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Comment by vertis | Hacker News Reader

Here are some of my super secret ideas that will help you take over the world. If you use any of these ideas you agree to remember me when you get rich (you don't actually have to give me any money, just drink champagne and think happy thoughts about me)

- Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved.

- App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday)

- Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are

- Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing.

edit: formatting

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>Swarm

http://www.gocatch.com/

Pretty neat idea, although GoCatch isn't very big here in Brisbane!

> - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday)

Cortana (and I assume Siri) do this out of the box. You just say "show me stores that are open right now" and voila. You can even get more specific and say "show me mexican restaurants that are open right now." You can probably get more creative but I haven't tried yet.

> Group purchasing for work

I use https://www.splitwise.com/ for this. Works well for everything from big expenses to burgers. Use it in my flat too.

The finding app sounds like something i could use!

> - Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved.

It's called an office manager. Combined with an expense account for the company.

> - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday)

It's called Foursquare. Bonus, it does this for a radius around your current location and when it doesn't have official data, it makes a guess based on check-in data.

> - Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are

It's [probably] called the Uber/Lyft interface from the drivers' side.

> - Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing.

Haven't reached the Omg Everyone Is Getting Married age, but I'm sure this also exists already.

On the last one, I've never seen a formal registry (managed through a retail store) that didn't denote whether someone had already purchased an item.

Main part of the idea was not creating a huge wish list, but rather just the de-duplicating part of the wedding registry.

The de-duplication is very handy, but I think the main point of a wedding registry is so you know the thing you're gifting is something the couple will actually get use out of.

If you know the couple well enough to get a meaningful gift that is not on the registry, go for it, but I've been to plenty of weddings where I was not close enough to the couple to know their tastes/needs for something as personal as homegoods. No one wants to embark on their new life as a married couple with a bunch of stuff cluttering their house that they'll never use and just have to drop off at Goodwill (or worse, go through the hassle of returns - how many different stores would the gifts come from with no registry?), and no one wants to buy a present knowing that's what will most likely happen to it.

>> - Group purchasing for work

> It's called an office manager.

No office manager I've ever had would purchase anything and then seek divided reimbursement from individuals in the office.

If the purchase is for the workplace, even something recreational for the employees, the company should pay for it. There should be a fun-budget for such things. Group purchasing is still an interesting idea, I just don't think the example's a great one.

A lot of workplaces don't work like that! I know my small non-profit can't go buying appliances, but we recently went in as a team on a sodastream and it would have been great to have a system to track it more than someone putting the cash up front.

FYI, there are mod kits for sodastream machines to connect them to large CO2 tanks. I installed one on mine recently, love it so far.

That may incur tax liabilities and in non-tiny workplaces purchasing anything is a huge hassle.

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