1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc....
2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data
3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data so that we don't have to wait until the end of the day to parse it all.
4) Oh and all of this data is unstructured and comes from 75 different sources.
Soon the average hedge fund will have more people just cleaning and managing data than they do in quantitative research, dev ops, software development and trading.
Oh and lots of the data is considered proprietary so while AWS/Azure, etc is fine, sending it to a third party to process is not.
TL/DR Help me, I'm drowning in data. How do I get the time from when I acquire data to when I trade based on it down to a reasonable time frame, where reasonable is closer to hours rather than days/weeks.
The same line of inquiry has been evaluated for most 3rd party software that companies rely on. For this specific instance of data collection and cleaning, I'm imagining it's not going to be a much different calculus, although perhaps you'll see a higher percentage of firms choosing to roll their own if they have the chops and pockets (e.g. Two Sigma, Bridgewater, Goldman Sachs, etc.).
I will note that there are commercial mechanisms firms could try to implement to try to limit the downsides in case something like this happens: warranty & damages provisions, and insurance are two come that spring to mind. I'm sure there are numerous other considerations in the age-old "build or buy" cost-benefit analysis.
Cleaning:
Open Refine seems to be the best product in this category. I haven't used anything but my own tools to do this before, so I can't really offer any advice.
Warehousing:
My understanding is that this is just a fancy way to talk about a database with a schema designed for analytics. There are many open source databases which do this very well, the one I use being Cassandra (and/or KairosDB), though it is also likely the one that is hardest to use. For a beginner, you might want to refer to this SO answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8816429/is-there-a-powerf...
Data processing/collection:
This is something that is incredibly dependent on the data sources, so I likely can't tell you anything that will help. Most of my data sources I've worked with have been internally sourced log files, messages from ZMQ, or CSV data - you might be working with something far different though, since there are lots of public data sets and such which are common. Ideally, this would be integrated into the tools that you are using to clean the data, but I don't know if that exists.
Handling input from many different sources at different rates is not a very hard problem to solve if your system is build correctly - you could for example run a daemon for each data source which will populate the database when there is new data available, then send a message off to the processing engine, which will integrate the data into whatever reports you are running.
Specifically for a use case of a hedge fund, the reports could be triggered by a message which is sent when the new data is available, and processing could be done in parallel in Lambda or similar dependent on need to get a nearly instant return, enabling nearly real-time reporting.
Check out my company, SnapLogic: https://www.snaplogic.com/
I have seen local companies working for months/years to finally use his BI package but the trouble at the step 1 is big (and also, to put the data in a "nice" schema).
The problem is that enter in this space is hard. Years ago I was at a company that have a niche product (in foxpro) for this kind of task, and I have dreamed about build something like this based in my experience, but get the funding for this kind of "boring" task is hard (more in my country, Colombia).
P.D: If wanna help, we can talk. I can't give a magical solution but at least I find this kind of "boring" jobs compelling ;)
We threw every rule out the window in the name of performance _when fetching raw data from external sources_. So we had weather station networks, NOAA forecast runs and NASA satellite data in a workable schema in our shop way faster than average. Mix of C, PowerShell, Perl, and the nonstandard parts of T-SQL, highly parallelized, tricky but fast.
After the "workable schema" was established, the rules came back and we acted more responsibly. Smart instead of clever.
Ran this stuff all day long, getting every piece of data asap. Things that can only be calculated with a full day of data we poked and prodded the meteorologists to express in "partial aggregates", which to me were just like the map steps before an EOD reduce.
Took a lot of mutual understanding and iterating but worth it in the end. When the ultimate data source (satellite or radar site for us) posted its last hour of data, we were 95% done with the day's computation work. We do our last step, publish our numbers, and bam, Our ag clients have this stuff a day earlier than they are used to.
It's a native streaming platform so your data will be cleansed, processed, scanned for outliers event-by-event rather than in batches. We have dozens of streaming connectors IT/Enterprise/Web data sources. We also support initial load for your firehose data. For unstructured data, we have support for RegEx based parsers.
Shoot me a message if you have any more questions. We have many big name users in Aerospace, Banking, Device manufacturing, and Logistics industries.
www.watchful.io
guarantee worst-case linear time matching for any
number of expressions
It's open source, and match time is linear in the length of the input string.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on a different open source project)
More like "mitigating" or "occasionally getting regex slightly more right than some other solutions". There are many different approaches to regex and all seem to focus on different parts of functionality (RE2 focuses on quick compiles and simplicity, libpcre has 'all the functionality', we're about streaming + large scale + high performance if you can tolerate long compiles and lots of complexity). A number of new projects are trying very interesting approaches, like icgrep and the Rust regex guys.
I would be curious to hear about your approach.
www.watchful.io
I don't know much about Paxata but I think Trifacta are well-regarded in industry and academia. Trifacta founders worked on research / open-source-? project Data Wrangler http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/ and turned it into Trifacta.
I don't know much about either product in truth.
1. The UX is subpar. It insists on running in only a single tab at a time, and attempts to open multiple tabs will instead override whatever it considers to be the master tab. This is a huge pain, because I often need to have a mapping workflow open in one window and some other relevant part of the application open in another. Instead I have to save, go find the thing I want, and go back. Another problem is that when working with data sources containing tons of fields, there's no easy way to search.
2. It offers an expression language to perform some computational tasks, similar to what you'd find in Excel, but it's hamstrung by a poor UI and a limited amount of functions. The built-in editor for expressions is really poor (see Tableau for an example of a great editor for a simple Excel-like language; it even has type linting) and, unless I've misunderstood something, you can't declare any variables so you end up with huge nested expressions. There aren't many functions available, so something as simple as removing whitespace ends up as lstrip(rstrip(foo)). In combination with no support for statements (or at least a let expression like in lisp) this makes any nontrivial data munging completely indecipherable.
I've looked around in this space and it seems like there are a variety of products, but the supplier of our main CRM will only support Informatica Cloud. I think that a company that can offer a product that does what you've said but makes a serious effort at UX could cause users to revolt and demand to use it! I know the joke is that Slack is just a pretty IRC with better UX... but that's exactly why it has become so successful.
In terms of data munging, take a look at Microsoft's Power BI. It's visualization software but it has a nice data munging mode that, crucially, keeps track of all the changes you make and displays them in a linear format. This is great for getting a quick idea as to what was done with the data and is essential for doing reproducible data analyses. Unfortunately, Power BI also suffers from poor UX in insisting on tiny fonts and gray-on-gray palettes that are totally unreadable to anyone over 30.
https://www.holistics.io/data-preparation/
And on the part about firehose data, you might already know this, but Kafka and their line of work should be aligned with what you're after.
Omg, so many sales pitches. You should figure out which of those were automatically generated by someone who's bot is crawling HN and using NLP to find posts like this, and then hire them. There's basically 0 chance that isn't happening...
Sounds like a job for Apache Camel?
+scaleable
Problem solved on all points.
100% fully functional, fully featured, 100% free download right from the website.
Disclaimer: I work for splunk.
Everyone I know in law is dissatisfied with every part of their tech stack. If someone could come up with an integrated SaaS solution, and be SUPER careful about compliance... they would be printing money.
My impression is that the legal industry is most of the reason why WP is still being used.
Quite amazing that it’s still around.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/14/2019225/game-of-thr...
Can you explain what you mean? Letter generation etc is still usefull, I don't see what billing has to do with it. They can still charge what they want to.
But... saving time means they have more time to provide more services, accept new clients, and review their documents to decrease mistakes. Is the relationship not apparent in their minds?
The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
Logojoy, for instance, is an example of a service that supplants human labor with a single "good-enough" deliverable at a low price, and does so in a fraction of the amount of time. I imagine this would be much more difficult in legal settings, but LegalZoom seems to be alive and kicking, so it must be possible.
To your second paragraph, I would add that it's hard for customers (and lawyers) to figure out what is "good-enough" in the legal setting. I'm a lawyer and there's a lot of stuff you can find on the internet that I personally think is good enough (I would use it in my personal affairs because the risk of the missing edge cases being an actual problem is slim) but I wouldn't be comfortable recommending it as a solution to a client because those missing edge cases are a real malpractice risk.
In the case of a logo, good enough is whatever the client thinks is good enough. In the case of a lot of legal solutions, good enough is often a murky risk/reward calculation based on legal concepts the client may not understand completely.
I still think there's enormous room for improvement, both in helping clients understand the concepts and the risks they're taking, and also in providing better automated solutions.
I'm sure that there are lots of legal consulting companies that do this for people and entities that consume lots of legal services but the real trick is providing it profitably to "unsophisticated" people doing a one time thing.
That last step's a real doozy, though. Startups are a field that thinks "move fast and break stuff" is actually a good idea. That kind of thinking works when you're slinging viral social media and personal productivity services, but it is catastrophic when you try to move into an industry where your customers' lives or livelihoods are on the line.
I don't get it. I'm pretty sure they're not hurting for new cases, so they'd make up any losses in fewer hours with more clients.
>The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
While I agree that the billable hours system reduces the incentive to be more efficient, I don't think it removes it entirely. Otherwise lawyers would still be using typewriters to draft memos. In my experience, removing some of the inefficiencies frees up time and mental bandwidth to focus on activities which actually benefit the client. More time reading cases, researching, evaluating issues. And you can bill for that.
Note: perhaps my experiences aren't representative of the industry as a whole.
The only "legal tech" that can succeed (in my opinion) is the kind that eliminates the need for lawyers, but then you're up against a different problem: people who think lawyers are magical wizards who can invoke spells to keep lawsuits and regulators at bay. It's really hard to convince many people that they don't need a lawyer, even though lawyers and law firms are almost never accountable for the advice they give.
Your advice is akin to saying "hey you inexperienced coder, write some production ready code but don't test it and when the only time it needs to run, give it a try. Hope you don't screw it up! When there's another coder in the room who can claim 'oh no he meant to set my financial variable 100X not 10x' and can convince the compiler to agree with them"
Not familiar with the space, but seems like what you are describing.
But here's the real problem for anyone looking to innovate in that space: the customers. Lawyers are as a rule anti-technology, slow to adapt new techniques, and set in their ways. Worse yet, they just bill their clients for their shitty software like Lexis or WestLaw, so they aren't even personally motivated to reduce costs.
Doesn't this take money away from your firm? It is only when firms are competing on cost, time or client recognized quality that they will institute better workflows via software.
From our perspective in the national standards group, we would actually want our associates to just spend more time on value added activities. Instead of wasting time organizing PDFs of exhibits and monkeying around in spreadsheets, we want to them evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues. So it's not precisely cost control that is the primary concern, but quality assurance.
No, because we are in fact competing on cost and client-recognized quality, and to a lesser extent time. Plus our fees are driven more by the market than by our actual costs, so if we billed fewer hours, we would simply bill at a higher rate to reach the same expected fee while still maintaining our position in the marketplace. Or if we could reduce our fee, we might be able to win more market share.
The pejorative term in the industry for padding billing with useless busy work is "fee justification," which really shouldn't ever be necessary. Especially in my practice area, because there's always more work that can be done to flesh out our deliverables, which in turn makes them more effective for convincing the IRS (or state equivalent) or an appeals judge. When I say I've cut thousands of dollars of charge hours, we didn't simply stop charging those hours, we allocated them to more useful, value added activities.
