Ask HN: Industries Ripe For Disruption? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Industries Ripe For Disruption?

83 pointsjasonlbaptiste100 comments

After seeing the ticketmaster/livenation merger post, there's probably a long list of industries ripe for disruption. ie- ticketing, riaa/music,etc. I'd love to start putting together a list of other industries, so hence the reason for this post.

Please post reasons and/or a piece of information that provides insight as to why that industry is ripe for disruption

View on HN

Look at a lot of big traditional B2B businesses. They haven't gotten much coverage because they aren't sexy and visible to the normal consumer.

- ERP ssystems are impossible to understand for the people that work with them, and require an army of highly paid consultants just to get it up and running.

- financial software for large companies doesn't allow managers to see numbers in real-time, is difficult to get numbers in and out of, and hard to use.

- HR software for managing people, their interests, knowledge, track record, etc. in large companies.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more.

The advantage of B2B software is that you have a very good income model. A SAP ERP system for a company with 1000 employees runs into the millions. There are customers out there willing to pay you by the bucketload if you can make something that doesn't suck. And most of what is on the market today sucks badly.

This is an industry that has been resting on its laurels for many years, and is ready to be picked off by nimble competitors.

This is an area that has huge potential. The problem is that the scale is beyond the capabilities of the small startup. I'm involved in something that might have the right model. My client acquired some quite capable, but rough around the edges, software from a supplier that went belly up. The intention is to fix the bugs, enable low cost (non-programmer) customization and spin it off as a separate company. There may be other opportunities out there to take good enterprise software public.

The other approach is to take on a narrow vertical and do a bangup job, Grow from there.

For the purpose of disruption, which vertical?

I'm hiring people in this space if anyone is looking for a job.

In the B2B space? That doesn't exactly narrow things down.

I was counting on anyone interested to click on the link to my company in my profile, which goes right to a home page focused on financial software for businesses...

More than just "doesn't suck" -- you need to be able to save people money from pretty much day 1.

Right you are, but you'll find that even though you've got the technical and design chops to blow the current systems out of the water, the sales cycle for these large corporations are pretty long.

Part of the problem is that when things cost beyond a certain amount they need approval. With approval comes delays and red tape. You'll have to have some sort of pricing and buy-in strategy for you to be able to get the large company to buy your stuff if that's the case.

If you can manage that, then by all means, go kick ass.

Never said it was easy ;-)

But you're absolutely right - the sales cycle is very different. Not only do you have looong lead-times, but you also have to understand all the corporate bullshit, and weird decisions that get made based on the sometimes irrational behaviour of big corporations.

But if you do it right you can make big-corp pay for your development. If you sell it well some companies will give you the opportunity to sell them something you have yet to make, and that they full-well know will make your company very profitable. Nix the VC, go straight to the customer, and make them pay up front.

I remember asking a friend who wrote software why it cost what it did. Their answer $20k is the amount an average middle manager can sign off without running it up the chain.

Well lets try to answer the question then. The classic disruption model requires cases of 'non-consumption' to start consuming the alternative product.

Who just can't afford/manage ERP but could use it? I think there are a bunch in this sphere.

True. But I would highly recommend that you consider "how to sell a B2B product" before considering legacy segments like ERP. Its non-trivial to build a new product from scratch in these spaces but there is an opportunity to build SaaS version of ERP products for small and mid-market customers. See these examples: http://www.coupa.com and http://www.nurturehq.com. Both are good products with large markets, are completely hosted and don't involve any legacy integrations which can be a killer.

However, all such products do require a systematic sales team/plan/process including inbound/outbound/inside sales kind of approaches to build revenue.

Title Insurance. See this article from Forbes magazine: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1113/148.html

Summary: Fancy this: racetracks that keep 93% of your money and return only 5% in winning tickets. They wouldn't last long, not unless they could somehow rig the rules to both forbid price competition and make the purchase of race bets mandatory. That's more or less what the title insurance industry has done to American homeowners.

Required for a mortgage, government protected, and 93%+ of the premium for profit/overhead. Wow.

Read the 'The 4-steps to the Epiphany' by Steven Blank (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...)

