Robots are still rising. Drones too. Voice recognition for everyone with Siri and the equivalent on Android. Natural language queries in Wolfram Alpha.
Biggest innovation in my mind is the concept behind KickStarter. Literally revolutionizing marketing, fundraising, and the product development process.
I think that everything you directly mentioned is incremental improvements over the last decades (electric cards, SSDs, 3d printing, tissue printing, DNA/RNA microarrays, 3d motion detection, RaspberryPI and Arduino [which are more mass production and extra firmware plays than anything], etc).
However the io9 link's contents are the f-ing future and they didn't even scratch the surface. Our understanding of biology is getting better and better, automation is finally starting to get wide acceptance both in industry and academia, and there is so much work being done by universities today that was pure science fiction only a decade ago.
The future is sneaking up on us quietly, and once it's here, there's no going back :)
Out of all those things you listed, self-driving cars and maybe - just maybe - 3D printing are the only truly exciting things, at least in terms of their potential to be disruptive.
What a meta post. Arrington complaining about a problem his site perpetuated by popularizing consumer tech. [1]
Maybe TechCrunch should step away from the desk/SF and put more reporters in other cities on the ground, instead of relying on so much inbound pitching? Technology, used loosely, is becoming an everyday aspect to many businesses so maybe TC also needs to reconsider their editorial position, too. [1]
There are tons of other companies in cities around the US (and world) less interested in getting caught up in the SF noise. Spending PR budget to target TC just for some ego exposure amongst select group of peers at the cost of a less targeted audience isn't a wise decision for most.
Austin has quiet a few smaller but sustaining tech companies doing pretty interesting things on a regular basis; $AWAY, $BV, $SLAB, Chaotic Moon, Mass Relevance, and numerous other fresh startups like Outbox [2] and DailyDot.com. I'm sure same is true for other cities.
I suppose you're right. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. For years, they wouldn't fund or write about anything that wasn't a me-too product, and now he complains that there's nothing but me-too products.
Everyone in the tech world is going bananas over the same stuff. Technology helping technology: things that make Facebook easier/harder to use, things that make software development easier/harder to do, mobile this-that-and-advertising.
BOOOOOR-IIIINNNGGG.
The companies that are doing actually interesting things are using technology to make non-tech stuff easier/better/faster/brighter: Uber, AirBnB, Zipcar, that female-led startup connecting farmers with buyers, etc.
Technology for technology's sake is done and boring and short-sighted. We've got news aggregators that aggregate other news aggregators. Mobile ad platforms that resell ads from other mobile ad platforms. Photo-sharing apps whose entire purpose is to create filters for other photo-sharing sites. And it's all ad-supported.
Arrington's right: it's all just the same thing over and over, and it's boring. And I never thought I'd agree with Arrington about anything.
That startup is Vegetality. And why would it matter if it was started by a woman in this context? (I can't wait until ~50% of startups are by women and it's not considered exceptional.)
when singularity suddenly comes, all articles will be obsolete before being written; as soon as arrington starts to type their first letter. so there won't be any time to be bored.
so enjoy getting bored, because after singularity you will only be perplexed and petrified. (unless you are upgraded or modified)
> I love how Arrington, Thiel, Graham, and others spent years talking about how you don't need any college, promoted quick-buck social media startups with no plan, and kids fresh out of high school, and now they are sad there is no flying cars. [...]
Humans have been talking about flying cars since the 60s. If we would have had them by now, their creators would have been educated well before Thiel Graham and Arrington.
Sure, we only got self-driving cars, almost flawless speech recognition, concordant natural language queries, "Minority Report"-like UIs, Google Glass, space flight at 1/10th of the previous cost, 1GB fiber to the home, dramatically cheaper solar power, garage gen tech, 22nm chips, we did a spectacular landing on Mars, working Exoskeletons, the technology to find planets that are only slightly bigger than earth,...
And Mr. Arrington is bored? Maybe he's just not paying attention.
Most of what you mentioned came from big companies with a $billion or more. Mike is an Investor. When he says that innovation is not happening, its probably because he is not seeing good ones starting up, i.e a new comer with an amazing idea. We'll see the effect a few years from now, when most great products come from Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple. It is probably that way already.
Every decade has had a game changer who came in from no where. Who is going to take away the 201x?
Besides speech recognition and natural language queries, all the tech you cited is not yet distributed. And as someone wiser said "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". So I'd discount the impact of tech demos like Google Glass, at least in the short term. Long term OTOH, I'd like to be as optimistic as possible.
Mike Arrington is bored with blogging. Does that mean he'll stop?
Personally I think we're on the edge of a revolution, with the rapid shrinking (and increase in power) of computers, and Google boldly pushing into some pretty deep AI.
Intelligent personal assistants. Self driving cars. Wearable augmented reality.
