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Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

• tmaly 6y ago
  There is some potential for commodity hardware with AI to spawn some innovation in the maker space.
• artemisyna 6y ago
  Threads like this is cause 2/3rds of it will end up being “what’s something that folks have heard about in the news but hasn’t gotten big (enough for more press) yet”. Rephrased, this question is also more of a product-market fit one (“which market exists/will exist but doesn’t have its demand satisfied yet”), whereas a lot of answers are focused on the tech.
• strikelaserclaw 6y ago
  webassembly
  • halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
    Lol, I wish as well but people have been saying this for the past 3 years.
    • mgamache 6y ago
      I think there still performance issues when manipulating the DOM. When those get worked out (and they will), it may change the velocity of adoption.
  • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    Why will it take off in the next couple of years? Any changes coming?
    • mgamache 6y ago
      see my comment above re DOM.
• mcilai 6y ago
  Deep learning will continue to surprise
  • supernova87a 6y ago
    Nice try, GPT-3.
• grahoho 6y ago
  Augmented Reality. Apple seems poised to release some AR Glasses based on the patents they've been registering and the investment they've made in the ARKit framework. This will probably become another iPhone-like platform for developing apps on, and will likely present opportunities like the early days of the App Store. There's a cool project trending on Github right now showing how magic-like some of the technology in this space is: https://github.com/cyrildiagne/ar-cutpaste https://github.com/cyrildiagne/ar-cutpaste
  • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    can you recommend some AR people i should follow on Twitter?
    • Balgair 6y ago
      Anyone at PTC should be good: https://www.ptc.com/ https://www.ptc.com/
  • nbawal 6y ago
    I think it has been tried unsuccessfully many times. There is even a Silicon Valley episode about it. Certainly it does not fit the "non-obvious" criterion. Apart from gamers, people just don't want it.
    • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
      I would disagree. Before iPhone, all the phone vendors and telecom vendors tried to create their own sketchy "platform". Also I would say "apart from gamers, people just don't want it" is the same reaction as people who didn't understand what a "horseless carriage" would be used for when it was invented.
    • replies-to-fool 6y ago
      Aside from gamers, shopping apps are starting to use AR to preview items in one's own house. I think the IKEA app currently does this for furniture. This might be somewhat niche area though.
• ahelwer 6y ago
  One idea I've had (heavily influenced by The Diamond Age, I must admit) - a premium video game experience where NPCs you meet are sometimes voiced/acted by actors hired real-time on-demand with face or even body mocap. The NPCs revert back to regular AI versions if an actor is unable to be hired at that time. The player could interact by speaking with their own voice, naturally role-playing the scene. This would of course be astonishingly expensive, but people are clearly willing to spend a lot of money on video games these days so there might be a market. You could create the company providing the real-time on-demand acting service to whatever game company wants to integrate with your services, either contracting or hiring actors to wait around for requests. They could even work from home if their internet setup is good enough. Reasons this sector might take off: recent greater consumer spending on video games (especially with the pandemic) & their normalization as a field of entertainment, recent greater consumer spending on online services where you pay to interact with actors (although they're all of the, er, amorous type), and the growing popularity of mixed reality driven by the release of Half Life: Alyx.
  • nafix 6y ago
    That's a really cool idea. You should pursue it.
    • ahelwer 6y ago
      Sadly my specialty is in formal methods and distributed systems and I don't think I have any domain expertise: * No knowledge of acting or actors; never even been to LA * Never worked with mocap technology * Never worked with video game development * Never worked with voice or streaming services Maybe I can pick up some of this as a hobby. Anyway it's not really a novel idea (like I said, you can read this exact concept in The Diamond Age, a very popular novel among the tech crowd) so I'm sure someone is trying it. Who knows, we'll see in a few years!
  • Guest19023892 6y ago
    I don't think this makes sense for a number of reasons. 1. As you said, the costs involved. You'd probably need to charge people something like $10 per interaction with a voice actor, plus $2 per minute. This makes for a very limited market. 2. Actors need to be waiting for a request on a wide range of characters since there would not be enough demand for them to consistently play the same character all the time. So, when a player triggers an interaction, there's going to be a delay as the actor is brought up to speed on their role, the person they're interacting with, the world they're in, etc. 3. When players return to a NPC, they'll likely be assigned a different actor since the previous one is either in another call or not working. This kind of ruins the premium interactions since the player remembers the voice and small details of the last conversation, but now the NPC has suddenly changed. 4. You're in the business of matching up adult voice actors with children playing games. You'll need a record of every single conversation because it's only a matter of time before you get reports of inappropriate conversations unfolding. 5. This isn't a long term business. Technology gets better each day at speaking and understanding human voice. It will replace the voice actors and it also solves all of the above issues.