Things to look for in a disruptive market:

1) The presence of the 'Earlyvangelist'. It does not matter if you can disrupt an industry if no one will realize the value of the innovation. This means finding real people at real companies and gathering requirements for something they will buy.

2) An existing distribution channel that is available for the new product.

3) Existing product positioning that you can leverage. As a startup, its hard to disrupt when you have to spend all your money on advertising, branding, or explaining what your product is.

4) Large existing market.

The book has a helpful framework for analyzing markets base on some of these factors, maturity, etc. This identifies the primary constraints of market risk. From there you can work with the customer to build a better product, and if you are lucky the risk shifts towards execution.

visas / immigration. you're looking at $400-900 an hour for lawyers to point you to the right webpage and tell you whether or not your particular situation fits through a loophole.

corporate setup & startup paperwork of all sorts. also housing rental contracts, contractor... contracts. etc.

patent applications. it's so hard to find good examples and templates. i'd pay to have something that said "type your overview here", "upload a picture here", etc.

college applications. they charge what, $50 per application they look at? save them time, save applicants money. and how many colleges would perfectly suit you that you never heard about?

make school scholarships more transparent and ease the application process.

keeping up with relatives. i feel a little dirty about this one, but i'd love to have a helper manage my familial relationships in a behind-the-scenes fashion. birthday email templates, friendly hellos, status updates, etc. although deciding to pay for a service of that sort would mean acknowledging that you're a terrible grandson/husband/etc.

warranties & mail in rebates. they all turn straight into money and dealing with them is total bs.

i'm going back to work...

"keeping up with relatives"

I've needed something for keeping up with friends, since I don't have many relatives. While fb news feeds tell me what's going on with my friends ON fb, the only out-of-band reminder I have is just birthdays.

I thought about this for a long time, and I need it. Problem is, I'm not sure if anyone else really does. And even if they do, people might not admit to using it, which makes for a distribution problem.

Thoughts?

A birthday reminder? The guy who made Bebo also ran a birthday reminder service which he has since returned to. According to a TechCrunch article last year, it makes $4M/yr in fees.

Back in the dot-com boom, the startup I worked for built a similar service. It was very popular. In fact, it was so popular we... shut it down to work on a sort of web-based ERP framework. WHOOPS!

But yeah, there's probably room for another birthday reminder service.

http://www.birthdayalarm.com

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/11/whats-next-for-bebos-fo...

hey,were actually working on this at Ramamia.com for keeping up with your family . The goal is to take care of that and be a simple communication utility. Some of the ideas above will be incorporated. Email me if you want to chat: j@ramamia.com

visas / immigration.

The perceived value of immigrating is high enough that the price is not objectionable to many clients. They just want to make sure it is done right. In a market I used to work, by far the most successful immigration lawyer was regarded as a sleazy guy by most of the other immigration lawyers. But he projected WEALTH, and that was perceived by clients as the ability to succeed with a case. So he had plenty of income to maintain the trappings of wealth, and the cycle continued. Most immigration lawyers have enough technique to do most cases, yes, and many clients (if they are good at reading English, which is not a given) could look up laws and forms on the Web and do their own cases themselves, but immigration lawyers trade partly in peace of mind.

Having been through the immigration process myself with a corporate immigration lawyer who used an online system for streamlining I can attest to this.

Lawyers are there to do 2 things, spot anything which might become a problem before it does, when it becomes a problem get your back. No 100% automated online system could do that.

However an automated system could probably reduce costs a lot.

The largest industry that is 'over ripe' is the energy industry. In particular, electricity distribution. Creating devices that perform 'demand management' are nearly trivial.

In Australia, the normal price for large scale wholesale electricity from the national grid is Aust $48 per Mw/hr. But several times a year the 'spot price' is over Aust $10,000 per Mw/hr.

This is the reason companies have 'peaking' plants that only operate 3-5 days a year.

There will be 2 main stratergies:

1. Owner / user generated power would be transferred back to the grid during high price periods.

2. Load shedding (automatic turn-off of power) would occur during high price period.

The primary requirement is a 'smarter grid'

> The primary requirement is a 'smarter grid'

The grid doesn't have to be all that smart. It just needs to tell folks when the peakers are being turned on and off.