There's going to be a lot of exciting stuff to write about in 2013.
The Spirit autonomous tractor[1] becomes available to farmers this spring. I guess driverless vehicles are not exactly radical by now, but the fact that you can actually put your money down on one today is still pretty amazing to my eye. Though I guess it might not be all that interesting through the SV-centric lens.
2013 is also going to be a big year for Healthcare IT, the HHS is moving to open up clinical patient data via HHS. I doubt Google will venture again into the healthcare space, given the recent failure of Google Health, but it's going to be a turning point, they should have waited until the end of 2013 to close it down!
Kenyans now have $50 smart phones that exceed all but the latest phones in capability. We have $50 android tablets. We have reached a sort of technological plateau where stuff we consider awesome advanced technology is more available than clean drinking water. The great stagnation cometh, the center holds, things stick together more strongly than ever.
I seem to recall reading a few weeks ago that VC money was starting to move towards B2B companies. If that's true, you're not going to see a lot of exciting tech blog worthy start-ups. You will see a lot of progress in software, and real people will be receiving real value. In fact, i view that as a really positive thing. We don't need another social network enabled live drawing text-pad that opens a door. However my fiance definitely needs some software to reduce some of the redundant unsexy work she has no time to do
As a software dev currently thinking through my 'next thing,' I find this opinion refreshing. There's a lot of redundant and me-too software and it's far too easy to fall into the trap of building another mobile/social/geo/photo app.
I think hardware makers are doing a great job of pushing the envelop, but software not so much.
The question is, what's next for software? At the time Twitter came out, it was brand new...amazing...innovative. I can't recall feeling the same about anything since.
My own personal belief is that embedded software is going to be the next thing, but the problem there is the barrier to entry is a bit higher, both in terms of knowledge base and financial cost. That said, tech like Bluetooth LE is making it easier than ever to try.
> My own personal belief is that embedded software is going to be the next thing
I've started hearing that embedded software control via cheap Android tablets ($50-$100)/hardware interfaces is beginning to take off and reducing the barrier to entry. Pretty much, you can use a $75 Android tablet to control an embedded device and drive the user interface. iPads are, frankly, a bit too expensive for most hardware applications.
If I had the energy, I would champion an open-source project for niche hobbyists who want to program a particular type of hardware (assuming their particular hardware has some kind of serial/network relatively-open, documented interface - something like ZigBee but less complicated maybe) but aren't necessarily programmers. Build the project such that the UI and hardware control layer run on Android - and can be abstracted out from the actual hardware later. The UI is not going to be snazzy looking (sliding menu) but reliable looking - like an industrial control but maybe a bit better.
If you allow me a small anecdote... I used to live in Manhattan. Occasionally, I would go to the store to get paper towels or toiletpaper and buy the bulk-size. Invariably, the package would be too big to fit in the small plastic bags that were available and carrying it along with everything else was rather awkward. Last year I moved to Turkey, and one of the first things that I noticed is that all of the bulk-size packages of paper towels and toiletpaper have built in carrying straps.
Now, this may seem like a very, very minor thing (and it's not unique to Turkey). On it's own it says nothing, but the longer I've been away from the US, the more and more I've noticed just these sorts of little things. It's the sum total of these "little things" that indicate to me that the US has, on a very fundamental level, stopped innovating.
Oh, sure, the US will continue to produce new things. It'll probably even produce one or two big new things in the next couple years, but it's not the big things that drive the innovative spirit. Gather enough smart people in one place, give them enough time and enough money, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get a major innovation (or, at least a driverless car).
You'll also waste an enormous amount of resources. A society that is innovative at its core has only to foster that innovation, in any small way, to get a far greater return on investment. In short: America has a tremendous head start, but America has become complacent. The "next big thing" just might come from somewhere where the people are still hungry.
I bought bulk-size toilet paper at a Target in St. Louis and the cashier taped a plastic handle to it as she rang it up. Fear not - the US is still advancing the state of the art in toilet paper delivery.
I think you're drawing too much from that observation. It says more about the market in the Turkey than the innovation in Turkey.
Geographically-targeted versions of items are custom tailored for desires of local markets. Even if we assumed none of the TP brands in Turkey are multinational corporations, do you really think that the carrying strap idea wouldn't have been nicked by companies that do sell to other markets?
Living in NYC and buying a big pack of toilet paper is an outlier as far as the US is concerned. Anywhere else in the states you would put the pack it in your shopping cart and roll it directly to your car door.
For all we know, those straps could have been designed in the States, and the bean-counters decided adding the straps to the case manufacturing process is only cost-justified in plants serving an average population density of X and above.
I only bring this up because I have, in the past, been working in the States and built better versions of products for sale exclusively in Europe.
