But can you, in less than 140 characters, describe the PROBLEM your project/startup tries to resolve?
Tarsnap: http://www.tarsnap.com/
My side project: I want to run the world's best free OS on the world's best cloud computing environment.
FreeBSD/EC2: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/
My hobby: I want to have fun while bringing classical music to my community.
West Coast Symphony Orchestra: http://www.westcoastsymphony.ca/
The problem could be "people lose their data, NSA can access my data"
Soundslice: http://www.soundslice.com/
- Study scientific papers by deconstructing them through a wiki-like interface.
- Filtering news feeds, automatically removing stories and tweets I don't care about.
- Keeping an updated journal for each of my projects in the fastest and least intrusive way.
- Learning languages by cutting and pasting single expressions from podcasts into a personal audio library.
- Aggregating my soundcloud, beatport, bandcamp, youtube and shoutcast 'likes' into a single cloud playlist.
1) "Increase the quality of life. Make people more productive or their lives easier or more enjoyable."
2) "Right a wrong. A variant on the above. Be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem."
3) "Prevent the end of something good. Preserve something classic or historical. Save the whales."
So it's more about creating a value proposition, in which solving a problem is only part of that proposition. Thus, building something people will use entails a carrot and stick: carrot for being used, and stick for not being used. Simply solving a problem can ignore other benefits.. ideally, it's about replacing the system that created the problem in the first place that needed to be resolved (thus solving a set of problems and potential problems). Solving 1 problem only is a good start, but having a vision to lay on top of that can provide extra inspiration.
http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/gettingstarted/a/guykawasa...
We thought of everything for you: http://gojs.net
~~~
I think this is an interesting side topic to get into: my above pitch can be generalized for nearly any library. Fundamentally, selling a library is about selling man-hours. Either a programming team does everything themselves, or they do some of it get one or more libraries and pay some dollar cost and learning curve cost in return for getting literal packaged man-hours, in the form of the thought and features put into the library.
So my product, like all libraries, is there for people who don't want to re-re-re-re-reinvent (and importantly re-re-re-re-retest) Diagramming concepts like node-link relationships, layouts, grouping, undo managers, performant rendering, etc. Like any library, people are buying the man-hours we put in to perfecting a set of things, so they can get on with building the more nuanced parts of their app without running in to their own set of layout/undo-manager/what-have-you bugs.
Passive income generation is one of the pinnacles of what we as software engineers can do.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Public_Key_Infrastruct...
[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/bgp-hijacking-belar...
[3] http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/64208098281/on-trusting-...
While there has been quite a few attempts at online music collaboration, clearly the average amateur musician is not using any of them.
PROs use pro-music software to collaborate with other people, and some tech-oriented amateurs hang out in collaboration forums.
But all that is too hard/annoying for the average amateur musician.
BandHub "The Internet Music Studio" - makes it easy to make music with other people over the Internet.
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Knowledge workers spend too much time looking for information and knowledge[1] instead of, you know, thinking about problems. Organizations can be more effective when they provide tooling and processes to encourage and support knowledge sharing and transfer, and more efficient information retrieval.
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[1]: according to some research, up to 50% of knowledge workers' time is spent just looking for stuff. But to be fair, other research puts the number as low as 17%. Still, we believe that facilitating more efficient knowledge use, transfer and creation, will benefit all organizations.
Give workers the information they need so they could spend more time thinking/building.
For example, we could reduce it further by saying:
"Make things better".
But I don't think that would be a very useful message.
So this, to me, is the struggle... to figure out how to be as concise as possible, while not being overly concise.
I freely admit that I'm not great at this, but it is something I hope to get better at - distilling the message to its essence, without losing the essence.
In this particular case, I will say that "Give workers the information they need so they could spend more time thinking/building" probably does strike that balance fairly well. I may have to crib that from you. :-)
Anyway, the point in saying all this was just to point out that while conciseness is a virtue, it can - I think - be taken too far if one isn't careful.
That said, there'll always be a demand for a variety of protein sources. We've had access to complete plant protein for thousands of years, but we consume more meat than ever. Vegetable protein will likely always be the cheapest, and that has been the case since the dawn of agriculture.
Duet has a one time fee and is hosted on your own server.
I see the solution at a combination of factors:
- Noise ordinances and advocacy for same.
- Understanding that we are not "all the same", and that some people have a legitimate need for and function much better in a quiet environment.
- Communities established with "noise control / quiet" as a principal item in their charter, and with the boundary and means to enforce it.
- Better building materials and standards. Construction that spends that 10% or whatever extra to build in effective noise suppression. Architectural plans also focused on this.
- Continuing work on effective, after-the-fact noise suppression. Although personally I don't want to be perpetually confined to such a "bubble", even if such becomes possible. I feel much healthier as a part of the "natural world", but a world not full of car stereos, straight pipes, non-stop blaring TV's, nor 20 coworkers ongoing conversations and phone calls.
P.S. Advocacy and education, so that people don't get "worn down" by noisy environments before they learn and find their way to better. That would include assisting one's escape before the negative feedback loop traps one, economically.