And, folks need to be compensated for reacting to said on/off.

Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use. Blackboard sucks and could be easily replaced by hacking together open source solutions and presenting it in a slick package (like 37 signals) but tailored for college instead of business.

I couldn't agree with this more. I work with Blackboard's software on a daily basis and it is a aweful, unstable mess. The only problem is that Blackboard seems intent on sueing any competitors out of business using patents (see desire2learn)

d2l is awful in its own right - the University of Arizona uses it and I'm absolutely boggled as to how this software was ever sold. It's not terrible from the student's perspective, but the professor/TA interface is abysmal. It reminds me of interfaces from the 90s, before we had figured out things like going to the next page without a specific button to save the current page.

I think some of these have been invalidated:

http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali...

Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use.

Absolutely. My son is a student in an online high school and has taken online classes from other providers. All the competitors in that space are abominably user-unfriendly.

Funny you say that—I'm a startup partner with the submitter of this Ask HN, who linked me your comment, and I'm working on another startup that's trying to do that.

Screenshot of general page:

http://screenshots.markbao.com/bbcd72149092d041f5aa310f2f2d3...

http://screenshots.markbao.com/c637d2dc73f4b51c5e74111b86d7e...

One of the biggest problems with LMS (USPTO Blackboard patent 6,988,138) is that they're often hard to use, so teachers don't use them. I'm trying to change this by making things mindlessly simple, and using words they're already familiar with (Attachments, like with email):

http://screenshots.markbao.com/cecd9f592564abe2cd5cac2ae8060...

It's certainly not to the caliber of Blackboard, but I'm trying to target the long tail who just want websites and not huge, bloated LMSs, and scale up from there. Release early iterate often! It's going to be charged on a yearly basis by school, which includes unlimited teachers, file storage included.

It's mostly going to be a sales and marketing learning experience for myself.

Let me know if you think there is a market for this in middle schools/high schools/college... contact email/AIM is in profile.

one of the simplest things that blackboard manages to screw up is the message board. each class should have a board generated for it for that specific semester with a message area, a collaborative blackboard (auto generated for each thread and saved!), and assignments posted all on one page. I suppose you need a widescreen monitor to really get it all laid out nicely.

There is an open source competitor - Moodle (moodle.org)

My university currently uses Blackboard. Some of the computing subjects are trialling moodle to see whether the whole university could switch from Blackboard.

Moodle is simpler to use and less buggy.

Job search. There are a ton of competitors in this space, established and startup, but so far its all crap. I've been looking for a new job recently and I'm completely dissatisfied with everything that's out there. Craigslist is still probably the best resource for finding tech jobs, at least in San Francisco but there has to be a better way.

A couple of ideas have popped into my head recently about ways to really shake this area up and to make it into a profitable business to start.

Take the Markus Frind route. Go free and kick ass.

With adblock and ad sales down the paid model seems more palatable.

Have you seen indeed.com?

Wow, Quantcast/Compete estimate their monthly users to be 6-9 million. Their AdSense account must be quite healthy. I wonder how they got granted access to the data from the first few sites they index.

To answer my own question, of course job listing sites want their sites to be discoverable. At least monster.com doesn't even have a robots.txt file.

Yaw I was in the jobs industry. There's simplyhired.com and jobster.com ...

6-9 million uniques isn't really worth the funding any of them received, I don't think.

They didn't ask permission for the data any more than Google did. Scrape/index/refresh/repeat.

Some links from indeed have affiliate IDs in them, so there are definitely some partnerships involved for some of their sources.

CPM for a job site must be something really nice, at least $5. Perhaps they have around 50M pageviews per month, so that would make $250,000 / month. Maybe valuation should be about $15M? Indeed got $5M in funding, so that seems fine. Simplyhired got $17M, that does seem on the high side.

That's a pretty good site. I was thinking of something similar, to be honest. Seeing a competitor like that makes me pause. Their traffic numbers look good, but still fall behind sites like CareerBuilder, and, of course, Monster. I do note a recent spike in traffic numbers. Thanks, economy!