• badrabbit 6y ago
  Starlink+Drones. People using apps like cashapp to ditch traditional banks leading to loans and other financial activity to be done over these newer apps.
• ape4 6y ago
  Generically engineered plants for the home
  • brianhorakh 6y ago
    You mean "genetically"? They already are.. Like roses, or most patented strains. Lots of research into cannabis. What do you think these plants do?
    • wtracy 6y ago
      This is what genetic recombination has made possible in tropical fish in just the last ten years: https://www.glofish.com/ https://www.glofish.com/ I don't doubt we will see CRISPR and friends applied to ornamental plants the way they are already applied to food crops.
      • brianhorakh 6y ago
        Actually: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-crispr-non-gmo-method.html https://phys.org/news/2020-05-crispr-non-gmo-method.html
• plexiglas 6y ago
  Social media retirement services.
  • single_source 6y ago
    What do you mean by this one? Retirement homes for social media influencers? Cleaning up social media posts from defunct platforms a la Myspace?
  • TrueGeek 6y ago
    Is this social media for the elderly, or services to help you close down your social media accounts?
  • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    This sounds logical but do you think it will be mainstream as in Instagram level mainstream? Maybe a bit more explanation will be helpful.
  • chrisgoman 6y ago
    Whole cottage industry of this following AA/NA model called Social Media Anonymous. You could have camps, meetings, therapy, etc
    • jpindar 6y ago
      And you'd definitely want an app, where people could chat, share their stories... :)
• sritrisna 6y ago
  Specialized Accounting / Bookkeeping Services.
  • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    Can you elaborate? And why do you think it will go mainstream in the next few years?
    • gverrilla 6y ago
      probably AI
• cprayingmantis 6y ago
  I think small to mid scale farm ag-tech is going to become huge in the next decade. We already see large industrial farms making use of more and more tech what happens when that tech scale shrinks down.
  • brianhorakh 6y ago
    I work on this. Ai driven garden appliances. Biogensis accelerators. This type of tech is hard to make reliable and user friendly. Requires a lot of sensors and lab equipment to be engineered, mass produced, user friendly and reliable. One discrete failure and it kills the crop.
    • jppope 6y ago
      Whats your company called? I'm very interested in this as a hobby. Farmbot, small robot co, etc
  • dx87 6y ago
    Same. I think covid has made a lot of people question the idea of relying on a few large suppliers for all their needs, and expect we'll start seeing neighborhood farms to provide supplemental produce in preparation for future events that cause long-term disruptions to daily life.
• searchableguy 6y ago
  No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It's wasted time and effort for something that is cookie cutter in functionality and limited in scope (vast majority of web). Some of them provide collaboration tools, development environment and experts on call which is neat. Add ease of outsourcing, too. The employer doesn't have to worry about maintenance once the product is finished. Many good platforms will allow you an easy migration path and better security controls. That comes at a vendor lock in. That's the price but given the life expectancy of smaller companies and startups, it may as well be worth it.
  • patentatt 6y ago
    No-code/low-code is definitely reaching a crescendo of buzz in the legal tech market right now. Which is funny because it’s an idea as old as computers themselves, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit still left.
  • catmanjan 6y ago
    No code = someone else's code, it's been around forever, used to be called cots
    • dTal 6y ago
      And "cloud" means someone else's computer, been around forever, used to be called mainframes. Didn't stop it from being a marketing explosion.
      • SahAssar 6y ago
        In the "cloud" space I think the difference was being able to sell it as a commodity and in as large or small chunks as the client wanted, not the concept itself. Not sure what the equivalent in no/low-code would be.
• CharlesDodgson 6y ago
  In the crypto world there is a lot of hype around DeFi (decentralised finance) like everything in crypto it a mix of good technical ideas, lots of marketing bd, and a host of obnoxious bros. At the heart of it though there are really interesting things around liquidity. I will be boring now and say that Cloud services will continue to expand, it's effectively a tax on doing work on the internet and start-ups love using cloud, the idea of maintaining your own servers is considered silly unless their is some particular reason to. I expect to see growth of 20% yoy in that sector for the top 3 players. Azure, GCP and AWS.
