Post novel startup ideas as comments and see how many karma points it receives. Who knows, one might be developed and you can take credit for thinking of the idea first.
Oh, one more! A web consultancy that advises start-ups about i18n, translation, local laws, cultural differences, etc, so they wouldn't think: "Foreign countries are scary, let's conquer the domestic market first." Then we, the Dutch, could actually have used great sites like Amazon, Facebook, Ebay, and Craigslist instead of the terrible knock-offs that won here, solely because they were available earlier.<p>Seriously, Europe is a huge market, and if you wait until you're big in the U.S., you'll be too late. It's the internet - the rest of the world is just one hop away!
Here's one I <i>wish</i> someone would take from me and spend lots of time perfecting. I've been trying to get around to it, but have other stuff to do. It's on my "fun weekend hacks" list.<p>I have a commute that's about 30 minutes each way and 1 hour lunch every day. That's two hours I want to fill by reading printouts of interesting text and listening to interesting audio on my iPod.<p>For me PG essays would be the ultimate example of texts I want to read and Venture Voice (podcast) would be the ultimate example of what I want to listen to (others would obviously have different taste). I've gone through that stuff repeatedly and <i>tons</i> of other similar content, making it difficult to find enough new stuff to keep me entertained.<p>A site that let me assemble text-printout "playlists" and iPod playlists for a week or more in advance would be great. It requires measuring or guessing how long a given text (or book) is to see how long it would last and organizing the audio into chunks that are optimal for my given time allotments.<p>It seems kind of a weird maybe or niche, but it arose from a real problem I have and I think it could be pretty big. There has to be more people like me that want really targeted text and audio content to consume on their commute.
These have been floating about in my head for a while. Mostly social web sites but with a twist:<p>mmmbop: A Hanson based social networking site. Haven't quite worked out how this would work.<p>pandr: A social networking site for bears.<p>prson: A social networking site for like-minded people to organise crimes.<p>Feel free to use them yourself.
Macro news. I get the news in my RSS feeds and its damn near useless. <p>These events tell me almost nothing about the world. The signal to noise ratio is not good. I don't want to know that another 6 people in iraq have been killed in some incident, I want to know whether the situation there is getting better or worse, is it happening in a new area than before, does it involve a new group of people...big picture stuff.<p>This is the kind of info you typically get from reading feature length editorials but I don't have the time. <p>I want big picture news and global trends, complete with graphs and visualisations to give me perspective on an issue, delivered to me in an RSS feed. <p>Also I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to different issues that I wish to follow from start to end. <p>Already exist?
Location based gaming: playing games while moving around in your town with an iphone-like device (and having your location <i>matter</i> in-game.) You could port any kind of game to this concept: counterstrike, racing, even monopoly. Or pac-man, chasing your friends around the block. Or Sokoban, pushing giant boulders through Fifth Avenue. <p>I had this idea six years ago. I'm appalled that it still hasn't happened. Of course, very few devices have GPS chips, and operators are wary of sharing the location of their customers with random companies. But still!<p>Anyway, Loopt is a step in the right direction.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_game" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_game</a>
A better email client - automatic classification of incoming mail, understanding mailing list headers, reminding me to add attachments if I've said "see attached", understanding bounce messages and tracking them against that address in my contacts list ("You're trying to email <foo>. I see that didn't work last time. Please check the address is correct."). etc.<p>
Problem Scenario:<p>I'm a hacker. That's just how I roll. Last night I built a "digg/reddit for pictures" type of site. No sweat. But now I need someone to maintain/market/add content / etc. It's a huge pain, and I'd much rather stick to coding.<p>What would be nice:<p>Some kind of site/forum/network/etc that connects hacktrepreneurs with talented and/or cheap marketing people. (sometimes you get what you pay for; sometimes the work is just not that hard)<p>