Spoken like a brat spoiled by an embarrassment of riches. Even if one grants that not much innovative has happened since the iphone was released in 2007, and other comments have already falsified this claim, 2007 really isn't that long ago. We're talking about an event that completely changed the way people interact with mobile devices and consume content. A seismic shift that resulted in the rise (Apple) and fall (Nokia/RIM/Sony) of empires. How often do we expect that to happen? When did it last happen before 2007?
As anyone here can attest, innovation is hard -- really hard. I'm a nobody and I see this firsthand in my daily life. I've been working on a side-project for years that I hope will change the world and planned on building a proof of concept prototype last weekend. I expected to be done with the prototype in 2 days. It took over a week. A quarter of the way through construction, the code for the prototype just kept getting more and more complicated and kludegy, even though I thought I had designed it well enough to be straightforward. Although, I eventually had to redesign the whole thing, the final design ended up being much better and more reusable than the original POC I had planned. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could spend time to rethink the design. There were plenty of stories in 2012 to blog about where products were released half-baked because they were released too early.
I suspect we will see many interesting things in 2013, much of which has been incubated and polished during the time that Michael thought nothing was happening.
> A seismic shift that resulted in the rise (Apple) and fall (Nokia/RIM/Sony) of empires. How often do we expect that to happen? When did it last happen before 2007?
Looking back, I was more surprised by the rise of Google (and Android/Linux) in a world dominated by Microsoft. But at 28, I'm probably just a little older than you.
I'd also argue that the reason the last milestone was in 2007 isn't because of the iPhone, but because that's just before the global financial superbubble popped (foreshadowed by the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble in 02). IMO, that was the earthquake which stymied true attempts innovation. Many people stopped trying to innovate and starting worrying about finding a safe place for their retirement fund (still are), or worse, finding a job.
Shoot me an email u feel like sharing your POC project with a fellow dreamer.
Peter Thiel actually talked about this in one of his CS 183 lectures at Stanford. He categorized progress as vertical vs. horizontal. Vertical progress can be defined as a problem of going from 0 to 1: you manage to do something totally new. Whereas horizontal progress is a problem of going from 1 to n, as in replicating an idea that has already been proven to be successful.
Thiel said that most of our vertical progress comes from Silicon Valley, which I agree with. But I think SV also has a lot of horizontal progress, which is what Arrington is complaining about. Everyone and their mother is working on a social app, and every software company is going apeshit about mobile. Granted, tech news coverage is probably skewed in favor of horizontal progress, since vertical ideas by definition are so brand new and "out there" that most people would dismiss them as crazy. Still though, it would be great if someone came up with the next technology as innovative and groundbreaking as the iPhone or, to a slightly lesser extent, the iPad.
There is so much amazing creation happening right now. Unfortunately for TechCrunch, it doesn't have, nor aspire to, $5 million seed funding, so TC won't hear about it.
Oh, tech bloggers. Never happy. I think we should all try spending more time away from our devices. There is so much more to life than those glowing rectangles.
As a founder, it's often better to start where your own pain points are, because sometimes you'll stumble upon an incredibly massive pain felt by the entire world. Now you're ready to do business.
Be advised, however, because even if you manage to identify one such sharp pain point, and even if you have a solution, only rarely will you successfully be able to repackage it and market it to the masses. But to put in perspective, if you're working towards an affordable solution 99% of the world is compelled by extreme pain to use, you might very well be working on a billion dollar business.
The question is, when are more startups going to realize that the biggest pain in the room is as clear as day? It's right in front of every single one of us. It's only a matter of time before people in massive numbers realize that 24/7 surveillance of all telecommuncations isn't fucking cool. People are already flocking to VPNs to get around downloading restrictions, so what happens when people realize they need a VPN to send a private email? Here the truth is contagious, and government elements can only repeat lies successfully for so long. The problem of the surveillance state is the very definition of sharp pain:
Compared to the markets for cosmetic surgery, real estate, knee pain, back pain, ANY market you can think of - the prospect of having all of your telecommunications stored indefinitely if not monitored in real time by regimes teetering on the edge is an order of magnitude more concerning. When you consider that a 24/7 surveillance state by definition constitutes neverending pain, it's really no contest.
Unwanted, unconstitutional surveillance measures are creating a seering hot, absolutely intolerable pain for the entire human population. This is a pain that demands a solution, ASAP.
As a startup and as a developer, there are very few pursuits more worthy of your time than furthering human rights and averting absolute tyranny.
Curiously, thanks in large part to Bitcoin, the startup community now has the power to fund itself anonymously and innovate solutions that actually matter, without outside interference.
What are these pain points related to the rise in surveillance you mention. This seems to be an article of faith on HN: that lack of privacy protections, increasing amounts of personal data being aggregated, and intensifying surveillance is creating a perfect storm of bad consequence for civilians at large.