Right now, staff spend far too much time inefficiently manipulating data in Excel, manually organizing exhibits, and a variety of other mundane, low cognitive effort tasks (I can't really specify what kinds because that would essentially doxx me). They feel productive, they look productive, and they meet their charge hour goals. And it allows them to procrastinate on the more mentally taxing work, like evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues, which in turn detracts from the quality of our service. Our clients aren't paying us to be extra-expensive outsourced spreadsheet monkeys. They're paying us to eliminate uncertainty about complicated legal and tax issues. So freeing up engagement budget and the staff's mental bandwidth to focus on the high value added cognitive services is tremendously useful in improving quality.
And in terms of time, we compete on that in some cases where there's an audit, exam, or appeal deadline and the client came to us late in the game. But that's an edge case and relatively rare. Certainly having a reputation for being quick, efficient, and timely wouldn't hurt our market position, though.
It's a Sisyphean task. They are, as a rule, extremely anti-technology and conservative. At a previous startup, we had built software which was saving customers many hours a week—yet it was still an uphill battle to get paying approval.
If even after all the warnings in this thread you really want to build legal software, focus on disrupting lawyers instead of selling to them.
In general, law and media are two of the worst fields for technology.
See how well pitching 'do it faster and make less' goes over.
Oh, the clients expect an itemized bill? Simple, the above charges would be "10 legal intern equivalent hours @ $150/hour". If a client questions it, the lawyer can explain that they are now using a very expensive piece of software instead of interns and attorneys for certain tasks, but felt it was an ethical obligation to quote the cost in a human understandable way. Turn the arbitrary pricing into a positive!
And of course your software should be able to quote all its tasks in these legal intern equivalent hours. This also leaves the lawyers hands clean since they can say that the software came up with hourly figure, not them.
Perhaps bringing it back to a development perspective might shine some more light on it for us. Imagine you're a freelance developer and you've now developed (or bought) a fancy piece of software that allows you to do plenty of code-generation and reduce the amount of menial database layer code that needs to be written. You're now say 1.5x more efficient at delivering a product. What are you to do then? I doubt many clients would agree to a once-off fee for usage of your fancy code generation tool, even if you phrase it as saving "4 intern developer hours", and charge appropriately. There is also probably a cap on the hourly rate they're willing to pay you. Either that, or you change to a per-deliverable or product pricing model.
Sometimes change does need to be slow.
It's part of why I encourage everyone I know (particularly developers) to switch from hourly to fixed-price billing. Any efficiencies you gain should belong to you, not the customer. (There's also the fact that I find a lot more people are willing to pay $10k for X than $250/hr for 40 hours.)
You see how that goes. Project pricing leads to a guessing game. Billing hourly is fair for everyone, at least in software. If I am more efficient, I pass that onto the customer. I don't 'lose' money -- it usually results in more work.
Imagine charging $80 for some corn because I want to make the same money as if I had guys hand-picking and hand seeding and doing the entire farming process without machines. That corn only cost me $0.10 to produce but I am charging a price as if I didn't have modern efficiencies. I would sell a lot less corn and actually profit less due to both competition and price elasticity. People would look for alternatives to corn.
In software, not passing on efficiencies means that there would actually be a smaller market for software development. Imagine how bad the market would be for us if we wrote everything in assembly. A simple web site might cost $100m and there'd be exactly 5 people in the world building websites.
I did some fixed price work this summer for a project where I thought the scope was unusually well understood by both sides. About 3 months, 60k USD if done by a fixed deadline (yes - fixed scope, fixed price, fixed deadline!) and as far as I was concerned from the original spec I had it done within about 6 weeks.
Of course, I spent the rest of the project time politely asking the customer to sign it off and doing the odd freebie to try and keep them happy but mostly at home, not working and not wanting to take anything else on in case they turned round and said I'd screwed up somewhere massively.
Perhaps unrelated, but I still haven't been paid for all of it either. Still, if I do eventually get paid it all it will have worked out better than charging per hour.
The problem with hourly billing is it very poorly aligns incentives. It actually discourages efficiency because the easiest way for me to make more money is to take longer.
Also, psychologically, most clients are not comfortable with the vast differences in appropriate pay between developers. Even in the worst case (where scope was poorly defined and/or I estimated poorly), I'm making more now than I ever did with hourly billing.
If you had a monopoly on modern farming, it would absolutely make sense to charge $40 for corn. You'd soak up all the demand (since you're undercutting the $80 hand-harvesters) while still having massive profit margins.
Getting good at scoping is difficult but by no means impossible.
If a customer demands additional features, you prepare a Change Order and say, "OK, here is how long it will take and how much extra it will cost."
After a while they learn discipline and stop asking for changes half-way (or more) into the project.
Here is another perspective: the vast majority of features I've build as part of Change Orders rarely, if ever, got used. Granted, I make sure all relevant stakeholders are involved in the creation of the initial Scope of Work. That way, there are no late-comers who demand changes/additions.
Comapanies in my coworking space switch one after one. One has gone from a ~6500€ yearly bill to ~3500€ (3 employees), while improving reportability.
Non-industrialized accountants are just as necessary as human cashiers: Not. Lawyers are a bit harder to industrialize.
I think contracts (between law firms and their clients) use hours worked because they don't know upfront how complicated cases will be, how long it will take etc. It's not just for "understandable pricing". Your "bill whatever they want" suggestion is basically saying that at the end, the law firm can quote whatever price they want, and the client agrees up front to pay that.
Could you expand on the "media" part?
Workers Comp, Social Security, Family Law, and elder law in general aren't as glamorous. Clients for those services don't have such deep pockets as the other corners of the law do.
It's likely that a good SaaS-based system with embedded knowledge of jurisdictional rules (in the US, federal and state rules) could be successful.
But the sales cycle for a new product? Getting early adopters? Prepare for some pain.
1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and programmed. Each technician does things a slightly different way, and the end result is a different set of automation and measurement logic at each facility.
2) Fiber optic DATS (distributed acoustic and temperature sensing) data handling and interpretation. This is a fairly new type of technology in which a fiber optic line is installed in the wellbore. The fiber optic line basically acts as a 15,000' strand of thermometers and microphones placed every 3'. The data from one installation is on the order of terabytes per hour. Oil and gas service companies that offer this service don't know how to handle this amount of data. The problem could probably be solved with S3 or something.
3) Drilling optimization. Create a software suite that utilizes ML/AI to help drilling engineers figure out the best way to drill a well is. It's a perfect ML/AI application. Lots and lots of training data available, easily defined input and output parameters, etc. Drilling engineering is full of hard, non-linear problems and humans are just really bad at it. The only way to be good at it is to drill lots and lots of wells and then listen to your gut.
http://www.aogr.com/magazine/cover-story/fiber-optic-sensors...
I feel like it'd be really hard to break into this field without some data to play with. Catch-22...
If you have access/desire to share some data like this I'd love to chat more (email in bio). Sounds like an interesting problem.
I am work with technology that might be useful for this type of application. Thanks!
So to answer your question, any operator requires these services, though most dont know it. A company called Pason is the leading company in the drilling data industry. Their bread and butter is just data measurement and streaming, though they recently have entered the analytics space. Their technology seems pretty promising.
If you are interested in helping us understand the problem and potentially solve it together contact me at kozikow@tensorflight.com
Every time I change jobs as an H1-B employee, I've to fill in the same ridiculous data with every law firms weird interface. I wish the US Digital Services would focus on streamlining forms and having auto-import from all the data they already have about me (e.g. automatically translate I-94 records to how much time I actually spent in the US, infer my past I-797 records automatically, have a one time education related upload since that obviously never changes). I realize there are certain valid reasons the agencies don't share data, but I find that hard to believe in an era of infinite surveillance, they can't use the surveilled data to at least make my life easier. I can see how the immigration law industry would never allow this, but I can hope.
The green card process is another minefield.
Also for Schengen countries, I've to apply for a visa every time I travel, and they make me list every time I visited the Schengen zone in the past 5 years, fill out the same application form across different countries, and get the same paystubs and letters from employers. Even a tool that could just machine read all the documentation a particular country requires for a specific visa, and just goes and pulls everything that can be pulled (bank statements, pay stubs, fill in travel dates based on the flight ticket emails in my inbox, hotel reservations and so on.) Just make it convenient for me to travel :)
I'd say closer to four to be safe.
Source: am cofounder of SimpleLegal
Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineering.
In the US there are about 281,400 civil engineers [1]. I couldn't find more detailed information on structural engineers.
-Assume about 10% are practicing structural engineers who need to design concrete structures = 28140.
-Assume a company wants 1 license for every 2 engineers = 14070. (I base this off the fact that my company has 6 licenses for 12 engineers, but we may be higher than average)
-Assume we could get 10% market share = 1407 subscribers.
-Assume $1000/subscriber/year = $1,407,000 from the US market
Obviously this isn't a very rigourous analysis.
[1]: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/civil-en...
Single seat licences are not the only revenue model. Once a product gains traction consulting, training and providing VIP helpdesk and bugfixing services factor in as well.
You need computational geometry, computer graphics, and structural engineering expert level domain knowledge to implement anything. You need to create traditional 2D machine/construction design drawings from the 3D models. Then you need to sell it to corporations, whose work, most of all, must be dependable and free of guess work.
You need to know what sort of geometries you can use to model the reinforcements. Then you need to know how to design the system so it can handle very large amounts of geometry.
The worst of all is you need to deal with god awful industry standard formats- DWG, DGN, IFC, Step/Iges and so on. Maybe DWG import and export first.
To have any real chance you need a guy or two who are good with numerical code, someone who is familiar with e.g. Game engines, soemone who knows computer graphics, a structural engineer to tell how he does his job and what the thousand inconsistencies in the field are (this is not a trivial domain like housing or transport), a sales/marketing guy to connect and push the product.
And, like someone else estimated, the potential market is not gigantic - which is kinda funny because we all depend on reinforced concrete but don't need so many engineers for the design work...
These are much more standalone, and don't have many of the issues you listed.
No one I know is using the automated concrete design built into analysis programs like ETABS, Tekla, etc.
The utility of your software tools will be very limited if you are restricting yourself to only member design instead of total structure solutions like ETABS. Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS?
> No one I know is using the automated concrete design built into analysis programs like ETABS, Tekla, etc.
Not too sure about this because I know quite a lot of people who are using these tools. Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?
Why do businesses invest in new tech? Why pay for excel when I can use a pen and calculator? The answer is because it makes them more efficient. We have excel sheets to do the same thing, matlab code to do the same thing, and yet here we are paying for these member design tools because they are the most efficient for us. If you save an engineer even a couple of minutes for each element they are designing, you essentially pay for the software.
>Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?
We do use ETABS extensively for analysis. We don't use it for design. It is foolhardy to trust the automated RC design in these software. That seemed to be the standard of practice around here, but perhaps it is different in other areas of the world.
Do you mind if I ask why? I'm working on a sort of general approach toward designing trustworthy engineering software, and I'm trying to collect as many reasons as possible for "can't trust the software".
Its not a distrust so much as a fundamental flaw. For simple gravity design it works fine, but even then we are using spColumn because its just quicker for us.
The software for that kind of modeling is apparently pretty basic, pretty expensive, buggy, etc.
I thought it was shut down largely because much better software simulations were made available; are they still kinda crummy?
Fluid simulation is a very difficult problem to simulate, structures are a lot simpler.
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/americas-last-top-mode...
