Startup Ideas We'd Be Willing To Pay For
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giftrocket.com
1. A device that rings a bell or flashes the lights in any/all rooms of my house if my cell phone is at home and rings. This way I don't have to carry it with me everywhere in the house.
2. A service which lets me know which restaurants have excess capacity and will give me a discount if I come right now.
3. A reasonably priced dependable on-line grocery service that delivers in fly-over country.
4. An email device for senior citizens as easy to use as an iPod.
5. A device that lets you know whether the dishes in the dishwasher are dirty or clean.
6. An open source Windows clone that works.
7. A device that automatically disables any cell phone in any car within 50 car lengths of me and heading in my direction.
[EDIT: Numbers 1 thru 5 were serious. #6 was a pipedream. #7 was a joke, but like James Bond's Austin Martin, I can dream, can't I? You guys are giving me what I deserve for mixing jokes in with the real stuff.]
Some of my local pizza places use Twitter to provide this service.
re: "7. A device that automatically disables any cell phone in any car within 50 car lengths of me and heading in my direction."
Cell phone jammers are readily available, but are illegal in the USA. (This is not legal advice.)
The door latch tells you that. If the door is latched, the dishes are clean. If the door is unlatched, the dishes are dirty.
This works if everyone who opens the door when it is latched either empties the dishwasher (and leaves it unlatched) or relatches it AND no one latches the door after putting in a dirty dish unless they also start it.
Pretty sure this would have the opposite of your desired effect. Nothing will distract people more and have them fumbling around with their phone than if a call drops, GPS loses signal, streaming radio stops, etc.
Obviously, people shouldn't be doing these things in cars, but I think it's always interesting to think about unintended consequences. Also, I'm pretty sure your (7) was in jest, anyway, but just playing along here...
7. A device that automatically disables any cell phone in any car within 50 car
lengths of me and heading in my direction.
I think this device would have the opposite effect that you hope for. I wonder how many days you would last with it?Multiply the number of talker_drivers you meet with the probability that one of them can't handle the extra distraction of driving and banging on his cell phone, trying to reconnect his call that you jammed. Imagine on a busy commute, this happening every two or three seconds.
Actually, this could be a murder mystery plot, on par with cutting the brake lines. Hide a jammer in somebody's car, and wait for the inevitable result.
I'd buy one, personally. I can't stand dickhead drivers and if this is some way to make the roads safer I'm all for it ..
4. Isn't this the Peek(getpeek.com) device?
6. Doesn't Windows have to work first before a working clone can even be fathomed? I kid.
I keep my phone on vibrate all the time, which tends to mean that when I'm at home I miss a lot of calls. I'd definitely pay for a thing that looks like a regular landline phone but docks with my mobile phone.
There's probably some way of doing that, I guess.
Email:menu button pretty much anywhere, 'settings' (it's in the 'more' section if you're looking at an e-mail, then if you have multiple email accounts you tap on one. Though I don't see anything that explicitly says "make noise/vibrate/notify in menu"; all I see is "Email notifications" which I have turned on - and all I ever see is status bar notes and a trackball color flash.
I'm using CyanogenMod 7.1 on a Nexus One, things may be different for you. Especially if you're using a carrier or manufacturer branded ROM.
Amazon cordless phone listings for all phones that support Bluetooth pairing: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_scat_172614_ln?rh=...
We just set our phones down when we come in the front door, or even leave them in the car, and never have to worry about missing a call or finding our phones. Most all of these support pairing to two phones and a few support 4 or more phones.
And no landline required.
Also, got a link or brand?
I'm actually going to set this up for my elderly mother for Christmas who has a regular landline but also a "dumb" cellphone. Her hearing is not that great so if the cellphone is not in her immediate proximity, she'll miss the call. In this case, I'm just interested in the redundancy for phone service in case of emergencies. It doesn't change how she will use the cordless phone at all but does provide us(her children) with more piece-of-mind. It really is this good.