Hashjobs.com is a pretty cute rails app one guy threw together, I assume to show his Rails chops rather than as a startup. It's not mine, but was interesting enough to mention.

http://jobfeedr.com/ is another interesting one, I think I heard of it here. It's a modified WP blog...

Real estate listings. Only limited information on a MLS is viewable without a broker. And getting your house information on one can cost 200 to 500, or up to 6% of the price. There are already free internet listings, but those can lack listings and information on houses.

Seconded on all things real estate. This is more of a legal/social problem than a technical one at this point. Websites like zillow.com make a real estate agents role largely obsolete, yet they still try to command a huge commission on every sale. Another poster above mentioned Title Insurance as well.

I suspect over the next 5-10 years we will see major changes in this industry. Huge savings to home buyers & sellers are available if the bureaucracy and traditions can be broken and replaced with a more consumer friendly system.

Zillow hardly makes the role of a real estate agent obsolete - first off, their Zestimates are no where near correct in a lot of markets especially Today with all of the foreclosures and short sales. Second, the process of purchasing or selling your home isn't any easier because of zillow - only marketing a home is easier.

A consumer friendly solution is needed - when we purchased our home last year, the amount of times I needed to initial and sign documents and then sign again after changes and again when the conditions were met, and again when we removed the contingencies, etc - and each time Scan & Email or Fax it back to the sellers or a third party; it was just annoying. With all of the e-sign technologies and document collaboration, there has got to be a way to make this process easier, smoother and less archaic.

We got our home for a great price, and used a real estate agent, I could care less whether or not the realtor was removed from the process. What I want removed from the process is the pain.

There's already many competitors and real estate isn't exactly an awesome market segment to be in right now. Zillow, Redfin is actually doing something different (replacing one of the agents and returning savings to customer).

Methinks boat left the dock on this one.

Insurance industry: I have a close friend in the industry and he says there are tons of ways to improve the application, binder, and other processes.

Online learning: Large edu and enterprise players like Blackboard and Saba are due for a disruption IMO (I think the ball is already rolling on this). Schools and enterprises don't want to keep paying huge licensing and infrastructure fees, and students should be able earn an online degree from a combination of online courses (from multiple schools).

Online classifieds: I know this has been discussed here before, but I'm of the opinion that craigslist is due for a disruption of some sort.

Car buying and financing: I just bought a car for my wife. Even though you can apply for financing online, the entire process was a total pain. There needs to be a "TicketStumbler for cars" that includes a financing and insurance option. I should be able to apply for traditional financing as well as peer-to-peer (ala prosper.com) financing all in one swoop. It should pull listings from classifieds, dealer inventories, auto trader, etc.

Almost any industry can be rattled if the power goes to the consumer instead of the vendor. This has happened with consumer products but could go to services etc.

-automobile disrupted by cars from asia - oh shit happened!

-book industry disrupted by self published electronic books

-shipping industry disrupted by automation - happening

-pcs industry by netbooks with no moving parts/cellphones

-Windows/Office by Ubuntu/Openoffice (outside of USA)

-power industry by cheap solar cells - pipedream

-housing industry by prefab homes - pipedream

-newspapers by online media - happening

-drug industry by Indian made generic drugs - legislation won't let it happen

-all driving trades (taxis, truck driver etc) by automated DARPA style cars - pipedream

-most manufacturing jobs by cheap chinese/korean robots - happening

-most farming jobs by automation (eg AutoFarm - gps/AI driven tractors) - happening

-Californian/Arizona farming by cheaper farms in Mexico, Guatamala etc - happening

-drive through order takers by voice recognition -Long distance by skype, calling card & SIP providers - happening

-Business travel by HD Video conferencing systems - happening (Cisco + HP)

-Telecom equipment by Huawei

-Oil furnaces by alternative pellet combustion system (see Jon Udell) -??

-Military soldiers by remote controlled robots - happening

-billboards by gps aware ads

-interbroker dealers by cheaper competitors (ITG - etc) - happening

- speeding ticket writing by RFID tag reading systems (UK) -various industries by the rental business (Netflicks, Zipcar etc)

Candidates that will not be disrupted

- Governments - always political and loath change

- Unions

- Near monopolies (Heathcare, Cell phone)

- Religion to an extent

Classifieds.