A really good quality <i></i>standard<i></i> CSS layout.<p>I don't mean the stylesheets - no, those come later - no, I mean a really good, one size genuinely does fit all, semantic HTML layout. Does blogs, does galleries, does comments, does discussions, in a single well thought out semantic HTML format.<p>Then you have a library of CSS templates that people can use. And people can upload new templates. And each template gets checked, to make sure that it represents each element properly, and works across browsers (yep, that's a validator).<p>The business model is this: advertising on the template inspection pages, so that the "greek" text on the layout pages is all advertising.<p>Advertising is split with the authors of the pages <i>which are downloaded</i> - you copy the CSS to yer drive (downloading the zip file of the CSS + images) and the author of the template gets a cut.<p>How do you prevent fake downloads distorting the figures? Up to you, but I think you can filter based on IPs.<p>But the real key is that semantic HTML on the front end, because once you have that, it's <i>easy</i> to do the rest. But that part is a genuine hardness.<p>Or you could, you know, write the software for this:<p><a href="http://disastr.org" rel="nofollow">http://disastr.org</a>
This may be more of a pipe dream than a viable idea, but I'd like to see someone come up with a new model for an insurance company where everyone's interests are more aligned. For example, a health insurance company that paid doctors a dividend on the long term health of their patients minus costs instead of per procedure. If it worked, doctors and patients would be the ones balancing the effectiveness of treatments vs costs rather than an insurance bureaucracy. <p>Note that to prevent doctors from working with only healthy patients, they'd be paid out for improvements in health rather than absolute health.
A social music site / including music client and music store for classical music. Both last.fm and iTunes suck for classical music, which has a completely different set of concepts from pop music. Composers, conductors, orchestras, choirs, movements, etc. It's a smaller market, and the people are less technically inclined, but they're richer and less likely to pirate music.
I'm writing a practice app, which was my second idea but I think I have a better chance of getting a version 1 done quickly. (Not planning on applying to YC this round. I may be ready by next summer though)<p>Basically, it's something about MMORPGs that's never been done quite right. I'm sick of trying to explain how it should work, and want to show people instead.
A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.
A program that scours the obituaries to reverse-engineer email addresses and online identities so that people that you've met online can find out you've croaked.
a social network for couples. my married friends complain that they feel like hermits, because it's hard to meet other couples to hang out with. <p>you'd have a shared profile, which is matched with other local couples with similar tastes in movies, music, food, whatever.
Try looking for places where there is quality content and people who would enjoy that content if only they could find it. Where this occurs, there should be lots of potential to generate value, by matching people with content they might like.<p>For example, last.fm does this for music, del.icio.us/digg/reddit/news.yc for content, and I'm sure there are lots of other examples of services like this.<p>Here are two areas where such services, to my knowledge, don't exist: web comics and blogs.
No. I just like ideas. I have my own ideas, I just think it would be cool to get a list of ideas that people have but know they won't be able to work on. To prove this I'll start by listing some of my own. PG says one point of this site is to make you look like a desirable candidate for a start up so if you can list some good ideas or critique others it makes you look good. Ideas alone have very little intrinsic value on their own. The best ones are ones that can make things just not suck.
1. An online radio site that lets you select station by what mood you want to feel.
2. A website like 43things but with a timeline for each goals that tries to hold you accountable for them through social pressure.
3. An online video website that are like demo conferences where people can share their ideas.
4. A social network (or app) where users could do market research and product development for companies and get paid for their work and ideas and it would turn it into a competition.
What would be great is a way to subscribe to torrents as you do on tivo. So that my shows can be downloaded with out me having to search, Like a virtual tivo, but better. yes, that would be sweet.
A temporary phone forwarding service where you can give a number out freely but say "It will only work for seven days." Same idea as the onetime email address but for phones.
-a real estate aggregator to provide people with historical price trends on given property. Eliminate the information asymmetry between the real estate agent and the buyer.<p>-public and uploadable data warehouse, a la Many Eyes and Swivel, but with better graphic capability, something along the lines of trendalyzer. Design it in a way that rewards contributors with points to build resident 'data experts' and to enable referencing and storing of different people's analysis.<p>-web-based statistical software like SAS. allow sharing of programs through repository as well as collaborative editing.