So, the guy suddenly loses his call. He then looks at his phone, trying to figure out what happened. In that time he accidentally swirves into another lane.
Thanks, you just disabled my GPS, so now I'm looking at my phone trying to figure out what's wrong, instead of looking at the road. That's an idiotic idea if I ever heard one.
It's illegal in most places anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_jammer#Legalities
Also other stuff like traffic conditions...
Get a laminated card with a magnetic back. The card says "i am clean". When you turn on the dishwasher, you put the card on. When you empty it you take the card of. No exceptions.
Alternatively you can buy these novelty "i am in/i am out" switches that some people have on the door of their kids room.
2. http://www.groupon.com/now, https://livingsocial.com/instant. I don't know if they are in Pittsburgh yet but will be soon, and maybe google will join the fray now that offers is there.
3. In Chicago (also flyover country) we have http://Peapod.com
4. http://www.getpeek.com/ was an attempt. A failed attempt as far as I know, though it did get a lot of press 3 years ago.
5. I can always tell by looking at them. You should add a sliding clean/dirty thing on your dishwasher.
I don't know the first thing about marketing to senior citizens and their caretakers, but I know I spent hours searching for "senior citizen email app.."
Key features for such an e-mail system:
- simple addressing. In this case, just click on the picture for who you want to mail.
- a big fat "I'm done, send this!" button.
- email whitelist. No spam, no scams, just people you personally know.
- new messages should either be read automatically, or you should get some sort of overlay every time you go into the app that says "you have new messages from [people]! [BIG read now button] [smaller wait until later button]" This way, grandma will always see her new messages.
Though I have to ask...why haven't you made any of these things? Your #1, #4, and #5 seem like weekend projects. I can think out the basis of the technical solutions for all of them while just sitting here. Granted, there are much better ways to spend a weekend. But hooking up my cell phone to the house lights sounds like it might be kind of fun.
In general, why don't more hackers make stuff like this? It seems like coming up with the long list of ideas is the hard part. Is it that putting the things together is just too much work?
The jokey 7 Reminds me of the time I hitched a lift with a drunk driver, because I concluded that it was safer to be in his car, than walking along the road with all the drunk drivers about. Such a device actually sounds quite dangerous - I'd rather have someone driving towards me talking happily on their 'phone, than looking at it in confusion trying to see how many bars they have.
I would pay for a device that simply washes the dishes at once, one at a time, only dishes.
It could be a hybrid of a toaster and a car washing tunnel: you insert the dish and it spins inside the device with sucessive phases of soap, rinse, drying, the the dish pops up, hopefully not falling to the ground.
Same for glasses.
The demo appears to be buggy, but they seem to have something substantial in the works. From the website:
Please note that Observer was build during the Node Knock Out, a 48 hour coding competition. The commercial version currently in developement, this free service will stay online as long as there are resources to support it.
update: ClickTale does this perfectly, down creating playable videos. http://www.clicktale.com/
Could you describe was buggy about the demo? Did it load really slow or was it something else :)?
I'm currently working really hard on the commercial version of Observer which will be much more speedy less hacked up. So any feedback is still more than welcome at this point :D
Thanks,
Arnout (developer of Observer :D)
3. A wrapper around PayPal
Why put lipstick on a pig? I'd rather use Stripe (not as full featured yet, but getting there)
4. An iPhone code editor with Github / Heroku integration
Github lets you edit and commit tiny changes right from the site.
5. Zerocater for startup swag
Lots have tried; nobody wants to pay for swag it seems. [Edit: I misread this one, they want their own swag.]
http://techcrunch.com/2006/05/04/get-web-20-schwag-from-vall... (closed)
http://www.startupschwag.com/ (closed)
I think you're missing the point. This is startups ordering schwag for itself. Not for other people to order the coolest new startup's shirt.
Github lets you edit and commit tiny changes right from the site.
