Ask HN: Niche ideas for a scalable platform project?

Hi all, I am currently working on my final BSc paper, which deals with the design and implementation of a scalable platform. By "platform," I refer to the type-3 platform, as per Marc Andreessen [1]: "the platform provides the ‘runtime environment’ within which the app's code runs." Well-known examples of such platforms include Google AppEngine, Heroku, and Force.com. You might as well assume this platform is running on an infrastructure cloud, such as Amazon EC2. Now, as you can imagine, this is a complicated topic. My initial approach was quite pragmatic: I could try to build a platform for running casual web applications and document the design decisions. Optimizing resource usage is integral to this as well. However, I then started to think that I could approach the problem from the practical side. What would people like to use a platform for? How would it solve their problems? Therefore, I'm looking for your crazy ideas. Web applications aside, these sound interesting: - A platform for high-frequency trading (I know this is hard); - Hosted voice applications (like Twilio, but code runs inside the platform); - A platform for service integration (providing/consuming web services, mainly). In the end, this might involve creating a domain-specific language, providing a tight integration with other systems or hardware, etc. Looking forward to your comments. [1] http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-three-kinds-of-platforms-you-meet-on-the-0