• blhack 6y ago
  Distributed IT/office that services remote workers in their homes. Pay a fee and you get access to a pool of desks, chairs, computers, and an IT/office staff to come to your house and maintain it and set it up. In that vein: tooling to manage remote workers.
• mrfusion 6y ago
  Space tech, things for mars. (Elon is going to need a lot of help) VR development. It really hasn’t hit mainstream yet and when it changes how we work that could be huge. I think AI based procedural generation of games. Seeing how good gpt3 is getting this seems like it could be huge. AI based personalized education. Have you seen how well gpt3 can explain concepts? Could something like that also evaluate your understanding, come up with custom learning plans?
• dvh 6y ago
  Elysium
• bovermyer 6y ago
  Open agriculture.
  • brianhorakh 6y ago
    Every farmer i talk to about this doesn't store their data in compatible formats (yet) There are no standards.
    • jppope 6y ago
      why is that?
      • brianhorakh 6y ago
        Requires skills in both science and tech that only commercial farmers have, big companies don't share good. Plus Lots of data points, proper measurements require self calibrating "field suitable" lab equipment that doesn't exist or is highly cost prohibitive. Im actively spend 60+ hour weeks solving this. Have been for almost three years (im solving for spacex/mars missions, but it'll work here on terra firma too) Expect to see early prototypes in 2022.
        • jppope 6y ago
          any links to your work or way I can follow what you are doing?
    • bovermyer 6y ago
      That's not what I mean. Commercial agriculture is heavily dependent on, and influenced by, companies that zealously guard what they see as their intellectual property. When I say "open agriculture," I'm referring to protecting free experimentation and open seed culture.
      • brianhorakh 6y ago
        More likely we'll move away from seeds towards sharing clones of rooted cuttings. Much more predictable. Open cutting exchange is a good idea actually. Trace genetics.
• zamboni-killer 6y ago
  Smart Tattoos. Color E-ink displays. Eventually: holographic VR.
  • brianhorakh 6y ago
    I tried to get a smart tattoo (design my own, long story). Metallic inks aren't safe. Nonstarter. All sorts of nasty issues with xray, cat scanners and airport backscatter machines.
• barnabee 6y ago
  Electric aircraft for shorter trips instead of trains. The battery energy density still needs to improve somewhat but that is happening. They’d allow for serving more direct (point to point) routes than trains as the infrastructure cost is so much lower than laying and maintaining tracks. Rail serving high volume routes still makes sense, especially while electric plans remain relatively small.
  • SahAssar 6y ago
    I might be wrong but this seems like a very US-centric idea. For most of the developed world trains fill this need very well, while the US has had problems with their rail network for reasons partially based on geography, partially based on population density, and partially based on their own fault. I think this explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ The solution is not aircraft, the solution is more and better trains. Or perhaps autonomous buses/trucks depending on how far out you look.
    • wtracy 6y ago
      IDK, high-speed rail doesn't seem to be taking off outside of Europe and a handful of Asian countries. That leaves most of Asia outside India/China/Korea/Japan, and pretty much all of Australia/Oceania, Africa, the Middle East, and the entire New World. I would love to see high-speed rail take over the world, but there's a lot of sparsely-populated places out there, and it makes sense to investigate technologies to support them.
      • SahAssar 6y ago
        Sparsely-populated places are the cheapest places to build rail, both because of land prices and also the cost of labour. I think that for any volume of passengers over shorter distances that would be large enough to mandate a regular airway it would be cheaper to build high-speed rail. At least over the long term the economics of scale should take over and besides that a rail network is more useful for shipping of goods than a airport would be. In the US it'd require similar effort/cost as the Interstate Highway System did, but would probably yield equal economic benefit.
• brianhorakh 6y ago
  Hombrew advanced material fabrication (especially with graphene) Open lab equipment. Open Sensor designs.
  • brianhorakh 6y ago
    Also demand for solarpunk architecture and design themes, also those incorporating smart biological controls (probably uv filters and Biocidal surfaces) for at least a few years after covid.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• EE84M3i 6y ago
  Honestly, why would anyone share a good idea here? I get it that ideas are cheap, but if someone actually thinks they have slam dunk they're not going to share it on HN.
  • RivieraKid 6y ago
    Ideas may be cheap but they can be insanely valuable.