CraigsList is not the be-all end-all of buying/selling things locally online. It may be a tough nut to crack, but it won't be hard to radically improve upon their horrible user experience. I would love to see some competition in this space.

Not going to happen. Craigslist is at that early Google period where everyone who uses it for the first time never looks back and is uber-loyal to the brand. A slick competitor with a great interface and new tools still has to climb that huge Ebay/Facebook-style mountain (no users no stuff, no reason)

What about layering some features on top of Craigslist that are mind-numblingly idiotic to leave out? I'm thinking better meta-data for apartment listings, for example.

I don't know about 'they,' but if you build it I will come.

Incidentally, have you seen http://www.housingmaps.com/ ?

I've used Craigslist for a car sale and wasn't impressed. I ended up paying a fee to AutoTrader and sold it fairly fast.

I'm working on the motorcycle equivalent at MotoListr.com.

Your interface is cleaner and more attractive, but cycletrader.com is a pretty well established competitor. Do you have a plan for beating them along any particular axis?

My plan is better dealer support. Direct line to my cell phone.

I think I help to sellore close to 100 cars through CL. Fast.

no no no no no no. Craigslist can't scale like google did because it's LOCAL. If I'm the only person in my country using google - I still have value. If I'm the only person in my country who uses craiglist - it's useless. My local craigslist sucks. There's pretty much nothing there but spam.

Just make sure that when you launch - that you're not targeting SF/NYC.

(I will admit - there is local competitors that you would have to beat in most markets - so it's still tough - but it's not always cl.)

Or different countries. There are quite a few countries in which CraigsList never really "caught on" and where there isn't really something similar.

Agreed. Gumtree.com is much bigger in the UK than Craigslist, bizarrely due to the foreign community initially - lots of south africans, antipodeans got on gumtree when it first took off.

Posting a classified ad is only as useful as the number of interested parties who read it.

Your new site would have to be pretty fickin' special for me to post my ad there instead of to a massively larger audience on craigslist

Also, you can't exactly undercut them -- Craigslist is free for most categories and pretty reasonable for the others

online auctions.

ebay sucks, for both the buyers and sellers. and ebay doesn't even like auctions anymore, they're moving towards the amazon-style marketplace model.

Good one. Ebay is just such a force to be reckoned with, but they've completely lost their soul. They've pissed their sellers off like none other. You would have to have something so different and innovative to start stealing their thunder. Maybe you start in a different niche ie- Etsy. I really like what Etsy is doing.

So far the only auction site I have seen that has gone anywhere is tfields.com which started as a transformers toys auction site and grew from there. It is a real catch-22, you need lots of buyers and sellers suddenly.

my initial thoughts on how to make that happen would be to round up some medium-sized ebay sellers, ask them what their needs are, build the site to meet them, and offer them free auctions for a period of time to switch and help promote.

I think the best model to beat ebay is to create a "Ning" style auction site where you have separate auction sites dependent on the community that they target.

The best strategy for a startup to topple a massive corporation is to flank them. Hit them in their weak spots, grow, and eventually you might get enough resources to topple them.

that is the biggest issue. they are the giant in the industry. their name is a word for selling something online, just like 'to google' is 'to search'. taking down that giant would be serious business. but its a giant that can be taken down, and would be seriously worthwhile to do so.

Man, if only someone was going after them, one step at a time. Oh wait.

http://www.dawdle.com

The self-pimping done, you're being too narrow in terming it "online auctions". Auctions don't make a ton of sense for the vast majority of items sold online - they're only really useful for unique stuff. That's why they're moving towards Amazon's fixed price model. The problem with fixed price is that it's a "take it or leave it" proposition. Well, Dawdle solves the "take it or leave it" issue by letting potential buyers name their own price with our StandingOffer technology.

First video games and gear, then the world! MWA HAHAHAH AHA !!!!!!1eleventy-seven

Check your layout in FireFox... it's not happy. Good design though.

We can't replicate, but this has been modded up very high - can someone show me a screenshot or help us out? Thanks!