It does not mean that you just can't take a couple of web developers and make it usable, but as the market is small it might pass the price point with a supersonic bang...
They have a sheet with around 30 rows and 150 columns, and they have 100 of these sheets (in a single Excel file). Some parts use formulas, but usually when somebody needs to change something they need to go through every single sheet. The issue is now when they try to add new data Excel won't let them.
I don't even want to know how they share the file or do backups.
Goo thing you're in healthcare...
And that pushes the data back into the same spreadsheet and a relational database with change history.
Is there a queryable relational database?
(For what it's worth, I'm doing something similar in the transport planning space. And yes, bridging the gap between that and modern CS is a substantial piece of work.)
Where I would invest (if I were Autodesk or their competitor) is in releasing CAD tools for free in exchange for a consent to use the designs/details internally for ML purposes. Would love to contribute if anyone is working on such a product.
The plan is to link CAD to the mathematics and then link the finite element to this as well. The system would also function as a sort of github for engineering where users can find and use functions to do most standard analysis. Email is in my profile if anyone is interested in talking.
I really like the equations and how you only allow to make formally correct equations (including units). Anxious to see how this develops.
(full disclosure: I am co-founder of a Software which tries to achieve the same aims using different concepts: www.valispace.com)
There are places for users to upload and store data as well - datasets.
As of now, the code solves equations in javascript within the browser. This is why documents have to be opened when a requirement changes - because I have no server side of the code to solve them without the browser. It isn't a long term solution, merely a step in the building on the platform. My next step is to add a server side code that is capable of solver more complex and larger equations on the server. When that is done, changes to requirements will update documents without the need to open them manually. I plan on using python and there are several large libraries available.
This will allow me to link documents to CAD. When the math changes, the CAD will change as well. Once that is done, I will add a finite element meshing and solution system to create an engineering platform that essentially does everything.
I like your site. It's nice to see other people addressing these problems. I am also an aerospace guy. I worked on the shuttle for a while and then designed some components for the Orion. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more.
We are working since 1.5 years with some engineers on a software to solve this: www.valispace.com
I would be curious to hear from you whether what we are building with a focus on the space-industry also applies to structural engineering.
My management style is like this: every task/request is numbered, placed in a queue and assigned to a professional.
What I expect from my ticketing system:
- every manager should be able to assign tasks to someone and set the order they must be executed. He needs know what his team is doing and when they finish each task. - every professional should know what to do and what are the priorities. - everything is numbered and linked, all communication recorded.
Everything should be well integrated with email (please, don't send me a notification email about an answer and an url, send me the f* answer). If I answer the email, everything goes into the system, I should be able to send commands to the system by email (for example, add a keyword in order to make it a comment instead of answering).
http://www.storytotell.org/constraints-and-semantics/
In a nutshell, I argue that the problem with most ticket systems is that they do not constrain the domain enough, so they wind up having similar problems to email (sifting through a chronologically-ordered pile of text rather than structured, semantically-ordered information).
Your comments make me think the crux of the problem is that people want tickets to be like email and use email to manage them. I'm not sure you can ever overcome the "chronological pile-up" problem if you allow email as a user interface to ticketing.
In fact, my usual approach to dealing with tickets/issues/emails which start to develop this problem is to make my own private copy of the thread and edit it in precisely this manner, though I'm the only one this benefits since it doesn't get sent back upstream.
I still think there is something here though. Stack Overflow replaced message boards, which were basically HTML versions of mailing lists, and part of that was identifying the semantics of question, answer and comment and defining new operators and new expectations for them.
A wiki is a good approach but because it's totally free-form, the user gets stuck doing the work of keeping things hygienic.
JIRA allows you to edit all the properties of a ticket whenever, but it generates such a huge cloud of email notifications in the process, it kind of disincentivises you from using it. And nobody is in the habit of rereading the page to see what is different since last time.
I agree that's partly it, but that seems ok when you're in the thick of discussing a problem/fix. If you're doing a code review or something after a fix has been pushed, you actually want certain messages to stand out to describe resolutions and whatnot.
So like gmail where you can star/mark certain replies as important and those messages would show up at top-level in the ticket, where all other messages are collapsed.
Full disclosure: I'm part of the maintainer staff.
[1] https://github.com/zammad/zammad/ [2] https://zammad.com
Major feature that allows me to work around any shortcomings in your office: API access to everything and/or database access (preferably direct read/write access, but even if it's just a downloadable .sql.gz it's a huge benefit).
I'm probably not a typical user, though, FWIW.
Personally, I think the optimal ticket system would have this data for each ticket:
* A unique, prefixed ticket # (JIRA gets this right)
* An assignee (like an email To:)
* A reporter (like an email From:)
* A one-line summary (like an email Subject:)
* A multi-line body (like an email body, but ideally with markdown)
* Attachments (like email attachments)
* History for edits of all of these (not like email!)
That's it! It really is basically email, but with a unique ID, and editable with history instead of immutable with replies, and a decent UI, perhaps RSS + notifications.
Unfortunately, everybody else seems to think that their ticketing system should embody their vaguely defined and ever-changing workflow, prioritization, approval, and release management system, so they want to be able to add any number of possible statuses, approvals, workflows and and all the rest. Once you add that, you end up with another JIRA or ClearQuest or BugZilla, and the cycle repeats itself.
As is (consequently) friction it creates in changing the workflow as needs change.
Thats just the fundamental and immutable nature of the problem domain.
www.asana.com
I'm not associated with them, but I have used them successfully for months at a time (better than most productivity software). The reason is it is well integrated and similar to email.
The recent GitHub updates let you assign multiple people to reviews and such, but I find it's usually better to tag everyone you want to look at something. I don't think assigning something will send a notification.
For my latest startup I went looking for a service desk tool. The key criteria was "feels like email". The moment any alternative required a user signup just to lodge a support request, I ruled it out.
I ended up choosing Groove. I don't recommended it. All ticketing systems suck, this one just sucked the least for my support desk. Groove doesn't extend to other ticket types, and it's nowhere near as flexible or extensible as JIRA, and the mobile experience is horrible. But it does "feels like email" for my customers better than every alternative you care to mention.
That sounds like unnecessary micromanaging. You couldn't possibly have enough detailed knowledge to know the proper order of tasks in all cases. Possibly even most cases.
I agree that communicating the priorities are important, but the boots on the ground have a much better understanding of what they're working with than you do.
I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where
(a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that)
(b) the office then requests x, y, and z information
(c) a push is sent to my phone where I can review the information and approve or disapprove some or all permissions
(d) a final step of either entering my pin at the office, using my thumbprint on my device, or something else.
The key components would be storing the data encrypted at rest, following HIPAA and then some, having a solid auth protocol (keys, jwts, etc).
I think adoption would be helped because the public are already used to permissions like these when installing apps.
The benefits are a lack of paper trail, no one is going to not shred my SSN, my most up to date data is now available, and instead of hosting N apps/databases, I'm storing 1 and can reduce my maintenance, customer support issues because one for all, all for one.
Edit: edited for readability.
I'm sure it's possible to hack together an AHK script[1], combined with Pulover's macro creator[2] to automate virtually anything repetitive on a Windows PC, or use Selenium to automate browser actions[3]. Of course then you run the risk of having to fall into the classic XKCD automation time sink[4].
[2] http://www.macrocreator.com/
Agreed. Especially considering they have an ENTIRE department devoted to personnel along with an office at every single unit level above platoon.
I'd suggest something much more low-tech - a website where you can punch in all your details - insurance, allergies, medical history, etc, etc... and then you can print it out (or a subset of it, for different kinds of providers) or generate a PDF that they can copy & paste into their horrible legacy system (an improvement on retyping), or, for those truly at the cutting edge - the kind of electronic transmission you speak of.
I am on board with what you're saying; an escape hatch for non- or semi-adopters. Obviously, printing is a way to go, so maybe on the mobile app, the ability to check each piece of information required then export/email to your preferred destination.
It'd also be interesting to look to make money on conversion i/e replacing, or integrating with, the outdated monsters you're talking about.
Maybe we're not even talking about healthcare anymore, maybe just the ability to piece together PII (personally identifiable information) and deliver it to X.
>>>> on another note
This goes into a topic I've seen posts on recently, and something of interest to me, personal indexing; a better way to throw blobs against the wall and have it indexed for me, leading to a personal Google. I mean, that's already coming, really, between Facebook and Google (especially Google Photos) but currently I see nothing about piecing together information I'd like to share on a professional level.
It's actually a pretty good solution for ad-hoc "working together" with someone (a lawyer / architect / whatever) on a project, where you have lots of files you need to share and refer to during the project.
I wonder if you could stitch together a workflow as a reseller for Google Apps (no clue what their current name is)?
Either way, good suggestion.
Sell the service to the patients for some smallish fee ($5 per month) and then provide the integrations into the various provider systems for free.
Later on you could scale it up to be an add-on to employee benefits or the health plans.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rancar2
I would love to hear from anyone else with big ideas relating to or are working on driving outcomes towards holistic wellness with patient-center healthcare, patient data collection/quantified self, and patient-powered research networks. In the bigger picture, I am passionate about making the world a better place through innovation and working on what really matters for humanity.
They also offer identity document verification with facial recognition crosscheck. They want to use this to detect visa overstayers for immediate deportation.[3] That now looks like a market with potential.
[1] http://www.card-reader.com/medical_cards.htm [2] http://www.acuantcorp.com/autofill-software/ [3] http://sandhill.com/article/its-high-time-we-build-border-te...
Edit to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Vitale
When you go to the doctor for a sinus infection, the cost of this is not fixed, even across insurance companies. The other factor is the "level" of service. (ref: http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...)
The more in-depth the examination and the more time you spend with the patient, the more they can charge. All those forms are "taking family history", etc. and it is free money since you have to do the work. Those are then scanned so they can be used later in an audit.
(Source: I also worked at a start-up that was trying to disrupt out patient medical systems. It's very hard and has lots of roadblocks. btw, of the top 50 EMRs in the US, only 3 have APIs and these are mostly to pull data, not push it back in).
It looks like it's offered for free now. The thing with this kind of software, is it must be "good enough" for the task.
And here they ask for credit card details over http...
"So what happens when the Douglasses are no longer around? We have every reason to believe that we'll be around for a good long time, but we wanted a plan to provide for our loyal customers just in case we aren't so lucky. So we made one.
Here is how the plan works. Immediately upon learning of our deaths the executors of Dick's estate (his two highly computer literate kids) will post two files on our www.compmngr.com web site and will send out a broadcast email advising our customers how to download the files. The first file is a small standalone computer program called RegisterEvent.exe, which allows you to create your own registration files. So you won't have to register with Douglass Associates and you won't have to pay a registration fee. You can read more about RegisterEvent and how to use it below. The second file is a ZIP file containing all the source code for COMPMNGR and its supporting programs. This file will only be of interest to those few users who want to continue COMPMNGR development and who either know C++ programming or or willing to hire a C++ programmer."
See http://www.topturnier.de/ for what he is doing.
If one would like to do something in this space I'd go with a solution where you can rent the equipment, get it shipped to you in boxes and ship it back later. For larger organisers you could arrange for leasing options or an on-premise installation that has an auto-update.
The advantage would be to provide offline capabilities including a controlled network environment for adjudicators.
Geez. Small world.
Would it? See, here's a dirty little secret: people can't deal with change.