  • jppope 6y ago
    I think the argument is about market trends not IP/company ideas... still a valid criticism though
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • skmurphy 6y ago
    Some folks--including many on HN--have many more insights or "good ideas" than they can execute on. If they want to see them come to fruition they are not harmed by giving away a substantial fraction of them that they don't plan to execute on but still see the possibility of and need for. See http://blog.fogus.me/2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approach-to-open-source/ http://blog.fogus.me/2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approac... or https://www.nickbentley.games/the-100-10-1-method-for-game-design/ https://www.nickbentley.games/the-100-10-1-method-for-game-d... for two descriptions of a 100:10:1 model. There are other models.
  • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    Well I was asking for technology/market, not ideas. Unlike most people who say ideas are worth nothing, i do believe both ideas and execution matter. That said, just sharing information on what market looks attractive and what tech looks promising is not even an "idea".
  • quickthrower2 6y ago
    The slam dunk will look like meh to everyone else. It’s the idea AND the insight that counts.
• cryptica 6y ago
  Existing technology business models will be adapted and re-launched as services which are coupled to cryptocurrency tokens. Also, we may see the rise of cryptocurrency communities which attempt to manipulate company insiders and governments to gain control of the proceeds of production to drive the value of their cryptocurrencies. Private property rights will be eroded (due to lack of enforcement and increasing systemic corruption) and so cryptocurrency, which offers a cryptographic means of ownership (which does not rely on law), will gain increasing significance. The proceeds of production will no longer go to shareholders, they will be diverted to cryptocurrency holders. The shareholders who embrace this mindset of moving profits to cryptocurrencies will see their ownership stake of company profits increase at the expense of those who resist this shift. In the end, nobody will want to own stocks since they will no longer yield profits. Corporations will behave like non-profits; the profits will be funneled to cryptocurrencies. All of this will be completely legal and almost everyone will support it. In 10 years, this will be completely obvious. We are in a post-scarcity economy. Wealth creation will have little to do with productivity and everything to do with redefinition and redistribution of existing ownership rights. We will see cryptographic ownership rights surpass legal ownership rights. Once this new, highly fluid, decentralized financial infrastructure is firmly in place, the transfer of wealth will end up facilitating a new wave of massive decentralized productivity with a stronger focus on social principles.
  • cryptica 6y ago
    If you're downvoting this, you are probably missing the fact that this already started. Ethereum has already managed to infiltrate many companies and these companies already started diverting some of their profits to buying up Ethereum. Even Reddit is getting into Ethereum. This is just the beginning.
    • biolurker1 6y ago
      HN crowd has a lot of crypto deniers. The funny thing is that HN leaders like literally PG, Googl Bosses, Zuck and Marc Andreasen are very bullish on it. So it doesn't take much to realize who is right
• jacknews 6y ago
  Beyond meat, fake milk, etc.
• jacknews 6y ago
  Asteroid mining.
• jacknews 6y ago
  Using AI to identify breakout technology or trends that are set to go mainstream. The benefit is that the operators of said technology can 'invest' in that bandwagon and reap piggy-back profits, while mitigating the inherent risk of actually developing those technologies or trends from scratch.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• NathanFlurry 6y ago
  Web 3/Dweb minus the crypto built on IPFS (or something similar). I believe many developers will soon come to realize that you don't need a blockchain to build most decentralized applications. Products like like Google Docs, social networks, messaging app, etc don't depend on a proof of stake, and we shouldn't be running miners to power such simple operations. All these applications need isa decentralized form of message distribution and log storage paired with public-key cryptography in order to build a CRDT log. I understand why IPFS in itself at first glance often seems over-hyped, since it is essentially just a hyper-distributed caching layer. However, I highly recommend looking at technologies built on top of it like [OrbitDB](https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db) and [Textile](https://textile.io/ https://textile.io/). When they work reliably, their API is as easy if not easier than other "server-less" products like Firebase or Parse to use. Once libraries like these become mature, I believe the way we build software will be flipped on its head within 10-15 years to be completely client focused with minimal backend infrastructure. The main advantages I see are: * Increased reliability. This allows developers to remove almost all of their centralized servers and rely instead on a common infrastructure and protocol. * Much simpler codebases and infrastructure. You only need to write a frontend for most applications. Building on u/searchableguy's comment: I can see no/low code tooling really taking off with decentralized-first applications, since there is no need to manage a complicated backend infrastructure with vendor