Higher Education. Existing institutions are selling inefficient and grossly overpriced products in an environment in which objective evaluation is hard to obtain and the status quo fears innovation. If you could crack that nut, it would be massive.

There is another bigger one: College Book Industry.

The current system is pretty inefficient. This probably differs from country to country. The current system here works like this:

The universities give lists of subjects and prescribed textbooks to brick-and-mortar bookstores. They then buy the books and sell them at a huge mark-up.

Students generally do not order online because of the time delay/import BS and many do not have a fixed postal address. Secondhand book sales are a bit of mess because it is not centralised, etc...

There are possibly quite a few ideas on how to make this system more effective (esp. in countries in which the internet penetration is not that high but the cellphone penetration is).

Check out chegg. They are going to / already are disrupting this market.

I think they've saved me 60% or more in the past... over the used bookstore.

I used half.com all the way through college (ISBN makes it quick), but it would be much easier if the chosen textbooks were announced earlier (like you point out). Most of the time I was without a book for the first week to 10 days.

The lead time issue could be fixed simply by changing University policy, requiring professors to disclose required textbooks X weeks in advance of the first day of class.

One loophole I found near the end of undergrad was that the campus bookstore's website had the required books posted for each class well over a month ahead of time (so you could buy them online and swing by to pick them up). I just looked up all my classes there, copied down the ISBNs and hit up half.com or Amazon. Of course, this breaks down with last minute changes or additions made by professors.

Tangentially relevant:

8 Stupid Frat Boy Business Ideas http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-...

"NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I HATE TO CRUSH DREAMS BUT PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THIS."

Ouch. There is a huge degree of truth in that. Situations differ however and I know of at least a few local book exchanges that are making a living (i.e. in operation 2+ years).

I do however not know of one central/large one. There are several reasons why in some cases it succeeds and in others not. In poorer regions/countries people would look for more ways to save money (the pressure isn't really on an Ivy League guy to buy a $50 book instead of a $100 one when his tuition is $40,000. In countries where students live on less than $3000 a year it is).

A solid business idea I have seen is a chinese copy center - you hand in a book and the next day get your book and copy for about $20 (this business is in operation more than 7 years without any uhm... legal problems).

Text messaging. It's been discussed here before but it's worth repeating.

This is difficult to tackle if you don't already have a serious presence in the mobile industry.

There are still a lot of innovations you can make here without replacing the SMS backbone wholesale.

For example, users interact with user interfaces, not messaging layers. If you can get people using your interface, you can switch the messaging layer where appropriate. Notice Google now sending IM to SMS?

At my startup, Borange, we send group SMS for free on the iPhone, and are working with metadata and a user interface to innovate around sharing social availability and impromptu invitations, one of SMS's big use cases. When the time is right (read PUSH for iPhone?), we'll migrate users to a modern mobile messaging layer, and keep our backwards compatibility with free SMS for interacting with the rest of the world.

Check us out, by the way. We just launched our iPhone app and are looking for investors and partners who believe in the Matrix and major change in the communications space. http://www.borange.com.

You mean like 3jam, Limbo, sms.ac, Zemble, Google's Dodgeball, Yahoo's ill-fated "Mixd," and a dozen others who are no longer around and I forgot about?

Jeez, I truly do wish you guys luck, but group/social SMS is a pretty tough nut to crack.

(I used to cover the mobile industry for a trade publication.)

Well not exactly... The work we are doing at Borange is more concerned with scheduling and availability than sending group SMS, and my main point was that there are possible strategies for migrating people off of SMS by including SMS compatibility. It's the lowest common denominator in mobile messaging, and you really can't afford not to include it to some degree for moving forward.

Yeah, crazy dead heap there, though! How long until SMS joins it? :)

Finance is another area ripe for innovation. There's a crisis going on, as we've all noticed, and one reason behind it is that businesses in the industry who were perceived to be creating tons of value turn out to have just been running intelligent people in circles.