How would you test them? The ask is for a complete stack right on his phone.
Observer (http://observer.no.de) seems like a good new solution.
Because that pig lets me use it as a non-US citizen.
Take it three steps further. I want to know what tools of all types other developers are using. I'm a game developer want to browse what other studios are actually using and sort based on developer size, time, and more.
For example what do people use for Source Control? Small devs probably use Git or SVN. Show a time trend and SVN likely trends down and Git way way up. Large devs will almost exclusively use Perforce. I want to see this data for EVERYTHING. Text editors, modeling packing, memory managers, build tools, databases, profilers, and so so much more. There are dozens of amazing, wonderful tools/middleware/things out there that I don't even know exist.
This can naturally be expanded outside of software development, but I'm greedy and want to use it for myself first and foremost. :)
appfresh also has integration with this, where you can check the tools you need and also update them.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/yc-backed-b2brev-aims-to-be...
- First, reviews are the wrong content. You won't get them, first of all, because customers of businesses who see 10-20 engagements per year will never leave lukewarm or negative reviews. Secondly, even if you only allow recommendations (like LinkedIn) and not open reviews, it's still the wrong content to describe a complex business service. The managing partner of WSGR has tons of recommendations on LI. Does one of them come close to capturing how he thinks about business or his potential value? No.
- Second, stars or any other standard comparison ranking system is the wrong discovery method. Stars help people discover who is good, but not who is good at what.
- Third, participation. LawPivot, who was able to raise several million dollars, lets lawyers generate business through a private Q&A site. Well, the most successful lawyers have no reason to use this service- they are already oversubscribed. Any service discovery/review tool dependent on active participation by the service providers leaves out the best players. This is less of a concern for the B2Brevs of the world, but describes why Guru.com and Elance became talent slums.
I probably shouldn't say anything, but we're launching (and applied YCW12) with something designed to fill a number 2 role for an often overlooked class of business services.
Oh and we'll have women's sizing too :-)
Forget ClickTale. Check out Mouseflow. Love it and much more affordable. http://mouseflow.com/demo
Useful for debugging purposes too and they have a "live" version.
So kind of like http://www.gigpark.com/ (which is arguably something like "Yelp for (Business and other types of) Services").
Thought that's by far not all we do, my startup ( http://www.kout.me ) has the ability for people to do that. A lot of interesting problems in this space.
Seems to me that this article could be a little less manna-from-heaven and more inclusive of the unmentioned-but-existent.
Take a look at:
and
In addition to the already mentioned http://www.bestvendor.com (which I look forward to checking out).
- Software that automatically finds receipts for all my account activity. So that if I give it my bank account statement that had a charge for Dropbox, it would automatically create dropbox.png which is a screenshot of the receipt from dropbox. This would save about an hour every month finding these manually.
- Mac OS X widget that adds all daily revenue from all different ad networks (adsense, cubics, lifestreet etc.) and displays the sum for yesterday and today in the menu bar.
I'd be interested in something that also allowed code editing with github integration for the iPhone if any exist.
I secretly love watching the thought process of people as they fill out a form.
eg. When you become King of Mayor of whatever on foursquare you get an actual shirt type thing, or an iron on badge, etc.
Can kind of be solved by using iSSH or any other SSH client for the iphone. If you've got a bluetooth keyboard then it's pretty handy.
What I imagine is intended by this is a text editor tailor made for browsing and editing code on a touch screen with limited real estate. A non-trivial problem in my estimation.
startupswag.com and hackerswag.com are taken but aren't hosted yet.
* +1 for omitting the e (but not all vowels) * +1 for sounding like "swagger" * -10 for reminding me of "Swagger Jagger"
Although it's more strange that the site's down atm.
This is exactly what BestVendor is doing.
www.bestvendor.com
For now, we sent you an invite to the current alpha. Check your email. We're making the whole product much better soon, so stay tuned.