Any change made to the software means people have to learn something new. And that results in tech support.
I once had a very nice chat with the CEO of a CNC company and asked him why certain features weren't implemented since his hardware was clearly capable of it. He was quite blunt that a single new feature added about 30% to his tech support budget for almost 3 years, and his tech support budget was almost 1/3 of his annual budget.
So, he simply will not add a feature until it results in an expected 500K in increased revenue or he has to fend off a competitor.
> Still, it's a real opportunity.
Is it? Actually?
And do you know ballroom competitions well enough to get all the corner cases correct? The Douglasses have been to a LOT of competitions and probably wrote this because they got tired of the grief caused by badly run competitions.
How many ballroom competitions exist (<1000)? How much are they willing to pay (<$1000)? And how much will tech support cost?
So, this is less that $1,000,000 per year in revenue MAX. And, this software is already in place with people know how to use it.
Your revenue will likely be $10-20K per year for a long while unless you completely displace this. And they can always drop their prices and block you out if they feel like it. And your tech support costs will be quite high.
I suspect the Douglasses made this same calculation and that's why they aren't improving it. It's just not worth the money.
I would suggest we make a monthly of these as they provide important insight into industries.
I got so exited about the thread and it made me realise something very interesting which I turned into an essay. I call it looking for hidden problems underneat obvious solutions.
https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
Perhaps Quarterly?
Just imagine how much valuable knowledge and insights get lost every time someone retires.
Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput.
There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.
And inside the object as well?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. Are you asking if it should be better than what can be done with photogrammetry?
And inside the object as well?
Doing just the outside is a big enough market/problem.
IMO it should be done with a mixture image segmentation and procedural generation.
Not sure what kind of datasets you're looking for. You'll see actual products to test with.
I've been studying and working with GANs for about a year now. They are still very exciting, and I'd love to try to expand my codebase to new types of data.
Additionally, there are some recent techniques that haven't been tried with voxel-based renderings.
Perhaps there is another algorithm that can help go from voxel -> polygons as well.
I think with the right tech, time, and execution this could be a matter of:
1. Take a picture
2. Generate until you get the 3d model you want
Well, not exact cause I don't like their voxel building generation method.
I think a GAN + Procedural Generator is the winner.
edit: Let me know if you want to work on this cause it's an active area of research for us. See my HN profile for contact.
Curious to know more about your train of thought. I am working as a researcher in the domain and thinking of experimenting with GANs for 3D model estimation using similar inputs as the one in the paper I referred to.
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/software/softlib/coil-100.p...
I was musing another kind of 'real world capture' with videogames, because I want to race around my neighborhood in Forza. https://hackernoon.com/dashcam-google-maps-dev-kit-custom-ne...
Maybe but I actually think that's the wrong approach.
I mean, to me it's kind of hard to believe nobody's tried making a "conveyor belt" like process inside a closed system
Yea they have - kinda. None of it works well or fast enough though. We put up a patent for one a year ago before I thought there was a better way to do it. The manpower required to move items onto/off of a line is a big part of the problem.
Taking that 10k number - assuming disparate types of items that might be part of a series like "Bathroom" (toothbrush, hair brush, toilet brush, plunger) - in 24 hours that means cycling each item through in about 8 seconds. The only way I remotely see that possible is essentially having a robot hand pick up the item at the entry point, hold it for the capture sequence (perhaps have a custom-designed 'mount' that can allow for true 360 via a couple positions), and then drop it out the other side.
It's the scale part I'm wondering about, re: one size machine fits all doesn't seem to make sense. One machine for items under a certain dimension (e.g. "hand held") then another for items where the machine has to essentially have super-powers to pick up and rotate objects to complete the imaging process (e.g. a couch, a dresser, a motorcycle, etc). I think trying too hard to accommodate outliers ends up tainting the balance of operations a little? Just thinking out loud, really cool puzzle.
But yea, there are a lot of us working on that.
http://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/architecture-and-techn...
That said, some people have tried to use RS for this problem, but from what I've seen end up just using Kinects.
I assume that process would be easy to speed up if the requirement for absolute accuracy was removed. The 8' ROMER arm we use is accurate to ~!2 microns over its entire volume which is absolutely overkill for something intended to produce models for visual arts applications. A quick and dirty approach to generating the mesh might increase the inaccuracy by several orders of magnitude but when coke can has dimensional tolerances to the tune of tenths of a millimeter, the quick and dirty mesh will still be representative of the end product.
Who would be the primary customers? The entire 3D capturing market is currently several $B per year, including services. Where would be the customers that aren't getting served today that would double this market?
10K scans/day is way beyond their limits, and I'm not sure that's a very common use case. But I bet they could get there if they wanted.
That's been turned into an industry with very high throughput.
Stereo structured light is great, but doesn't work on specularly reflective objects. You've seen those amazing depth maps from the guys at Middlebury? Wonder how they get perfect ground truth on motorbike cowls that are essentially mirrors? Well they have to spray paint them grey so that you can see the light. The next problem is that you're limited by the resolution of the projector (so I guess if you own a cinema, yay!) and the cameras. Then you have to do all the inter-image code matching which sounds trivial in the papers, but in practice a lot harder (and since you don't get codes at all pixels you need to interpolate, etc, etc).
There are handheld scanners like the Creaform which work pretty well on small things, but I don't know what the accuracy is like.
The ultimate system would probably be a high-resolution, high-accuracy, scanned LIDAR system. Then you lose the problems with scanning ranges/depth of field, but you accept massively higher cost and possibly a much longer scan time for accurate systems.
It's quite mind-boggling; nobody is really doing it on an industry-scale level. Every video game developer has their own way, all of which have their own problems.
It is a very hard problem. Blizzard actually came up with a very good system, but it's not in a state where it can be commercialized or open sourced.
I actually think whoever comes up with a system which solves these problems in a clean and consistent way will be sitting on a little revolution for content distribution.
Which is not at all interesting for self-published games (be it indies who want to avoid steam, big publishers with their own systems etc).
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Electronic%2...
Some companies are even selling more or less standard solutions for that, but in reality from any given 1000 games 900 will have very different data formats and all have fairly good reasons to do so - using universal "patch systems" really creates more problems.
Gamedev is riddled with really smart people that reinvent the wheel all the time because they found a way to micro-optimize this or that. They get to do this because until recently, there was no "good enough" solution for a wide range of games (or the "solution" was priced with enough zeroes to make bill gates cringe).
But you saw how popular Unity got, and how fast. That's the games industry in a nutshell: ripe for solutions that work for more than just one studio.
And compare, say, to simple incremental zips of Quake with alphabetic file loading order.. Total no-brainer to implement and use. (I have even seen zips with custom LZMA compression!)
So, if any, someone will have to solve a problem of artificially created obstacles, not a problem per se.
But I'm a huge fan of irrlicht 3d.no idea why no one uses it?
You could then devote so much more time on ideas...
Speaking from experience as I'm currently making the jump to Unity for my projects, the time savings of choosing one of the all-in-one engines instead of gluing together engines is really substantial.
This is done in bits and pieces across existing engines and third-party tools, but there's a lot of room to make it cheaper and easier.
Quoting Wharf's spec intro:
Wharf is a protocol that enables incremental uploads and downloads to keep software up-to-date. It includes:
A diffing and patching algorithm, based on rsync
An open file format specification for patches and signature files, based on protobuf
A reference implementation in Go
A command-line tool with several commands
It is used to power itch.io's Steam-like application, itch: http://itch.io/app, delivering multi-gigabyte game installs & updates.
- File formats are streams of protobuf messages - efficient serialization, easy to parse from a bunch of programming languages. Most files (patches, signatures) are composed of an uncompressed header, and a brotli-compressed stream (in the reference implementation, compression format are pluggable) of other messages.
- The main diff method is based on rsync. It's slightly tuned, in that: it operates over the hashes of all files (which means rename tracking is seamless - the reference implementation detects that and handles it efficiently), and it takes into account partial blocks (at the end of files, smaller than the block size)
- The reference implementation is quite modular Go, which is nice for portability, and, like elisee mentioned, used in production at itch.io. We assume most things are streaming (so that, for example, you can apply a patch while downloading it, no temporary writes to disk needed), we actually use a virtual file system for all downloads and updates.
- The reference implementation contains support for block-based (4MB default) file delivery, which is useful for a verify/heal process (figure out which parts are missing/have been corrupted and correct them)
- The wharf repo contains the basis of a second diff method, based on rsync - for a secondary patch optimization step. The bsdiff algorithm is well-commented with references to the original paper, and there's an opt-in parallel bsdiff codepath (as in multi-core suffix sorting, not just bsdiff operating on chunks)
- A few other companies (including well-known gaming actors) have started reaching out / using parts of wharf for their own usage, I'll happily name names as soon as it's all become more public :)
I'd be happy to answer any questions!
http://android-developers.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/saving-dat...
It's exactly what you want, but this service isn't poplar. It doesn't work because everyone is on Steam. Network effects. It's like when app.net tried to replace twitter. You can get mad at users, but users are using Steam & Origin and Battle.net and they don't care.
This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry.
The main problem is this:
You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company meeting.
What do you do? You can either:
1) Find a speaker yourself by searching Google and sifting through the mess of results
2) Call a speaker's bureau and get raked over the coals on price
3) ???
Ideally, there would be a marketplace for speakers. Where you would be able to search for talent that fit your criteria (available these dates, for this price, talks about these things, is well-regarded, etc.) and book them online.
Nothing like this exists.
It is super easy to get going with their hosted service. (Not an employee, just a satisfied user.)
Of course that turns this from a technical problem to a marketing and sales problem, which may be less appealing.
Bigspeak, Keppler, Eagles Talent, and Celebrity are bureaus and function in a traditional way. Espeakers and SpeakerMatch are essentially speaker directories -- they make money from speaker's paying them a monthly fee or in a lead gen style.
Orate.me is new to me, I haven't seen it before. In a cursory look at their site, it looks like their speaker list is just NSA members.
Also the calendaring problem is easy to solve...
There's enough public data to develop a sentiment algorithm and solve the popularity problem.
During the 2008 election, Rudy Giuliani was running as a Republican nominee. When his financial disclosures came out, he surprised everyone with how much he made on the speaking circuit. News orgs filed FOIA requests to see what universities and public institutions paid him to speak.
For some events, he'd speak in the same city to different groups. The price each group paid was wildly different (+/- 50k). The meeting planners hit the roof.
Speakers bureaus do not view meeting planners as their clients, the speakers are.
- There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas.
- You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data.
- MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.
This problem is hard to solve at the root because each MLS is independently owned and heavily influenced by the National Association of Realtors and local governments. As an active RE investor myself, I'd love to work on a problem in this space.
As an aside, I'm working on a RE investment product that solves challenges similar to this one and I'm looking for RE investors to join me. If you're interested, shoot me an email at hello[at]myname.com.
disclaimer: I am affiliated with rew.ca (a competitor on the west coast)
10+ years ago we had other "agents" that made a lot of money, e.g. "Travel Agent" in Travel&Leisure industry. Then internet came along and now we have 1,000's of websites that have replaced what Travel Agents used to do...
For Real-Estate I think MLS is just a start a small piece of the puzzle, someone very smart is going to disrupt the whole industry and make many billions of dollars.