The real problems people have are:
- Repeatedly search for the things they want but have no one place to save
- Have to sort out from millions of low quality search results
- Search engine is not intelligent to help people find things more efficiently online
- Businesses have problem to get their products/services listed for SEO marketing
The project description is available on Kickstarter right now at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1986902972/bingobo-build...
The beta announcement is here:
http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/beta-release-announcement.j...
1. Charities don't do software development because they can't afford it.
2. Programmers who want to volunteer end up using skills other than programming (like IT support).
3. New programmers cannot get real-world experience because they don't have the necessary real-world experience to land a job
I am aware of the solutions like Tarsnap and Spideroak and I even use some of them, but this is more about very cheap offsite backup of bulk rather infrequently changing data, measure in terabytes, that would be prohibitively expensive to store there.
Nice Weather : http://alexiscreuzot.com/apps/nice-weather-2/
These days, I usually read the feed updates as soon as they come in. Since I only get links in the DM, I also end up giving the authors the (mobile) page-views they deserve for their hard work. Win-win. :)
(UK and US movie services, Cable TV, and movie theaters).
EDIT (Problem): Online movie streaming catalogs aren't great individually due to fragmentation of distribution across a huge amount of services. People tend to miss them. We tie all the services together, so you can be alerted when the movies you want to see are available in movie theaters, online streaming and cable TV.
the problem is "people miss movies when they are available"
right?
Paying outdoor writers and photographers competitive prices for their works and delivering users amazing stories in well designed, modern, web pages, only online, no print.
Link to a sample article ("real" ones will have better writing then this): http://acivitillo.com/articles/2013/vistula
Solution? Svpply/Pinterest for Amazon.
Problem 1: First-year university-level math and physics textbooks are too long, too expensive, and too boring.
Problem 2: Many adults lack basic mathematical skills. Few good books exist for teaching high school math to adults.
Problem 2 prime: Many parents lack the basic knowledge of mathematics required to help their children with their schoolwork.
Solution: A math textbook for adults.
Solution: http://muscula.com
I'm working on an open resource for teaching and learning Python: http://introtopython.org.
[1]Dealership management system, where the dealer stores information about car deals, repair orders, and inventory.
Interestin: http://interestin.co (provides "follow-up essays" as well)
I'm bootstrapping alone around a day job. It's not impossible, but it's very painful. :( Trying to use my time wisely to get to a sellable product ASAP so I can switch to full time.
I sort of wonder about stuff like that. If you look at what we know about the algorithm that "is" the human mind, it's not actually capable of creating. So nothing is created. It's copies of other things, usually mixed together.
Most commercial AI products these days avoid patent issues by using AI. Every AI program that isolates and OCR's text uses dozens of patent pending techniques. It's just that this is not visible in the actual code. The reason that it's not in there is that that code encodes something akin to a VM, and the real program is the training results. It is generally very hard to determine what exactly the program does, but for trivial patents that (e.g. energy-lines to separate individual letters, or tracing likely pen movements and recognizing the derivative) is something these algorithms can be shown to do. Yet as far as I know, no-one's been successfully sued.
The algorithms themselves have the advantage that most are quite old, and have obvious roots in the 60s and 70s. So they are not patented in the US (effectively). Is this the perfect way around software patents ?
I wonder. Copyright-wise. If I use an algorithm analyse all text from an author and then have it produce "his next book", would that be legal ?
We solve both - http://www.supportfu.com
For angry birds, the problem it solves could be "people have too much time with nothing to do" :)
I don't think I have a good solution but given the general growing unease and distaste people seem to have with social media, I know it's needed.
- market data,
- order streams,
-news,
- predictive models,
- pricing models
and push out the appropriate buy and sell orders.
Tonnes of data must be processed as fast and efficiently as possible.
- How to trade more efficiently - How to deal with the increasingly complex data that must be munged, aggregated and pushed through a decision model - How to lower commissions - How to slice up orders so large orders don't move the market and hide strategies so HFT firms don't learn about your flow.
For sell side firms, we allow their buy side clients to trade more.
Not so obvious to me. Consider browser plugins, desktop application (e.g. Outlook) plugins, letting users grant your service access to their online email, etc.
- Converts English notes into organized data.
- Zero navigation interface: Everything on one page.
- Code in natural language: Make quick buttons for anything.
Link: http://kyn.me
When you log your calories, you can only choose from the foods that you bought and logged. When you use them, the quantity decrements.
You setup reminders for when X food is at Y stock, and get push notifications based on that, an automated grocery list application with a calorie counter to manage your spending on food and weight!
Lost 100lb so far on it.
I'm learning OBJC & JAVA via teamtreehouse as fast as I can so I can start building it natively for Android and iPhone.
I really can't stand apps that you're not absolutely thrilled to use, so I won't be releasing my current version.
Maybe in a few months? Anyone want to help out?
me AT chetanshenoy.com
Nah but really, I try to solve the music listening and artist compensation problem on my spare time. Without regard for copyright since Im not doing it to make money.