis for content on the web)
http://ascribe.io (registering content ownership in the blockchain)
http://urbit.org (radically simple complete re-write of system and network software/infrastructure)
https://artadvisor.io/ (artworld intelligence)
https://graphcommons.com/ (collaborative graph databases)
Universe does sound promising, although they barely say anything. Do you know where I can learn more about them?
Premonition - http://premonition.ai/
It helps you choose a lawyer by analyzing legal data - which lawyers usually win before which judges, whether or not they run up the bill, etc.
Seems like there could be some ethical issues, but the value proposition is potentially enormous.
On the other hand, if big business starts using this kind of analysis to always beat the little guy in court, that would be pretty shitty. There is already a big imbalance in legal power, and something like this could make it much worse.
Uber
I've been querying for HN/reddit submissions a lot. I'm fascinated by all its accomplishments and the issues it raises:
- Viability of work-as-you-want, surge-as-needed supply model
- Creating critical mass for carpooling and rides on demand to work (I don't think anyone believed it was possible to convince upper middle class people to carpool with strangers)
- Being one of the few major instances of coordinating a shift away from tipping
- The spotlight they've shone (yes that shine's past participle) on the taxi industry and the "unseen" improvements we were missing out on
- The issues related to the contractor/employee boundary
- The general logistics of on-demand infrastructure and things it enables at scale
Most of that applies to Lyft too of course, though they're in the news less.
(In case I sound like a propagandist, let me note that yes their ethical lapses do bother me and I know some people who would lose respect for me if I ever worked there, so yeah it's not all wine and roses.)
Have you seen the new email campaign they're running?
Council ruled a few days ago, no new taxi licenses, no Uber.
But it's hard to defend the company when they treat their employees like garbage.
"Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Xbox (Xbox 360 & Xbox One), Playstation (PS3 & PS4), and other Smart TV platforms (currently Samsung, VIZIO, & Opera TV)" [0]
The clients play media you host yourself on your home computer or server.
They're self-funded and remarkably successful in the cord-cutting community.
I like Grouplend for three reasons:
1. It uses cutting edge technology and Big Data.
2. It's bringing B2B lending to Canada; finally, you can get a loan without going through the big banks.
3. Markus Frind invested in the company when he got his $575-million payout after Match.com bought POF.
I just wish they paid more. On angel.co, they're offering $50-75K for junior-intermediate engineers and $65K for intermediate-senior engineers at the low end. I would have liked to see them offer at least $75-80K to new grads, at least the well-prepared ones.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-busi...
At the moment it seems like it's just another part of the on-demand economy, a kind of reverse-uber for people who own cars in the city.
But if and when self driving cars appear, Zirx are the company that will know how to run the infrastructure and facilities for autonomous vehicles in and around cities, and other forms of transport.
One card to rule them all.
Also, the white text on black background makes it notoriously difficult to read & seems like a choice made by someone designing a geocities site. Not a great choice for something that's core feature is "readability"
I remember reading an article on Genius about Heroku (FWIW, http://genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotated) and hadn't initially bookmarked it.
I eventually remembered the "Genius" bit, so went to genius.com to locate the arti--
"...Wait. This is a lyrics sharing site."
"Uhh, what?"
I had to use my browser history (and my now-dented, slightly-less-certain hunch it was genius.com) to find the article.
I like the yellow on black with the hollywood-style hatch-like design, but yeah, it doesn't "have it" just yet.
1. I believe the web needs an annotation layer, somewhat analogous to the vision of Wikipedia but available globally across all sites.
2. I highlight and annotate aggressively when I read, which is why I care so much about annotation tools.
Today I think there are a couple good tools for annotating the web. For drafts or private highlights and annotations I use Instapaper (premium subscription needed). Their is simple and barebones, but functional... it reminds me of Pinboard. However, Genius annotations are public and richer with embedded media, commenting, voting, etc. Another early candidate to watch in annotating the research vertical specifically is Hypothesis (https://hypothes.is).
https://coding.net (It's for Chinese developers but you can try https://ide.coding.net also)
This is the YouTube of music, and has been exploding in popularity.
While there is probably room in the music sharing market for SoundCloud to grow (and fall out from YouTube's copyright policy), there is so much around the YouTube to MP3 environment that it's going to be difficult for anyone to take that market lead away from Google.
I hope I'm wrong though.
Great for digital nomads and those who move often. These guys had the most awesome idea to match people in different cities who move, so if you are lucky can save tons of money on renting the apartment and buying/selling the stuff. Will definitely use when I decide to relocate next time.
- They continually refine the product
- They are careful of feature creep
- The community they've cultivated seems to feel incredible ownership of the product.
We're doing bare metal without the high cost.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
Other disclaimer: Did anyone notice I'm in the top 100 for HN points now? \o/
I always ask myself if I would truly be better at managing a MariaDB cluster than RS.
Would you say it makes sense for a one man ops team to run bare metal?
I prefer bare metal so I'm assured very specific things, such as data security, overall latency (CPU, disk, etc), and also IO flow between VMs, and ALSO the choice of whatever hypervisor I want on servers I use VMs on.
Outsourcing hypervisor management to a third party sometimes makes sense, and sometimes doesn't.
That said, Rackspace DOES have bare metal offerings, but I find them to be far more expensive than they are worth. Exelion does it less expensively with better service quality, but of course, what I say is just a smidgen biased. ;)
1. You should put up a performance/benchmark page to compare to both bare metal and virtualized competitors (ala your "value"). For example, here's a page comparing DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode: https://community.centminmod.com/threads/digitalocean-vs-vul...
You could make a nice price/performance matrix to compare against your competition.
2. Also I don't know how feasible it is, but you might want to allow some "trial" method, so an interested party could try your server for a short amount of time (1 hour, 24 hours, etc.) to benchmark their app.
The hosting industry right now is in a race to the bottom in terms of prices and from what I can gather from your site, all you do is rent out servers you colo in the InfoMart facility. I don't know if you actually rent a cage and use your own equipment or if you just resell servers from one of the dozens of providers there.
It's going to be a hustle to grow when your competitors like online.net and dacentec.com offer servers with similar specs for less than half the price you do.
I just got a server last week from online.net for $32 a month that exceeds the specs of your $99 a month plan.
Would I rather go with a $30 plan with a server in an insecure building on an earthquake fault line, or pay $60 for a server in fort nox with excellent support.
Side note: I was looking at Liuqid Web the other day and saw they offer guaranteed 60 second phone support for all plans.
I also follow Beyond Meat. Google's Sergey Brin invested in them.[2] They are working on cruelty-free "cultured meat".
[1]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/medical-technology...
[2]http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/silicon-valley-fake-meat-b...