Also, agents for basic residential purchases where the property is about as mundane as it gets provide very little value. However good agents will do proper diligence by inspecting the public records for the property. That part may be disruptable with software and an ambitious enough records maintenance effort. But good agents who do their jobs properly are well worth 6% (and, by the way, that 6% is frequently split two ways, so each agent gets 3%). Of course my bar for "good agent" is much higher than Joe Coldwell or Jane Keller-Williams. "Good" agents know local and state regulations very well and do diligence to inspect the public record and work closely with well qualified inspectors to get the best (lowest for buyer, highest for seller) price they can. Most agents, especially for "big box" brokers do basic humdrum contract paperwork and have a very basic approach to disclosure and negotiation and don't add much value. They're ripe for disruption.
Kind of an aside; what's the motivation for buyer's agents to get good inspectors or the lowest price possible? They're getting a percentage and they're motivated to make sure the deal falls apart. Although, as a buyer it's not like I knew good inspectors, anyway. The best I could do is read their sample reports and go off of my own (sparse) knowledge of home construction.
Australian here: on my last house sale, I did a deal with the agent where if he got a price above a quite-high threshold that he would get 3% instead of his usual rate. This was seen as a remarkably generous offer, unheard of in the industry.
I've only once seen someone use a buying agent: husband and wife were both hospital doctors with three young active kids and they figured they valued their time enough that they would pay for a real estate agent to short-list properties for them.
I wonder what is so much more difficult about real estate in the USA that it requires so much more in the way of services.
When people buy a new home and move they typically need to get new utilities, health and car insurance, doctors, dentists, furniture, appliances, etc... They need to decide where they're going to shop for groceries, which restaurants they want to explore, what activities they're going to get into.
Agents mainly do two things:
1. If selling they can put your house into MLS.
2. For buyers they can let you into a house.
Being able to do these things requires NAR membership, a state license, and other fees and cost real estate agents thousands per year. Also driving meetings clients at houses takes gas and time. Also your 6% commisiion is paying for all the other people that the agent spent gas and time on who did not buy a house.
Would you be willing to advertise in the news paper that your house is for sale and leave the doors unlocked so that random people could check it out?
About the only thing a buyer gets out of the whole deal is a title search to make sure there are no outstanding liens on the property - and they have to pay for that themselves!
But what if someone steals the appliances? That is actually a problem for new construction.
There's a study which draws similar conclusions:
> Our central finding is that, when listings are not tied to brokerage services, a seller's use of a broker reduces the selling price of the typical home by 5.9 to 7.7 percent, which indicates that agency costs exceed the advantages of brokers' knowledge and expertise by a wide margin.
The entire Real-Estate industry is ripe for disruption.
Exactly why are we paying 6% to "agents"?
(We bought our house with them.)
But if your house is sold for $100,000 you'd pay $6,000 or $3,000 to Redfin. The whole thing is just the biggest currently running scam that I can think of and someone will come along and totally disrupt this entire industry of scammers :-)
I'm sure there are little things that go on behind the magic curtain, but definitely something that could be automated in a b2b fashion.
The worst part of it all - all that money is spent basically to protect the seller so they can wash their hands of the whole deal once the house is sold. There is very little to no buyer protection in the real estate world.
"We’re full-service, local agents who get to know you over coffee and on home tours, and we use online tools to make you smarter and faster. More than 10,000 customers buy or sell a home with us each year."
That's pretty much what any brokerage is. The only difference is they pay their people salaries. Any agent that can actually substantially sell and earn would strike out on their own and get their brokers license.
In less that 30 seconds, you can begin the process of listing your home with no contract or fees and includes MLS syndication.
The app auto-dispatches photography, drop-ships signs and lock-boxes, and starts the documentation management process.
At anytime you can reach out to your agent via phone, chat, or email.
When offers come in, they are displayed in "easy to understand" language and you can review then with you agent/listing account manager anytime.
When closing time comes, we dispatch a notary to the home and you exchange everything at the home. Super easy. Super convenient.
How we make money:
We retain a small fee at closing. When you go to buy your next home, we rebate that fee back to you when you use one of our vetted affiliate agents.
It is a win win. We keep the small fee and the agent "rebate" is essentially the acquisition fee for the guaranteed buyer. Agents don't waste their time working leads that will most likely not close (which is part of the reason why big commissions exist) and home sellers save thousands of dollars.
We operate in Colorado right now using brute force but V1 of our app will be released in January of 2017. We will be servicing Washington, Colorado, and Minnesota as of Februaury.
www.bluematchrealty.com
I basically agree, but I will say that when we bought our house and the (FSBO) seller turned out to be a flake and/or an outright nutcase, the realtor we were working with earned every penny of his 3%. I won't go into what he did for us because some of it may not necessarily have been legal for someone who's not an attorney to perform. Let's just say it took a lot of hustle to hold the seller to his commitments and make the deal happen according to the contract... especially when some of the flakiness turned out to be our own fault, due to the (in)actions of our mortgage lender.
Most of the other realtors I've dealt with fit your description perfectly. Nowadays, my thinking is that they're like airline pilots -- most of the time you can take them for granted and even think about how to replace them with automated processes, but when things start to go wrong, you may find yourself appreciating their work more than you thought you would.
Here you can sell a house privately, and the only fees you need to pay are the solicitor for conceyancing - the fees are around the same when buying or selling, between £500 - £2000. They will just do the paperwork, check there aren't any issues with the deeds, and do minor contract negotiations, and register the sale.
The purpose of an agent here is really just to have a shop where they can advertise your sale, take clients and guide them around a house (but TBH I'd rather just look myself without an agent as they don't add any value in my experience), and do a bit of management between the buyer and seller. For this they'll usually charge 0.5% - 3% (to the seller), but if you want to do it yourself you can just advertise on sites such as Zoopla.
You are wrong about the amount of time she spent, and wrong about the industry being ripe for disruption. Spending 10 hours on four deals is not physically possible, or you have the luckiest, worst realtor in the history of the broker business.
Many have said the same thing about the industry, where are the results? Realtors are not still in business because of information asymmetry. Redfin has tried, and they have not succeeded. In fact they ended up moving towards the historical model. That tells you something.
I'll let you in on a secret, you can sell and buy any house you own or want yourself! It's called For Sale By Owner and many people do it. You can also negotiate on commission.
But be careful, because there are a lot of laws in place in RE, to protect buyers. It is heavily regulated. You could make a mistake and fail to disclose something that could end up costing you HUUUUGEEE.
What you get with a good realtor is a ton of service. Just the other day I drove 25 minutes each way to go make sure a homes thermostat was on and the house was warm when the temperature dropped. I was doing a favor for a realtor I know, that is selling a house for a family in another part of the country.
A good realtor will do things like that for you. And it's often a thankless job. The house I did that for might not even end up selling, the realtor may not even get a commission and it ends up being a lot of free work.
A good realtor knows attorneys, handy men, plumbers, electricians, landscapers and is a tough negotiator. A good realtor will market your property to a wider audience than would be easy for you to do yourself.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong and disrupt a sale, often times at the last minute. Those connections can save a deal. I've seen it countless times.
The reason the real estate broker business hasn't been disrupted is because it's a service business, it's not a product and its difficult to reduce it to something that scales and can be automated.
There is a large graveyard of startups that have tried.
I gave up my real estate license because of the sentiment you are expressing here, and the amount of competition that was willing to put up with it. It's a crap job in my opinion, it benefits the customers much more than the agents in all but the really hot markets.
"Spending 10 hours on four deals is not physically possible, or you have the luckiest, worst realtor in the history of the broker business."
In lots of cases there simple isn't anything to do. I saw the house, did my own research on it, went to see it, did more research, did more research and then called my Realtor and said "Make an offer." Is that worth $43,000? Why would she make $43,000 for few hours of work? I bought two houses this way, my first and last call to my Realtor (personal friend of mine) was "Here's our offer on the house, send it in." One offer was immediately accepted, the other one went back and forth 3 times over two days.
The simple fact that charging based on percentage of the sale is theft, there is no other way to put it. There is one other "entity" that does this and this is Government with Sales Taxes (also theft :-) ). Can you tell me one good reason why Real Estate Agents do not simply charge by the hour?
It's a solved problem to make a system that stores information about home listings and transactions. Other countries have done it. Yeah, houses are annoying because of all the weird combinations. But the thing is just a CRUD app.
This system still exists because of organizations that are based on information asymmetry. A small group of experienced people could make a really, really nice platform for sharing real estate data in a month and it would never get anywhere.
After that is the extremely entrenched business interest in the status quo - a lot of people are making money off the current system, and any real disruption is going to cost 95-99% of the real estate industry their jobs.
As noted elsewhere, the level of regulation is such that even offering better data to buyers/sellers has a lot of regulatory overhead, including physical offices with real people.
Right now I'm only pulling from a couple of different RETS services but already it's hellish. Regular short term schema changes, terrible lag in pulling data (10+ minutes to pull 30 listings!), low API limits (cut off for pulling image URL's too fast but they won't give a limit - just saying "if we feel it's too much", so pulling images lags for hours as I have to be extra careful. Also no option to pay extra to speed up). That's before you get to matching up fields across multiple MLS's or dealing with weird crossover effects (MLS X cannot be shown in Y from RETS #1 - buts that fine in RETS #2).
In fact, I will give you all my money right now anyway, I'm going to go live in the hills far away from it all.
The cost incourred for at-home help with a dedicated easter european colf were huge. Might still be a couple of decades away but i can totally see a model where you rent a house robot that takes care of cooking, personal cleaning and limited interaction (no need to have super intelligent AI when chatting to a 80 years old man with Alzheimer)
On the other hand, if the robot makes snapchats with the elderly, that would be a way to bring our parents back into our lives.
But: http://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-to-sell-cuddly-companion-...
"ELIZA's creator Joseph Weizenbaum thought the idea of a computer therapist was funny. But when his students and secretary started talking to it for hours, what had seemed to him to be an amusing idea suddenly felt like an appalling reality." http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/
In the meantime, parents need safe food. If anyone goes for this, good luck!
The problem is that you need volume for it to make sense. One way to get that is aggregating a few people who want the same recipe. The other way is ordering those meals, frozen, for a bunch of days.
In either case, the people to talk to it about it are probably cooks on https://www.josephine.com/ .
Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such as (3D)-STORM or STED.
These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we hardly have any tools to view and interact with it. (And the people are overwhelmed with the analysis.)
Imagine a holographic video of living cell (potentially in near real time) where you can zoom by grabbing the hologram.
For presentations people often render a movie with Matlab, investing hours to get it right. With AR, you could take a movie by filming with a virtual camera in your hand.
Augmented Reality would add the most value. Some examples:
+ intuitive exploration of the data (imagine learning about a plant by scrolling through cross-sections)
+ intuitive manipulation of the perspective (the mouse 3D rotation thing is really tricky)
+ collaborative viewing
+ annotation of objects (eg. tracing a filament through 3D by following it with the finger)
+ avoid occlusion by just zooming and moving in
+ be able to point at things in a 3D image
It would bring much more natural ways to interact with the data. Essentially scaling up your molecular structure 10^6 to 10^7-fold so you can explore it as you'd explore a sculpture.
they call it the virtual camera. it's essentially a tablet, you used as if it's a camera of a virtual world.
Avatar was made with that device.
http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/resources/opensource/i...
From the same site you can download "pollen.h5". Then follow the steps to load the dataset in "hyperstack (multichannel)" mode. This will open a window where each frame in the movie is a z-slice of the 3D image.
