You place an order online or on your mobile phone while you're at work, or on the bus. After you decide on your order, the app generates a unique code. The grocery store is now replaced with an automated warehouse, with pickup or drive-through windows. You walk up to a window, scan your unique code that was generated earlier, swipe your credit card to confirm, and the warehouse automatically picks your items and out they come in bags. You toss them in your trunk if it's a drive-through, or just carry them away if these are city center stores.
Optionally, the store could have a little room to pick your own fruit and veggies, in case you prefer to see them.
This makes the whole process a lot more flexible. You could even remove the concept of placing orders and generating codes, and instead have a grocery store account for your household. For example, you ask your son to pick the groceries down the street. After he leaves, you realize you want some curry powder. You just click a button on your phone to add curry powder to the online list, and that's it. Your son doesn't even need to know, he just shows up at the window, scans your family card or enters a password, and out comes your groceries, including the newly added curry powder. After he gets the groceries, the online list clears.
One particularly promising idea was combining internet orders, with a pick-up place like BufferBox.
We also added some ideas to our canvas that were more specific to my country, but it's definitely viable and among my favourite things I'd do if I was able to do a startup. I hope someone is able to do it.
Edit: swapbox too, it seems bufferbox is winding down which is sad.
I don't see if those offer refrigerated holding. I think a similar service, specializing in foodstuffs, has a niche.
Comparing products across brands (they all have specs but the way they sort the specs is different and it's a pain to flip through tons of tabs).
Finding a chair to fit my kitchen table (given the dimensions of both).
Diagramming my bedroom to try to figure out if I can build a better bed.
Finding furniture that fits in a given volume (in my case, I want to find a trolley or counter that's Y cm high, at least X cm long, and between Z1 and Z2 cm deep).
On point 3, have you tried Autodesk Homestyler? I used it for a similar purpose :)
They seem to be aiming to pay bills from the US; I want to send money from another country to the US and just do whatever I want with it.
> Autodesk Homestyler
I looked it up and it doesn't quite seem to be what I want. For one thing, I live in Japan, so none of my furniture is in the catalog.
For another, want to find a chair that physically (not cosmetically) fits my kitchen table. This goes back to my complaint about comparing specs, actually. :)
For example, I want to ask "what are your thoughts on the new logo?" and have my co-workers leave comments and upvote/downvote each other's opinions.
Ideally, like a HN/Reddit-style upvote/downvote comment system where they could just type their name in and comment/vote.
For Facebook, not all of us are friends, and a few of them don't have Facebook, so it might seem a little rude to request that.
A few months ago I completed a game on an old Windows PC. Recently, I acquired a new PC, and had to unlock all the levels of the game again by playing through the game from beginning to end.
It's just a minor inconvenience, so it doesn't really "piss me off"; it is just something that would be nice to have.
I.e. my girlfriend was on a train recently, which stopped for one hour outside of the station. No information was given until nearer the end of that. Why?
A system that everyone could use: the first responders could provide information on the situtation. Editors could then format this for customers / people affected. Some other system could deliver it (something like iBeacons?).
I spent seven years working from home, making a trip from my home to company-HQ every few weeks. The train information board would also say "Train Late: ETA $(current time + 1 minute)".
Even if they knew in advance it had to be 30+ minutes behind schedule it would always say something like "Time: 13:30, ETA: 13:32" or so. Then keep updating. It meant you never had any idea if the train would genuinely turn up in a minute, or if it would still be lying to you an hour later.
I did seem to suffer from bad luck on the days I travelled, due to land-slides, rain, wind, or power-failures on various parts of the line. I usually kept waiting, but some days you could tell there would be no useful service. (i.e. They'd offer buses instead of trains, and that meant a 2 hour trip down, a working day, and a 2 hour trip back was just written off because a bus might take 4-5 hours to make one leg of the journey.)
A shopping list, but the trick is it knows where the food is in store, and arranges the list so that items on list are located close in store. For example, this is original list: apples, milk, hotdogs, chips. Lets say store has milk and meat on one side, and apples and chips on the other side. The app will rearrange to: apples, chips, milk, hotdogs. And perhaps give you a little map of store to show you were things are.
The same idea expanded a bit, could be to optimize for money. For example, if your list is going to be $200, you might save 20 dollars by shopping in two/few separate stores (accounting for gas), and app could divide the list into multiple lists per store. This is way harder, because prices change all the time (store layout doesn't change as often), and usually you can't look up prices online. The app could take into account any store coupons (assuming manufacturer coupons could be used in any store). The target audience for this are people who are willing to trade in time to save few dollars. I'm not sure they will have smartphones.
The lottery pool manager where we work keeps a physical list of who has paid up. Email invites were being sent through our company emails, but the higher-ups put the squash on that. She then scans the tickets, makes copies, and hands them out.
I decided to build something that would automate all of this except the buying of tickets.
Have you ever heard of readability? It's a plugin that removes link-bait crap and reformats articles into a standard format.