Solve whether P=NP, but keep it a secret. Slowly mathematicians and computer scientists will go nuts wanting to know, so one day you hold a conference with an astronomical entry fee. Profit. Easy as pie.
1) a money machine
2) a nano particle assembler that encrypts the dna of its creations with a quantum computer. (does that make sense?)<p>by the way,did you know that My last startup idea was facebook?
Generic combiner of web 2.0 apps. Not the same as a personalized homepage, e.g. google's homepage. The system would work with any web 2.0 app that provided an API, and would either give users an easy plug and play method of combining the apps to create something new, with easy app discovery; or use AI to resolve general goals. Basically, SOA on a global scale.
this isn't a startup, but i want it: a flashlight on my cell phone. i'm always using my phone's screen as a flashlight in the dark, but it's not very bright and drains the battery.<p>they've got those tiny, efficient, mega-powerful LED flashlight keychains -- can't be THAT hard to integrate one into a phone.
I know this topic is really already past, but what about a fully up to date web browser. Full CSS standards compliance, JIT javascript, nice developer tools, memory models, full garbage collection, just the web browser we all want right. Pay attention because here is the interesting part. Sell it to Microsoft. This is not a web browser where you are trying to capture the market. No just sell it to Microsoft because they aren't going to fix their browser anytime soon. I imagine they can't. It's too old, and maintenance has become a nightmare. That's why their browser is so behind the times. So, they got a problem, a big one, so someone should fix it for them.
I'd also like to see visual voicemail integrated into gmail or yahoo mail or aol or any client, but real visual voicemail...with voice-to-text technology for the message to be right in your inbox and a click to call back link or button.
i don't know. find a way to take away some of the pain I feel as a computer user:<p>having to have like 30 different logins for all the sites and communities that interest me where i inevitably wind up using the same password for all of them and a similar username for most of them<p>feeling paranoid when i browse the internet on a windows machine even when i use firefox, run windows update, and avoid leet juarez d00d sites<p>being frustrated that the extension language in excel is fine for quick, minor things but doesn't scale up to real software development efforts while the users i develop solutions for have no appreciation of how craptacular VBA is<p>you can probably think of more.
Hijack that google image labelling game idea and apply it to something like WoW. Basically, make an open platform that encodes computer AI hard problems humans can solve easily into a MMOPRG format.
What you want is something that capitalizes on a basic human need, whether that means validation of existence or sex or facilitation of work, etc.<p>For me, it was dealing with frustration (<a href="http://ventations.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ventations.com/</a>), although that site's not really a startup. More of an almost-joke.
SocialNotwork.com<p>A social network for all the people building social networks. It's perfect--now they can talk about how they are building the next Facebook to people that actually believe it can be done! It will also allow you to import all of your existing social networking profiles into one place. Widgets. Video. Wikis.
"The iPod of water coolers, producing flat and bubbly water from tap water."<p>details here:
<a href="http://peterarmstrong.com/articles/2007/08/19/company-1-turn-tap-water-into-premium-flat-and-bubbly-water-via-the-ipod-of-water-coolers" rel="nofollow">http://peterarmstrong.com/articles/2007/08/19/company-1-turn...</a>
Location based creations/addons to social and dating sites. <p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137254-c,webservices/article.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137254-c,webservices/artic...</a>
I have some ideas on my blog:<p><a href="http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/</a><p>See for example this discussion on using lifecasting to encourage good behavior in a world where few people are genuinely religious (you could also combine this method with a traditional religion):<p><a href="http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/2007/07/justintv-vs-god_07.html" rel="nofollow">http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/2007/07/justintv-vs-god_07.ht...</a><p><a href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=riddles_general;action=display;num=1183768425" rel="nofollow">http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...</a>