Ask HN: What web services should exist that haven't been developed yet?

23 points by abiekatz 11 years ago | 23 comments
List any top ideas that you have. It is an interesting exercise to come up with startup ideas.

Back in 2005 Fred Wilson said "Last year, when Brad and I were on the road raising our fund, we used to talk a lot about web services that should exist but don’t." http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/08/indeed.html

This exercise helped them target indeed.com as a potential investment and potentially others.

What services are missing from the internet these days?

  • anywhichway 11 years ago
    A reddit/HN clone that customizes the content you see based off your voting history. This has been tried a few times before, but I've just never seen one take off. In fact, reddit had this feature when it started but couldn't scale it well enough so dumped it.

    I feel like it would increase the quality of upvotes generally because people would know that their votes will impact the future content they see so it may slow the rate at which people up vote just to show they simply agreement and reserve it for actual high quality they we to see more of. That is just my theory, perhaps in practice it would reveal that people just care more about only seeing content they agree with anyway.

    • skellystudios 11 years ago
      StumbleUpon sort of does this, although it's more attuned to drag up older content than new stuff. I guess this is because the older the content is, the more data you have to make statistical associations.
    • ereckers 11 years ago
      Product Configurator (eCommerce Web Stores)

      Basically, the visual deal where you select a t-shirt, change colors, change patterns, etc.. Toys, computer parts, boat parts, shoes, cheerleading outfits, you name it...

      I was asked to build a product configurator a year or so back for a a store that sold customizable backpacks. I looked into building one and thought "hell no". I turned the job down.

      During my research I found some Enterprise level solutions, I saw 1 service (a manual thing with a couple guys), a TON of posts on outsourcing websites asking for the same, and I believe a complicated piece of software (it's hard to remember).

      I offered to build the thing for much more then they wanted to spend thinking I could turn it into a product, but obviously they passed.

      I think there might be a market out there for small and medium sized eCommerce store developers/designers/owners for a plug-and-play product configurator. It would have to tie in with some popular carts; X-cart, Magento, (a few others), but at least for me I thought there might be a business there.

      Or there could be a reason why it was never done.

      • jsiegz 11 years ago
        A data ETL tool. Now that lots of companies are moving to MPP databases like Vertica, Redshift, Teradata, and Netezza, it's incredible that there is still no straighforward way to do so without extensive systems and data engineering experience.

        Every time a customer asks us to recommend a tool to do this, we are baffled that nobody has taken this on yet (and wonder if we should do it ourselves).

        The opportunity to build the Stripe for ETL is only going to get bigger.

        • sehrope 11 years ago
          You should check us out[1]. We're haven't quite got to the full ETL stage as we've focused on individual databases first. If you've got a decent imagination though then you can figure out what we're trying to get to.

          [1]: http://www.jackdb.com/

          • viralbajaria 11 years ago
            We are building a generic ETL framework and would love to talk with you about this. My email is on my profile.
          • ghostdiver 11 years ago
            Poo Analysis as a Service

            Upload image of your poo, computer program will tell you if you have any health problems or you should change your diet.

          • Cyclosa 11 years ago
            Anything that recognizes and encourages the good behavior of people.
            • turbojerry 11 years ago
              That would be... people, e.g. the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina memes, you could I suppose do a RL version, GGG t-shirts with individual QR codes for up voting people.
            • keshy 11 years ago
              Android and iPhone dev environments exposed as a web endpoint. This would help ease development of opensource applications and improves portability and reuse of components.

              We could harness the power of the cloud and free developers from having to worry about hardware performance issues to run the heavy dev environments. If the app has to be debugged on a device, the apk file can be downloaded and injected. The apk can have an default injected script to automatically communicate with the cloud dev set up (sending over logs etc.) to create a really simply environment to work with mobile applications and collaborate efficiently across the world

              • apphrase 11 years ago
                SaaS model all-in-one marketing toolset service for bootstrapping apps. The current ones are either to much data analytics, or too dumb mail-list management tools.
                • atldev 11 years ago
                  We're currently working on this and would love to get some feedback. With just 5 min of your time you can help shape the roadmap and get early access. Survey here: http://bit.ly/15GpvsD
                • incision 11 years ago
                  The first thing that springs to mind for me is natural language search that really works. Along the same lines, reliable transcription.
                  • X4 11 years ago
                    +1 for natural language detection and transcription. Current systems are too fragile or completely closed. The ones available aren't better than what we had in 2004.
                  • rada 11 years ago
                    Speech recognition: send an audio file, receive text.
                  • erastothenes 11 years ago
                    A solid natural language processing API.
                    • stephenp 11 years ago
                      hemmingwaymaker.com. Makes long sentences short. An online de-obfuscator and English to English translator. Helps me finally read Finnegan's Wake and Of Grammatology.

                      slantrime.com. bends user provided words to make unlikely rhymes, with seed capital from slim shady.