Then go to Plugins/Volume Viewer (scroll down) and switch the mode (top left) to "Volume". (this is what you should get: http://i.imgur.com/0QoGa1t.png)
The same people also published lots of 3D data of the zebrafish embry. Have a look at:
http://vibez.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/
Look for "e098.h5" to download it.
If you have never worked with the HDF5 format before, you can use HDF5 View (https://support.hdfgroup.org/products/java/hdfview/) to look into the files. As you can see here (http://i.imgur.com/nnTiyQh.png) the data in pollen.h5 basically is a uint8-array of 193x199x419.
There are libraries for many languages to read HDF5. Eg. "h5py" for Python.
By the way, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PVAcLlYUpg
For Light Sheet 3D video of developing fly embryo take a look here: http://www.digital-embryo.org/ They have movies and also downloads of the raw data and Matlab pipline for analysis.
Notice that this was published in 2012. Fresh data doesn't get published before the analysis is done and the paper written..
These are images taken by confocal microscopy, where you focus a laser scanning microscope on a plane and only see that. Then you move the focus plane up by a bit and take the next picture.
Super-resolution microscopy such as STORM, STED or PALM on the other hand will give you coordinates.
The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music it's important to collaborate and giving gifts is a good way to make connections and impressions.
Great tie-in with various Manufacturers or even retailers to get rid of excess stock / failed impulse buy items / etc.
Honestly I'm pulling up memories now of watching other people's kids over the years playing with various music stuff I've handed over (Korg Monotron synths were the biggest hit) and those are really pleasant to recall!
Subscription boxes are a thing :-)
But I feel like I'm stuck with repairing his shit because there's not a nice and clean solution anywhere in sight. I thought of Wiki systems but the actual data entry will be done by people who would be completely put off by any kind of syntax/markup whatsoever. I'm neither good enough a Web developer to roll something similar myself nor can I dream of creating something like an entire documentation system.
I think the problem might apply to other smaller businesses in the EU and especially Germany, too. Lots of docu to have ready in the unlikely but not impossible case of an inspection.
For the cosmetics industry it'd need to be able to track ingredients, lots of external evaluation docu, internal procedures and so on. While at the same time it would need to be usable by people who are far removed from tech literate.
Before going bananas with Jira, either be very strict or use separate instances.
I currently work at in a relatively large organisation where all teams of various crafts and trades - not only development - share one Jira instance, since Jira is obviously what 'Agile' teams use.
Let's say that not all teams are equally equipped for analysis and generalisation.
Although there is supposedly some control process, there are now several hundreds of custom fields, many duplicates of the standard fields, and duplicates and triples or more of many custom fields.
The contents of them all are like the dwtf meme: True, False, FileNotFound.
Enterprise intranet/extranet apps often start out small and then spread like kudzu, eventually prompting a major project to replace them wholesale with a huge consulting-ware solution (like Sharepoint) that never fulfils the promises made (The exception being the specific niche you're asking about, compliance, which does have proprietary solutions that work, but are incredibly expensive).
To avoid that fate, try to pick something that you know can start small but you have evidence that it can also easily (ie. without a huge consulting engagement) scale to an organization-wide solution with 3rd-party as well as in-house extensions.
Good luck!
I'd be very interested in discussing the needs for a compliance and documentation tracker system and see if there is a market for it.
You can reach me at clement@clement-weyer.lu
It's almost as though if we had a Procedural Consulting firm that could come in, look at the big picture, and help companies to create EFFICIENT and WORTHWHILE procedures that ACTUALLY do justice to the customer requirements without breaking the bank. Then they can sit everyone down and explain the procedures and enforce the assimilation that most companies usually have growing pains with.
I noticed that when moving to a new company that is trying to grow and achieve higher levels of accreditation. Management had intended a two-way assimilation to take place between my procedural knowledge and the procedures they already had in-place. What happened instead is old procedures are etched in stone and new ones are seen as an obstacle... The assimilation was one-way and the other middle-managers like myself are mainly concerned with keeping everything the same, despite there being improvements that could easily be made.
But another (part of the) solution is using workflow software. Something that allows you to define and share procedures, indicate status of various taskings along the defined workflows, move data and such along. This clarifies to the employees what's needed, and gives an opportunity for them to provide feedback for improvements (too much granularity, not enough, too inflexible, etc.). Management, then, also gets better insight into the actual status of projects and taskings. It's part of continuous improvement to constantly be evaluating these sorts of procedures and clarifying, culling, adding to them. Management that's unfamiliar with these concepts is just bad management.
In the manufacturing world, the Procedural Consulting firm would conduct "lean events". (NB: Many, if not most, places do this incorrectly.)
The correct way is to collect metrics (meaningful) over time, encourage and reward employee feedback about ways to improve things. Then improve them (sometimes as a move across the board, but often by conducting experiments to see how well the new concepts work, then roll out to everyone). The risk is that improved efficiency will obsolete employees, some fear this (like may have actual panic attacks about this level of fear). Instead, you need a culture that sees this improved efficiency as an opportunity for growth (the same number of employees can now do more once people get retasked to new things).
It sounds like your processes are either immature (no one really knows what the best way to do things is) or tribal (you have to know the right guy to talk to to find the information or knowledge you need).
Premature optimization is god awful, because it locks you into a world of pain - your business is inefficient and the people actually trying to follow the procedure find it incredibly painful and limiting.
If your process is immature, you need to invest some time and money into finding out what the best way to do whatever it is you're doing. If your process is tribal, you need to find the guy or guys that understand what's happening and pick their brains about everything they know. Their implicit knowledge needs to become explicit. In my situation, I found that just agreeing on common definitions was a huge help.
If you're grossly inefficient, don't write a procedure for a bad process...you're just ingraining inefficiency. Once you've found a good process, then write the procedure so you can train your people to repeat good, efficient practice.
And maybe most importantly, train your people to the procedure but make sure they understand it on a level so they know where it doesn't apply and give them authority to deviate from the procedure when necessary.
Sorry if none of that applies to you. I'm just speaking from my few limited experiences.
Imagine a giant (3-5m reach) monitor arm that can be operated manually, but that can also remember the moves and repeat them. All of that on a mobile base that can do the same, along with a stabilisation head that can do a pitch/roll/yaw. Must be usable with and without power.
Just being able to record and play back what happened on the table has changed the way I work on things. A commercial version of this project would be huge.
Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git would be a mighty step forward.
One question: is there a use case for live group-editing? Same way live code editors work. I have to admit that I'm not super familiar of the workflows in that industry, so I am mostly just designing features the way I would like them to work.
How far along is the product? Have you talked to any lawyers about it?
The MVP is mostly targeted at businesses who have to sign/generate contracts at scale. There's a lot of features for those use cases, and then there's features for users that the parent is talking about (pure contract-drafting).
I have not talked to any lawyers yet. I think the worst part is that I don't even know how good the computer-skills of lawyers are, so... designing features by my competence feels wrong. Since I can design the UI to match the general structure of a contract, there's a lot that I can add to make the user's life easier, but it also adds more for the user to learn.
Most folks don't get started, so congrats on that, but can I say please do talk to some lawyers asap.
I know it is super painful but, believe me, it can save you months if not years of going down the wrong direction.
Here is a blog post we put together to show how to get in touch with people to interview:
https://blog.nugget.one/2016/09/21/case-study-how-i-got-25-c...
Apologies for the unsolicited advice :)
My understanding of the workflow is that they will send a clean copy as well as the redline to each other. Sometimes someone will in response further modify the wrong copy, and send back, which causes problems as it becomes unclear what was accepted and what was not and someone has to manually go through and check things. I hear that complaint come up - so I know there is at least one pain point involved.
http://thomsonreuters.com/en/products-services/legal/large-l...
that said it doesn't look all shiny and new.
We all know why this is happening. One way to try to "solve" this problem is fighting the change (Luddites), but this doesn't work. Also if people don't have enough income, they stop spending - who's going to buy products and services anymore?
Another possible solution would be that companies which automate most of it's work are owned by the community in which they operate.
Let's take banks for example. Most of the jobs in banking system can and will be automated. Imagine a country/state that has three banks - each of them is owned by a third of the population (shareholders). When a bank makes profit, each of the shareholders gets dividends out of it. The same example can be applied to other industries and in total people would get (in a form of dividends) the Universal Basic Income (which everybody is talking about these days).
Don't get me wrong, this is not communism. Companies would not be government owned, there would still be competition and private companies would still exist.
Anyway, there are also other ways to tackle the problem mentioned at the beginning. As Brexit and US elections showed us, it's starting to affect many people and needs to be addressed asap.
People cook food in their homes. You select the food from several cooks in your area in an app, drive to their house and pick the food.
I imagine a housewife/househusband that is already cooking for her/his family to prepare more portions. Snap a photo, a description, and price. It can be extra income for something that she/him is already doing.
People would use the product because it is convenient, saves times and they get more food variety.
Instead of "selling" the food, though, maybe the structure could be a food club or other value swap.
I feel like there's a big opportunity for a tool/tools that are installed in apps as a package and then customized from there. Many teams build a version of this in house (Instacart open-sources theirs), and I think it should be a product.
Will check out Looker!
A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law firms), and create some very valuable software.
This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.
Most of the time I spent selling my software was assuaging the risk-averse mindset that exists in the profession, rather than advertising the benefits. I actually gave a TEDx talk on this point as I think it's an enormous issue in the industry.
So the ease of creating the software isn't the issue, it's the culture. That said, legal tech now has a pretty healthy ecosystem which is a delight to see!
Connecting/disconnecting utilities, address change, car registration, new laws I should be aware of.
End the piecemeal.
Lots of services solved the just sending email part. And lots of mailchimp type services offer a complete product geared towards marketers. Not much in between and most existing players have laughably poor APIs that make custom integrations and extensions painful.
One-time pricing and a DRM scheme that involves obfuscated PHP files also makes me little nervous.
Problem is these who would benefit (residents) are often disconnected from those against it (the employees). You would need boards that really are sold on the benefit.
It's a decent industry my friend (not after this posting) makes ~300k a year working on it. However the race may be ending as these companies lock apartment managers into long complicated contracts. Not sure how many apartment managers at scale still need.
I'd tend to agree with the other comments that the hired out management companies would be a much better sales target since they have a real profit motive to efficiency gains. At best a neighborhood HOA is looking at periodically saving some time and being a bit better organized.
Basically it is either build your own large messy setup or buy a complete novel piece of crap that will barely support a single meal... aka aerogarden.
It would be nice to have basically a large self contained opaque cabinet with drawers of growing food.
Basically I want a food growing appliance with plumbing and electrical hookups.
I would easily be willing to spend a couple grand on something like that.
A turnkey package tracking system for small-to-medium shippers.
In much of the world the shipping (as in DHL, FedEx) markets are still very fragmented and do not look like they're going to consolidate all that much. (As to why, I have guesses but I don't know for sure. I'm looking at Central Europe right now but I expect this is true in many other regions).
As far as I can tell the package tracking systems are something the companies compete on, with the result that a lot of them suck or (worst case) don't exist.
Case in point: I'm currently waiting for a shipment that the seller swears they gave to the shipper, but the shipper's system doesn't recognize the code. Both parties maintain it's probably just not "processed" yet at the shipper's, going on three days now.