lock-in. * Real-time by default. Since IPFS databases run off of CRDT logs which rely on realtime syncing of new operations, they are benefit from immediate updates at all times – even when not connected to the main swarm out in the boonies. * Offline-first by default. * Cost/resource efficiency. No technology is magical, but [this](https://withblue.ink/2019/03/20/hugo-and-ipfs-how-this-blog-works-and-scales.html https://withblue.ink/2019/03/20/hugo-and-ipfs-how-this-blog-...) article from March is an early real world demonstration of how well this technology works already. * Transport agnostic. It's completely feasible to have your watch, your phone, and your laptop have their IPFS nodes connected over Bluetooth, but never have to worry about if and how they're connected together since IPFS takes care of handling that P2P connectivity automatically. Instead of writing code that says "my watch created a reminder, upload this to the cloud for my laptop and also tell my phone this happened if we're connected," I can just write "my watch created a reminder, broadcast this operation to the IPFS network" and your phone and laptop will automatically receive this update. * Security. The less that is stored on centralized servers, the better. While OrbitDB is not built to work off an encrypted database yet (it's in the roadmap for v1), Textile already is. Having everything be encrypted by default and optionally never leaving my device has many advantages. The main challenges I see blocking this from going mainstream: * Reliability still feels like the early days of the internet. The database-level libraries are still young, IPFS is slow/unreliable at times, and browser support is fairly strong but still has a way to go, and native mobile/native support is nonexistent. * Filecoin is not ready yet. You still need to run your own IPFS node/swarm in order to do anything serious. Existing pinning services can only go so far if you're working with something like OrbitDB. * Education. Security is of upmost important when designing technologies like this, so developers need to understand how a CRDT log works, how to build with merge conflicts in mind, and how to write/manage custom ACL for complex interactions. It also takes a different way of thinking to design networks like this. * Reliability and security audits. * Transport protocols. At the moment, many of the advantages of P2P over things like Bluetooth have not been realized yet since the IPFS core is still where most of the development is focused at the moment. * Cross-platform support. IPFS only has an official Go and JavaScript node implementation with a Rust implementation in the works. While Go has become fairly portable in recent years, it still has a very bloated runtime that doesn't embed well on mobile and web. Once we have a reliable Rust port and some OrbitDB-like Rust-based libraries ports, I suspect we'll start seeing ergonomic mobile and web APIs that bind to these popping up. To be clear, I'm not saying centralized servers will vanish in to thin air. There are many tasks like indexing large amounts of data that are incredibly difficult and not beneficial to build on a distributed network. The decentralized web – if done right – will make developers' lives much easier for many common applications, but there should not be a need to port things that aren't practical to run on the Dweb. [Edit: Formatting]
• jwitchel 6y ago
  Disaster mitigation products and services. Tools that enable better management of things that go bad. Nat disasters are obvious but also think ransomware, medical disasters, covid of course. Think insurance but also detection, contact mapping, probability models for fires, resource dispatching, hedging for financial impact, remediation planning. Disasters seem to be regrettably a growth market these days.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• gramakri 6y ago
  Personal home servers
• frabcus 6y ago
  It's worth understanding the kind of disruption you mean - product to product, or product to commodity. Simon Wardley has a blog with lots of posts about this. Also his free book about Wardley Mapping is useful for understanding the phase changes of bespoke to warring products to commodity. For specific ideas, see "Figure 2 - Wars" in this Simon Wardley blog post (written five years ago, diagram is I think ten years old so you can validate early parts of it): https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/on-two-forms-of-disruptions.html https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/on-two-forms-of-disrupt... We're currently just come through war phase (when there's fierce competition to own commodity versions and lots of new innovation gets built on top) of Big Data. From the diagram, the next wars Simon reckons should happen about now (and I can't find a post where he explains how he made that diagram) are: * Sensor as a Service (think radically better health or environment sensors, detecting important trace molecules cheaply) * Robotics (I guess think Ocado warehouses, or Shenzhen factories) * Currency (digital can change this in ways other than Bitcoin, depending on your politics too) Then the phase after that in 5-10 years time are: * Internet of Things (I'm guessing by then the microcomputers might be *so* cheap and network *so* easy they literally go in everything) * Immersive (VR/AR I think) * 3D printing (it's not very good or cheap yet, it will be) * Genetic Engineering, GMO * Social Change (not clear what this means, but certainly you can look around the world and see the demand) You can look for yourself for more. For slightly longer term, worth knowing the word "spime" as something to head for as well.