Here are a few thoughts: - information and analysis. It's still too hard for consumers and too expensive for professionals to get access to reliable and usable information on the state of companies, economies, etc. - sources of capital for individuals and businesses. New ways will emerge of providing good ideas and reliable individuals with cheap access to the capital they need to build businesses, buy homes, etc. Prosper and kiva hopefully are just the beginning. - payments and micropayments. Does anyone out there love paypal? Or credit card companies, for that matter? Should it really cost several percent to handle every small and large transaction that takes place in the world? And several percent isn't all that bad compared to transaction costs in some industries, like healthcare. Should it really take 10 minutes and require complete trust in the waitstaff to not steal my information every time I use a credit card at a restaurant?

You mentioned it, but I think the music industry is really ripe for disruption. Their business model is definitely shifting as we speak.

ebay/auction sites/local commerce can be done better.

The problem is that everyone knows that the music world is changing and wants in on the pie and so far Apple has done the best job. The bad part is that they are doing a pretty good job. The hardware is nice and works, the software for the most part does work and gets music easily and cheap to users who are for the most part happy. A high obstacle. Let others try attacking the music problem and instead try one of the easier ones.

That's assuming that the current lone model of "searchable mp3 catalog online for $ per song." There are many different ways to profit from music: artist interaction, live venues, merchandise, provide a quality recommendation/review service, etc. The current market is skewed heavily towards what the content that the industry thinks will sell, which receives the bulk of marketing.

Not to mention the fact that the market naturally segments into people of varying levels of interest. People who love music and people who just care about the Top40 can be catered towards by very different business models.

The biggest thing I fear about music is that it is emotional. People want to be in a band and will work for less then minimum wage while living out of a van so they can maybe make it big, but really just to play music. Combined with the fact that in the mind of the consumer a song is near worthless means that the money has to either come from selling massive quantities, aka iTunes and they only break even or something else. And everything that is something else that I have heard of isn't that revolutionary.

Government. Now hear me out on this one. I think with new technology, and the push for open access to information (that's digestible) will disrupt the political system as we've known it. Doubt it will happen once things get 'back on track' financially in this country.

Its already starting. Look at sunlight labs.

Don't mistake this comment as me trying to make this thread a political flamewar.

I agree with you that technologies used by government are ripe for disruption -- and in my opinion the Senate and Geithner today pretty much guaranteed that 'back on track' will be years, if not decades, away. So this really is a good, maybe vital, area to create tools that improve efficiency.

Most of the publishing industry, esp. books. This is somewhat contingent on the success of ePaper/eBook technologies like (but not) the Kindle. They still need to develop for a while (2yrs or so) so the displays will be fast, have good contrast and be able to display color.

But even before that, we might see a lot more authors going online and developing new patterns of writing that are based on shorter publishing cycles and still lower revenue expectations.

I don't know how this will play out, but I'd bet that the RIAA/audio industry would make an embarassingly good model of what this very conservative industry will go through.

Government, Governments are being run on antiquated software created by giants of the military industrial complex. There are huge hurdles on the procurement side, but the opportunities of making a 10x price performance improvement are all over the the place. One key is to make the product highly configurable to accommodate the different laws from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Another key is to tackle smaller entities because they will be more flexible. Voice of experience: dont start with the California DMV or the Illinois Secretary of State.

The insurance industry is a technological dinosaur. Many opportunities here.

Music Industry

This may be one of the most obvious ones out there. Artists don't need the record labels anymore. The money is not purely in the music, but ticket sales, merchandise, extra content,etc.

I like what topspin media is doing. Myspace has made great strides, but it's just a start.

iTunes much?

His comment would have made more sense if he said "iTunes' instead of the Music Industry.

Health Care.

HIPPA, medical records, billing, medical office automation. The medical industry is in the information dark ages and finally being dragged into relative modernity by the government.

Forget medical records. What about an online health care expenses manager like Quicken. If you've ever dealt with many doctors, or more than one insurance, or just the US health care insurance system in general it's a nightmare to keep track of what's been claimed, billed, paid back, written off, reduced, etc.

Television + Highly accurate profiles of the person watching the TV at any moment.

I think the enterprise sphere as a whole is ripe for disruption, which we've been witnessing with SaaS and other web 2.0 applications coming out as of late.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com