Ask HN: What web services should exist that haven't been developed yet?
23 points by abiekatz 11 years ago | 23 commentsBack 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 agoA 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 agoStumbleUpon 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.
- skellystudios 11 years ago
- ereckers 11 years agoProduct 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 agoA 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 agoYou 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.
- viralbajaria 11 years agoWe are building a generic ETL framework and would love to talk with you about this. My email is on my profile.
- sehrope 11 years ago
- ghostdiver 11 years agoPoo 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.
- jahde 11 years agoThis would be a great addition to a "Smart Toilet" where it analyzes your urine as well. Through wi-fi it uplaods the results to the website and checks if you have any health issues.
- trafficlight 11 years agoHow is this not a thing? This should be a thing.
- ig1 11 years agoThere's a kickstarter for that:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/uchek-universal-the-medica...
- ig1 11 years ago
- trafficlight 11 years ago
- jahde 11 years ago
- Cyclosa 11 years agoAnything that recognizes and encourages the good behavior of people.
- turbojerry 11 years agoThat 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.
- turbojerry 11 years ago
- keshy 11 years agoAndroid 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 agoSaaS 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 agoWe'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
- atldev 11 years ago
- incision 11 years agoThe 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.
- X4 11 years ago
- rada 11 years agoSpeech recognition: send an audio file, receive text.
- bobbylox 11 years agoAT&T offers this: http://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId=...
- anywhichway 11 years agoMany people use Amazon's mechanical Turk for this. It allows you to make automated requests like this that are processed by real people. Perhaps it is not the easiest service to dive into, so I wonder if their terms of service would allow someone to make an easy to use front end that focuses on just this task.
- abiekatz 11 years agoCheck out http://speakertext.com/
- bobbylox 11 years ago
- erastothenes 11 years agoA solid natural language processing API.
- stephenp 11 years agohemmingwaymaker.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.