As a software guy, I find it crazy that nobody has a generic white-label tracking system that any random shipper can use in combination with some smartphones/tablets for label scanning. It only has to cost less than the company pays the owner's cousin's teenage son to write the tracking PHP code these companies would otherwise use, and I bet you could upsell all kinds of premium add-ons if it worked well.
I would love to see this, and I think it's a big enough market to actually accommodate a startup.
Article about the other companies (one was doing a handheld inkjet printer for skin, that was not a normal startup pitch): http://www.slush.org/news/winner-slush-100-announced/
AFAICT there are still a lot of small local and regional shippers who offer a better deal than FedEx/DHL -- I assume that's mostly on price but it could also be on expertise, proximity, nepotism, whatever -- and the deal has remained consistently better for many years despite FedEx, DHL, UPS, and other large players being in the market.
My guess is that the further away from the FedEx/DHL hubs you get, the less attractive their service and the higher their prices -- and it looks to me like more and more stuff is being sold online in these markets too, and that stuff has very low margins and needs to get shipped for "free" or at least cheap.
Furthermore, in Europe at least you have direct competitors to FedEx/DHL on the international level (at least within the EU). Players at that level have their own tracking systems, sure, but that means they have to have IT crews, software developers, etc. and I'm sure they'd much rather not.
For example I recently had a delivery from DPD:
https://www.dpd.com/de_privatkunden
It's probably a much smaller market but there are also specialty transporters for stuff like art and antiques. I'm sure they absolutely hate having to care about tracking systems when their value-adding expertise is so thoroughly elsewhere.
Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended family.
A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers, toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic implement to insert in to mains-powered device to extract toast" problem.
I mentally facepalmed.
Someone should really fix toasters.
For toast it may be energy inefficient. But if I'm just making a small pizza, etc, it's way better than turning on the large oven.
Mine are nothing so fancy as this image I could find online, but you get the idea.
A pair of popsicle sticks secured together at one end would be fine.
Perhaps it is playing too much Shenzhen I/O, but I feel like a basic IC and sensors could solve this by detecting the width/height of toast pieces and continuing to release until the toast was substantially ejected from the toaster.
Some toasters have wire meshes that close in on the bread to hold it vertical, but they tend to leave marks.
This happened pretty regularly as it was a European toaster designed for perfectly uniform extruded wonder-"toast" and I kept sticking hand-cut slices from round loaves into it.
you can always unplug it before sticking
utensils in there
They have. They're called dualit.
https://www.amazon.com/Dualit-20293-2-Slice-Toaster-Chrome/d...
I bought my bottom of the barrel Wal-Mart toaster for $6 about 8 years ago. It might occasionally have issues popping out a piece of bread but it cost $6 and it toasts bread consistently.
I'm mostly holding on to this thing to prove a point to the "they don't make them like they used to" and the "you have to spend at least $100+ on X or else it will break in a week" crowd. I know it isn't the best toaster out there but I'd take it over a $189 toaster even if both were offered for free just because I'd feel like an idiot for having something so ostentatious on my countertop.
Maybe I should have linked to this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russell-Hobbs-22400-Slice-Toaster/d...
Haha ofc
For the last year and a bit I've been contracting with a company, and the recruiter who found me has fees of around 10% per day of my work, which they bill the company.
They found me via LinkedIn, sent me a couple of emails, arranged a Skype call between me and the company, and sent me a bit of paperwork. Not bad for €10k.
The other problem similar to health care is regulation and compliance but mainly it is because the industry is a very human industry despite all the big-data machine learning promises. Getting rid of recruiting is like getting rid of sales.
The big players in the industry are pretty much equivalent to google and facebook -> indeed and linkedin. The problem is you can only make so much money on advertising so they are trying to automate recruiting but still rely heavily on a service based approach (that is you still need humans). This is because advertising exacerbates the signal to noise ratio.
When google enters the industry (which I believe they just did recently) expect linkedin and indeed to become even more service based (ie highly efficient super recruiting firms).
Consequently cutting edge recruiting software has now become more focused on marketing automation which is what my company does (albeit we are more focused on the traditional inbound aka websites instead of the annoying email nagware you have seen). That is giving recruiters better tools to do their job.
That being said my recent idea is instead of giving recruiters (or corp talent acquisition marketing) sales automation what if we give individual candidates that software? That is give the candidates drip campaigns and automated sales replies and beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That is allow smart candidates to sell to recruiters and company at scale.
I haven't figured out the monetization for it or the actual demand but I think it would be interesting and potential disruptive empowering candidates.
Not sure I follow. Large companies generally follow a pre-determined hiring process. How would automated sales replies work for a candidate? There has to be a hiring event -- a trigger, for the reply to be relevant and be seen by the right person.
Hard to find boat from pier to ship
Also cost prohibitive alot of unnecessary middle man
The biggest hurdle would probably be organized crime. It might sound crazy, but most ports are infested with deeply rooted criminals who are involved with even the most mundane aspects of the import/export arena. Of course, even organized crime can be disrupted with the right tech.
This is still a big problem in tech industry.
Yesterday my friend in LA invited a few of us in Toronto to come to his BBQ this weekend. The group chat became us discussing the logistics and price of how we might do that. 150 years ago, that would have been an insane concept.
http://masterkeypro.com/ is sort of the only entry in the market and cores/companies-that-need-key-schedules change just often enough that say $5-10 month could gain traction.
One quick challenge though, my understanding is that the average org that needs this either contracts or has full time staff who manage their locks. Those are normally guys who manage this by placing the 10 cores they need to re-key on their work bench, maybe putting a tape label on, and then just going to the individual locks and dropping in a new core. I get the value as a management tool, but does this really improve things for the average staff locksmith?
at 300$ a license there's room for competition and if you could make a GUI that says calls to a prolog style logic engine to automatically create the keying hierarchy (Management needs keys to these doors, renters need keys to these doors, janitorial needs key to these doors, etc...) you could easily beat the functionality of Masterkey.
The problem: privlidged access management and auditing.
The solution: Cyberark, but not $250k to cover 1,000 servers. Ain't nobody got money for that.
In windows land.....I've got nothing, hence the problem.
It is somewhat "possible" to get a subset of the features above today but it always feels more like proof of concept rather than a complete product and you can never get all of them in one environment.
The problem is that there are so many free tools that are "good enough" so it becomes quite a luxury to pay for the last mile. Barrier to entry is very large because of this and because it is a very big and complex problem space. Would love to see some competition here, only serious actors today are intellij and VS.
We're working on a startup to bring all together into a modern search engine. It's called UpCodes.
There's a lot of space in the area of construction compliance that needs improving.
We'd like to run learning algorithms on robots, but there are no great options for hardware. (Happy to discuss in depth if someone wants to build it)
We want to train large models much faster than any GPU box you can buy. (There are several new things announced, but there's room for more).
Providers today offer uncapped bandwidth, some, like Amazon, without any cost cap, some, like KeyCDN, allow to set a cost cap, but take the resources off-line when the limit is exceeded.
Thanks for the link, will try it!
Mind sharing the name? I have friends doing ASR in college and they may be interested in your company. Though since their focus is on research/publishing papers, they may stick to standard datasets. But knowing about a new data source is always welcome.
Thanks.
I want to be able to go to a website, ask for demographics that I am looking for and be able to purchase an advertisement and hire talent to record my commercial.
As it stands, you have to deal with salespeople.
I want my pool cleaning guy to be able to go online and buy a radio commercial advertising his business. If he has to go through a salesperson and negotiate and all that, you've already lost him.
I think there is a ton of money sitting on the table waiting to be claimed for this opportunity.
One is that it's expensive to buy. One cause of that is that you have to pay sales people. If you remove sales people layer, you would lessen the cost of the ads and allow these people to come to the table.
Second reason is that dealing with sales people is a hassle. Their incentives do not align with those of the buyer. Salespeople do not want to deal with small timers because commission is too small.
Automating the process might be easier in some respects but I am very protective of of my readers and only want ads which are both high quality and relevant. Having to talk to me is a good filter to ensure that happens.
/s
Being a SaaS provider, create an extensions that you have to install (something consumers want...). This extension should have the permissions to read history / or urls visiting.
Have a blacklist transmitted of urls (so you don't need to transfer the user's data back to the server) and match with it. If it matches...you have to work on that consumer a lot more.
1) how about you find ways to make retention a continuous objective 2) get used to the fact that not all customers will be retained. I try stuff all the time that I have no idea if it will solve my specific problem. If you do #1 right, I would know that you want to hear about my specific problems and offer ideas on how your saas can solve them. That's the most you can hope for if your service doesn't immediately do what I initially hoped it would (or is more burdensome to implement that I thought, etc)
I imagine being able to create a structure or assembly from stuff in the McMaster-Carr or ThorLabs catalogs without having to be a CAD expert. When I'm satisfied with the thing on my screen, I press a button, enter my credit card number, and the parts arrive from their respective vendors in a couple days.
A search feature would be vital, of course. Being able to modify some parts would be useful, e.g., if I need 14 inches of pipe, I can cut down a 24 inch piece. Drawing from multiple disciplines would be necessary, e.g., combining an electrical box, optical assembly, and structural framework.
Maybe you get paid via a little kickback from those vendors, who also agree to integrate their catalogs with your service.
https://www.wizy.io/solutions/gmail_workflow.html https://kissflow.com/how-it-works/
It would put me out of a job, but better than shooting myself in the head next time I have to face 40 hours of slogging through data sheets.
P.S. If any of you are in Austin I recommend Hull Supply, they're good people.
ask to be transferred to Gabe, I'm sure he's still IT there.
P.S. I don't know if he'll remember the name but Axel -from the cage and lockshop- if you want a name to drop.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...
If you want to keep it simple, just set some random measurement in-between those numbers as a limit and start dieting when above.
I don't think the big issue for regular people is that they have tried measuring themselves but by random chance got an inaccurately low estimate, rather that they haven't really tried measuring or does not succeed in losing fat. The latter is sad as losing fat is mostly a solved issue, but the misinformation is so high that it's hard to get on the right track. If someone could solve the information problem they'd be a public health hero!
For people into body-building or serious fitness, the issue of estimating fat is a bigger one. Some people go for DEXA scans, but they are quite expensive and takes time. Something doable in your home, but more accurate than tape measure or callipers, especially for tracking variations, would be the ideal.
Edit: probably without android.
I don't know why the few companies that are in the IoT space for oil and gas aren't scooping up literally billions in missed opportunities for sticking cell-enabled sensors on oil platforms, fields, etc. Then there's the next billion dollars waiting for whoever starts sticking controllers next to the sensors on valves, etc.
Drone inspection and repair in oil and gas. People are doing this but it's taking way too long to take off for how much money is there just waiting to be picked up.
Sticking a laser scanner on a drone. Again, people are doing it, but what the fuck, there's so much money just sitting there.
If you're looking for contract work, just start browsing random EPC websites and calling up the shitty ones. Probably a good 10,000 at least that are still rocking 1995 crapsites, and not in the "good" "low functionality low load time" way, the "using tables for layout" way.
Trains should be automated. They already are in Taiwan for some lines, it's been feasible for years.
Motorcycle safety is still subpar for where we are in material science. There are a lot of riders out there that will pay buckets for greater safety. We've figured out how to not get our skin ripped off but I believe there's still a market for preventing broken bones, spinal snaps, decapitations, and the like.
