Malevolent Ventures – Request for Startups | Hacker News Reader

Malevolent Ventures – Request for Startups

8 pointstakinola9 comments

At Malevolent Ventures we love to fund smart passionate entrepreneurs who are building products to make the world a slightly worse place. We are putting out a request for startups to apply to our program with their best ethically challenged ideas.

For instance, the last team we funded recently launched their mobile app, iObject. Remember all the times you've been at a wedding and found yourself thinking this couple aren't right for each other. With iObject, you just press a button and someone shows up within minutes to object to the union. Think of it as Uber for sadness.

Now it's your turn. Share with us your best ethically challenged (but still commercially viable) startup idea and you may even be invited to be mentored by our general partner, Bill Z. Bob

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Monetization strategy: sponsored hunts.

Oh, there's clearly a way to productize a particularly obnoxious (and increasingly common) behavior among ethically-challenged ticket buyers, telling them what (high-quality) seats are unlikely to be occupied at a given event.

Say, for example, there is a set of front-row seats for an NBA playoff game currently unsold. The seller may have them listed on Stubhub, or NBAtickets.com (AKA TicketExchange/Ticketsnow), or on Ticket Network, or any combination of those or other resale sites.

With all Stubhub instant-fulfillment listings and TicketExchange listings, the details of the seats are listed right down to the seat numbers.

So, an aggregating mobile app could scan the primary sites to harvest unsold listing details as the event approaches (or, in the case of Stubhub, most events for which they don't control ticketing stay up for up to an hour after the start time) and tell the user that those seats are unsold (and therefore unlikely to be legitimately occupied).

Sadly, this is going on right now - there are third party sites which are scanning prime unsold seats and taking existing valid cheap-seat tickets and editing the section and row details to match the unsold listing,then selling those cheap seats as the better seats. I have experienced this firsthand with my own Sharks club seats.

This fraud problem (and other extensions of this tactic that the reader can easily guess) is exploding and will continue to do so as long as idiot venues stick with PDF (or other user-editable) ticketing and lax seat piracy enforcement.

A service that connects with your bank account and phone, so whenever you make a purchase it sends you a push notification telling you how many sick kids or animals that money could've helped.

You could then choose whether to send that amount to a charity and feel less guilty or choose not to and be berated and feel more guilty about it. The service could take a small percentage of the money that is donated to charity.

Basically guilting people into sending money to charity, and making money off that guilt. It does still help people, but it does it in a way that could be considered "ethically-challenged".

> this couple ISN'T right for each other. the verb should be in the singular when its subject is a collective noun.

... a sophisticated mobile app, uSuck, which can provide grammar-nazi responses to well meaning posts.

A small, battery-powered wireless router that runs on 4G. It broadcasts a configurable SSID which defaults to "Starbucks Customer Wi-Fi", and prompts users to "download secure browsing certificate", which actually downloads a (known-to-the-router) SSL cert, allowing for MitM attacks against users browsing HTTPS websites in coffee-shops. In case actually snooping the web traffic and exploiting it is too much work, the router can also replace all ads and e-commerce links with those that would pay the owner of the router. Finally, in a surprise twist, a small percentage of all injected ads and affiliate links actually benefit the company selling the routers, rather than the owner.

EDIT: I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.

pron.io

A p2p service offering the latest HD series and movies that are not camcord-quality.

Sometimes directly from motion-picture studios servers.

While you watch/download/stream, this powerful, mobile, responsive, native app turns your smart device into a DDoS and bitcoin-mining botnet.

It will also offer ancillary services like upvotes, likes, retweets by hijacking your legit social-media accounts.

Raising a seed round to hire 2 devs and a marketing guy.

Startup currently in 'stealth' but you can read all about us on: angellist, crunchbase, HN and reddit (cause those are stealth too).

Contact me: bro@pron.io

Surveillance. Mass surveillance. Really lucrative.

iObject actually does not sound malevolent at all. Quite the opposite actually.

Reminds me of http://somebodyapp.com/

>within minutes

That doesn't sound commercially viable at all.

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