• objectReason 6y ago
  Neural input devices could become a thing in the next few years. I, for one, would love to have a wearable which could translate neural signals into text and directional input - in lieu of a keyboard and mouse. My inevitable carpal tunnel could stop advancing. Thanks to newly available hardware like MyoWare, affordable neural sensors have become available to garage tinkerers. I think it's simply a matter of time before we're all interfacing with our computers and phones via wearables. http://www.advancertechnologies.com/p/myoware.html http://www.advancertechnologies.com/p/myoware.html
• objectReason 6y ago
  A potential game changer in the 3D printing space is Rapid Liquid Printing or (RLP). Why is it exciting? Normal 3D printers have to build from the ground up, one layer at a time. It wastes a lot of energy and time because the print head paths are restricted to one plane. In RLP, by contrast, prints are made in a bath of gelatin, the printer head is freely able to move in 3 dimensions allowing it to take the most direct path to form prints. No wasted movement = less time and more structurally sound parts. RLP was developed by MIT a few years back and I haven't heard much from it since. Maybe that will change over the next few years. https://selfassemblylab.mit.edu/rapid-liquid-printing https://selfassemblylab.mit.edu/rapid-liquid-printing
• user_501238901 6y ago
  Video games of some sort, where the game map is a 1:1 replica of the real world using streamed GIS data. The new microsoft flight simulator is already kinda there.
• pajop 6y ago
  Check out https://practicum.substack.com https://practicum.substack.com and also this Twitter thread of futurist sites https://threader.app/thread/1296654041569570819 https://threader.app/thread/1296654041569570819
• UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Rapid tests you can do at home for a variety of viral illnesses, initially for COVID-19, but expanding to a wider variety of viruses and virus types. Being able to track viruses in real-time will become a priority to attempt to thwart future pandemics.
• jbpnoy6fifty 6y ago
  X-as-a-service platforms that allow companies to perform segments of their oprations either with ease, or outsource it. It's been the big thing for a while, but still continues to grow. Basically, these are tools to make it faster and faster to spin up a business from scratch, by allowing those companies to focus more on the product itself rather than refactorable non-essentials. They may also offer value-added features such as "network effect" ability to optimize that packaged solutions, or a platform that allows them to provide quicker no code/low code Analytics to identify trends to be able to make business decisions accordingly. Examples of companies that do this. * AWS (infrastructure) * Salesforce * Azure * Pagerduty * Splunk * DevOps as a service companies * HR as a service Also, I recommend not caring about what's new, hot, and shiny; it's best to really understand market fit, and market potential; and build something "useful"
• josefrichter 6y ago
  Human body sensors -> API -> ML for diagnostics, neural control, etc.
• skmurphy 6y ago
  Privacy - Duck Duck Go may overtake Google at some point. Better Email management tools, use existing transport but allow you to manage 1,000 to 10,000 inbound messages in an hour of work. Note: this is not mean to offer encouragement for more to send 10,000 outbound messages or fall into Uncanny Valley of Email Automation (see https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2015/03/25/the-uncanny-valley-of-email-automation/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2015/03/25/the-uncanny-valley-...) IoT / Mirror World / Smart City / Digital Twin / Cyberspace is everting Sensors are woven into more of the natural world and the built world. Opportunities for services and better management and governance of natural and built world. Implications for Privacy. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2017/04/19/cyberspace-everts-into-the-real-world-as-iot/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2017/04/19/cyberspace-everts-i...
  • kevindong 6y ago
    > Better Email management tools, use existing transport but allow you to manage 1,000 to 10,000 inbound messages in an hour of work. What single person receives that many emails in any given hour?
    • cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
      Exactly. the problem with email tools is that it's built by people who think everyone receives thousands of emails. 99.999% of the world only receives less than 10 emails per day. They have no such problem as "information overload" when it comes to email.
      • skmurphy 6y ago
        The people and businesses who have the problem are willing to pay a lot to solve it. It's a high value problem to solve. If your competitor(s) could process the equivalent of 10,000 inbound messages a day would they be able to maintain a higher level of situational awareness on early trends and harbingers? Could they uncover and address opportunities before you became aware of them?
    • skmurphy 6y ago
• brudgers 6y ago
  Film photography.
  • foopod 6y ago
    Agreed. This is definitely a growing market today, I don't see why it wouldn't continue to grow. There are many areas that haven't been improved upon in decades as well. Things like.. + Negative Scanning Technology (the most revered scanners are from 10+ years ago) + New Film Emulsions + Moving from gelatin to a plant-based substitute for gel emulsions + Opportunities for automation in film processing
• shahbaby 6y ago
  SpaceX's Starlink + Increasing acceptance of remote work = A significant shift away from congested cities towards more rural areas