Somehow we still don't have GUI HUDs in our moto helmets. Like BMW is working on something but honestly it would be a relatively simple and profitable thing for a very small startup (2 man team working part time). Literally even just casting your smartphone screen to the visor would be enough to get people buying so they can have a HUD map and shit.
Big market for motorcycle storage solutions. I giggle whenever I see someone with an ammo box strapped onto their sports bike. We already dropped hundreds on gear and thousands on the bike, we spend many more hundreds or thousands on modding the things, there's ample opportunity for more elegant and functional storage solutions.
VR allows for limitless desktop screen space in a portable package. I'd like to be able to bring an HTC vive and a tiny screenless box to plug it into that would allow me to have a "multi-monitor" setup while I travel. Some say the resolution isn't there yet, I say make the text bigger. I have no problem reading the stuff in steamVR.
I get made fun of every time I bring it up but I'm convinced people are stupidly ignoring lighter than air travel, transportation, and data distribution, especially in an automated sense. Google has their wifi balloon thing but they dropped their blimp transport truck project. I think it could've been a thing.
There may be some margins available in teaching low-income people how to cook and eat basic foods instead of frozen meals. It took me to getting scholarshipped into college to realize that we were losing buckets of money eating frozen meals and fast food because we thought it was the "cheapest option," not to mention how unhealthy we were for it. Think like somehow getting low-income folks to buy potatoes, onions, peppers, dried beans, cheap cuts of meat, etc and demonstrating how it's faster, cheaper, healthier, etc. Potentially a gov funding opportunity, would save on EBT and healthcare costs.
Kids learn by doing. Good luck changing anything about education in the USA though.
Someone would be able to take over any industry in Taiwan that they please if they start up the company and instantly pay 2x local salary, give PTO, and have other basic benefits that we take for granted here. It wouldn't be much, you'd be paying ~44k/year USD for an Engineer, for example. You'd be able to poach the best talent, you'd draw shitloads of negative press from pissed of old Taiwanese businesspeople (no press is bad press), everyone would be telling you you're wrong, and you'd Donald Trump your way straight to the top. Think Scranton Oakmont or Gordon Ramsay as well. Just don't break the law. Also learn Chinese.
EPC means "engineering, procurement, and construction" company. So like, lyondell-basell or jacobs engineering or foster wheeler (now AMEC) or Mustang (not the car) or KBR.
PTO = Paid Time Off. Catchall for vacation time, sick time, holidays.
GP offices: Plenty of solutions already - generally regionally based or by payer. Also an issue with vets, hairdressers etc - pick an appointment based niche. (Have invested in 2 niches, advised others)
Wireless sensors for industry: Thousands of players here, including network providers and different tech stacks. The game is to find a niche that is easy to enter and pats well. (Have invested in wireless water metering, advised others)
Drone inspection: Plenty of players here, but it's a find-a-niche that you can sell to play, and you need operators for each application. (Have advised drone and drone application companies)
Anything on a drone: Drone's don't last long in the sky. (as above)
Trains: Trains get solved at the political level. Good luck in the USA. (am train lobbyist)
Motorbike safety: Check out where Dainese and BMW are going - air bags et al. I spend a fortune on BMW gear. (Motorcyclist)
GUI HUDs: The main player failed (Skully - internal issues) . I know of at least one early stage company attempting a generic HUD solution. (have met, not invested the early stage one and decided, luckily, that I didn't like the Skully people and did not pre-order.)
Motorbike storage: Has been a huge market since the 90s when you could only get adventure boxes from one supplier - in Munich. Now the problem is solved by countless suppliers and manufacturers - unless you buy a sports bike, which have a very different use-case. My first adventure trip was in 98 and I needed to self-assemble, now you can ride out of several branded dealerships with a capable round the world bike. (have motorbiked round what world - in pieces)
VR: The use-case is really only games so far. See Playstation. (have 2 VR kits)
Lighter than Air: Capacity and cost versus shipping are the issue, while air-cargo is well solved. Meanwhile the Helium market is stuffed. But I love the industry too. (read Bill Gate's recommended book on international shipping etc.)
Low income cooking: Those low income people are time-poor, poorly educated (the US system is dreadful) and marketed too by monster franken-food companies that price under the cost of decent food. Yes - its a hard problem to solve. (don't get me started)
Education: Indeed. Start with politics and how schools are funded.
Taiwan: (sadly) Why would you pay more than $1 over market?
This stuff should be priced for home and small office use.
"BEEEP" Why is your laser printer's ethernet port issuing tons of SYN requests? Unplug that printer! Factory reset it!
Grow it into carrier-grade implementations.
I've used Azure Key Vault quite a bit and it might be a good solution to the latter scenario.
It's not as friendly as drobox/slack but it's far more secure.
Think Wi-Fi thermostats that record data.
You also need to provide machines and software for cheaper than a human life. Human life has a distressingly low value in several mining industries.
- 3D Storyboarding for VR cinematic storytelling (mixed desktop/VR)
- VR home tours for real estate
- VR sports training for golf/tennis/baseball
- Rehearsal/Staging VR for event planning.
- VR Training for DIY/Construction.
etc.. In particular if there is a field that you personally work in or know someone that's a great place to start.
I also don't really understand what you mean by giving people the experience of something you were creating in the past. What does that mean? As advice it seems exceptionally vague; something an writing teacher might tell me to write about, but not solid advice for founding a startup.
We been talking about doing it monthly. And I have been talking with a few people about creating a conference around it. No pitches, no ted-lets save the world speaks. Just problems and people who are looking for problems to solve.
What ideas have you come up with to efficiently match up the problems with the solvers? Seems like pitches would still be involved somehow.
The problems would be conversations.
Regulations will unbundle research from liquidity provision starting sometime in 2018 (moving regulatory target, but theme seems clear). Sellside will have lower incentive to pay large research groups; buyside will have to pay explicit fees for research advisory. There is a big opportunity in providing platforms, with macro and market data live, where researchers can interact with capital managers, given that said researchers will likely find themselves bereft of their current distribution networks (bank sales forces) sometime in the next few years.
Equities already have a hybrid form of this where buyside earns "credits" to be allocated at the end of each year to research providers. But fixed income is at least twice as big as equities, is much more opaque because is essentially unlisted (mainly "OTC" = "over the counter" ie only those in the know), and therefore much more susceptible to disruption.
You could always give a good paragraph answer that everyone else is contributing to this otherwise excellent post. Maybe the downvotes would disappear.
I feel they live very differently and would spread ideas among their network when some app/service helped their live (cheaper, easier). I have some friends and family that fit into this mold and it's obvious they have a different thought process when making financial choices, even simple ones like shopping for groceries, and they depend on things that >=average earners don't.
And, it seems most of them have smart phones these days. So it's probably only a matter of time before something hits big with this group.
Most apps are for what many would say are "rich people." You pay someone to drive you? You pay someone to run your errands? You pay extra for grocery delivery? Eating out is expensive enough, you paid extra to have it delivered? It's for people who can afford convenience. Opportunity cost is not a real thing for poor people because they lack opportunity.
Because this is a pipe dream that ignores the decades long of suffering it will take to reach that state, if ever.
It may seem inevitable. Until you have an entire generation of the work force put out of work. Then the only thing that will be inevitable will be civil war. We always need to have work for people to do. It's fundamental to our nature. It's the modern expression of hunter/gathering.
As someone in the supply chain and logistics industry, I can list for you hundreds of people that know the traveling salesman problem and precisely why its not applicable to their situation. I know hundreds of people that already know how to better manage their safety stock than someone who suggests using Gaussian demand models. I know hundreds of people who can optimize last mile delivery costs orders of magnitude better than a drone engineer. I know hundreds of people who can manage inventory distribution and ordering automation better than someone who knows databases.
And sure, there are companies out there that are doing everything ass backwards and could use some help, even if it is primitive and simplistic. And when they decide to look for it, who are they gonna choose: the guy who saved Amazon $500M/year with their truck load optimization expertise, or you, with your shiny website and a trick you learned from a textbook?
So as a piece of advice, if you aren't part of the industry already, don't try to do B2B in that industry. B2C is fine, because as a consumer you are ostensibly a part of the industry...but B2B is a death march.
In fact, this very attitude is the exact reason why there have been industries that are primed for "disruption." If only those within the industry, burdened with preconceived notions and patterns of thought, try to improve an industry, you are very rarely going to see revolutionary change.
You don't need to "disrupt" anything to be a very good business, but I really resent this "leave it to the pros" attitude.
I'd rather people feel slighted than to have a bunch of kids fresh out of college trying to disrupt, say, the health insurance industry.
This isn't about "fresh eyes". The problem with having no domain knowledge is that you can't identify many of the issues that needs solving within an industry. Every job I've ever had, I see issues that I can solve with my experience.
So they are imensly useful and many time more relevant than most other discussions about building companies.
Lately I've been approached by a lot of "startups" who have made it inadvertently apparent that they know about a serious problem in the industry but have no experience in the industry, are taking absolutely idiotic and long-discredited approaches to solving the problem, and don't even speak enough industry lingo to be understood. These are the people I tried to address with my comment.
If you'll notice, I was actually the top commenter on your original discussion [0]. I still stand by everything I've said in that comment. It is a potential multi-billion dollar idea, and the market size can be verified by pretty much anybody with basic market research experience. And while I have plenty of valuable and marketable experience in the Supply Chain and Logistics industry, even I am well short of qualified to lead a company trying to tackle that problem. I would definitely consider being a part of a team that was formed to solve the problem, but here's the thing: If you learned about the idea from an Ask HN thread, I almost certainly wouldn't join your team. Maybe if Elon Musk vouched for you and Marc Andreesen was throwing money at you. Maybe if you and 9 other committed engineers had a collective 100 man years of proven experience solving hard problems across a variety of industries. But trying to be the leader of a team trying to solve a problem that you didn't know about and don't fully understand is a huge obstacle to overcome. And I think it is perfectly reasonable of me to try to dissuade the average HN reader from even trying.
The solutions to the problem in your industry might not be based on the skills or insights of your industry.
It might be that someone recognizes the similarity from another industry where the problem was solved in a specific way or that the insight just so happens to be solvable based on the knowledge of some specific technology.
And it's NOT about ideas it's about recognizing the real problem that hides underneath and which requires experience to understand.
Here is the essay I ended writing https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4... this might give you a better perspective on how this is useful no matter what constellation.
The crux of your argument is that an outsider may be able to pattern-match better than industry insiders/domain experts. In other words, an outsider can recognize a potential solution by translating his/her experience with an efficient solution from a different industry.
He is saying that you need to properly understand things from the perspective of an industry insider before you declare that your solution is disruptive. In other words, you need to understand why things are the way they are before talking of reformation. This is the central lesson behind Chesterton's famous "Taking a Fence Down" [0] quote.
Uh, no. The idea is that you identify the problem, build the team to solve it, build something quick that can prove that you can solve it in a better way than others, iterate to the point that CAC < LTV, scale.
Often they don't have the tech skills or desire/will to start something themselves, but are happy to join you if they recognize that it's a big enough problem.
So yes, a CS grad probably wont come along and revolutionise the Supply Chain industry, but mainly because SC has been at the forefront of areas of tech for decades. A CS grad may, however, come along and revolutionise...well just look at all of the recent famous tech companies...communications, travel, social, arts and crafts...whatever. Many areas are ripe for fresh eyes and new approaches.
I do agree that domain knowledge is often massively under-emphasised though.