But I never hear about what the harm is except for the exceptional cases. Anecdotally, none of my aquaintances has had a single adverse life event that can be attributed to these trends.
On the other hand, adverse events related to money/jobs, health issues, issues with intimacy and social isolation, being too busy: these are daily occurrences.
I'm bringing this up here just because your post reminded me I wanted to run this question by the HN community.
> I don’t want to read any more stories about how Facebook cloned something they couldn’t buy. Or that Twitter banned something that they tried to buy but Facebook got there first. Or the press regurgitating how Google+ is somehow not flailing. Or about the number of Android v. iPhone devices. Or Samsung’s patent mishaps. Or how Yahoo is winding down things in Asia.
The funny thing is that techcrunch is one of the most guilty sites when it comes to writing about these things.
We didn't get flying cars at $250,000/car. We got 140 characters for free because that's what people wanted. We didn't get hoverboards, not for lack of technology, but it just turned out that we wanted to search the world's knowledge with Google.
We're frogs in boiling water, not knowing just how innovative we're becoming as a people. And sci-fi writers are just bad (or as bad as typical entrepreneurs) at guessing what people want.
Well, good sci-fi writers don't try. As Ursula Le Guin puts it,
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually
charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by
futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and
futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|13 years ago|reply
Robots are still rising. Drones too. Voice recognition for everyone with Siri and the equivalent on Android. Natural language queries in Wolfram Alpha.
Cheap, reliable 3d motion detection via kinect.
3d printing. Tissue printing and a $99 genetic scan https://www.23andme.com/
Cheap SSDs.
Self driving cars.
Raspberry Pi boards.
iPads (I had to check that one - the first iPad launch was just recently in April 2010!) and competing Android and windows tablets.
github.
* Or these lists:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/27-science-fictions-that-beca...
http://io9.com/5971328/the-most-futuristic-predictions-that-...
* Things that were new and not so well known in 2007, but are big now:
The rise of online education via Khan academy, Coursera and Udacity.
Workable electric cars.
Twitter.
Arduino boards.
git
[+] [-] lubujackson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akiselev|13 years ago|reply
However the io9 link's contents are the f-ing future and they didn't even scratch the surface. Our understanding of biology is getting better and better, automation is finally starting to get wide acceptance both in industry and academia, and there is so much work being done by universities today that was pure science fiction only a decade ago.
The future is sneaking up on us quietly, and once it's here, there's no going back :)
[+] [-] enraged_camel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bodegajed|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akkartik|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxlpshr|13 years ago|reply
Maybe TechCrunch should step away from the desk/SF and put more reporters in other cities on the ground, instead of relying on so much inbound pitching? Technology, used loosely, is becoming an everyday aspect to many businesses so maybe TC also needs to reconsider their editorial position, too. [1]
There are tons of other companies in cities around the US (and world) less interested in getting caught up in the SF noise. Spending PR budget to target TC just for some ego exposure amongst select group of peers at the cost of a less targeted audience isn't a wise decision for most.
Austin has quiet a few smaller but sustaining tech companies doing pretty interesting things on a regular basis; $AWAY, $BV, $SLAB, Chaotic Moon, Mass Relevance, and numerous other fresh startups like Outbox [2] and DailyDot.com. I'm sure same is true for other cities.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/31/seven-apps-that-will-keep-y...
Don't I have the USA Today and Mashable for this? Did AOL make this decision?
[2] Saving the USPS. http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/business/988285-464/austin-st...
[+] [-] nhangen|13 years ago|reply
Thanks for finally waking up Michael.
[+] [-] jeffclark|13 years ago|reply
BOOOOOR-IIIINNNGGG.
The companies that are doing actually interesting things are using technology to make non-tech stuff easier/better/faster/brighter: Uber, AirBnB, Zipcar, that female-led startup connecting farmers with buyers, etc.
Technology for technology's sake is done and boring and short-sighted. We've got news aggregators that aggregate other news aggregators. Mobile ad platforms that resell ads from other mobile ad platforms. Photo-sharing apps whose entire purpose is to create filters for other photo-sharing sites. And it's all ad-supported.
Arrington's right: it's all just the same thing over and over, and it's boring. And I never thought I'd agree with Arrington about anything.
[+] [-] ebiester|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminish|13 years ago|reply
so enjoy getting bored, because after singularity you will only be perplexed and petrified. (unless you are upgraded or modified)
[+] [-] raphman|13 years ago|reply
> I love how Arrington, Thiel, Graham, and others spent years talking about how you don't need any college, promoted quick-buck social media startups with no plan, and kids fresh out of high school, and now they are sad there is no flying cars. [...]
https://plus.google.com/110412141990454266397/posts/YLXqGgpc...
[+] [-] akiselev|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] groby_b|13 years ago|reply
And Mr. Arrington is bored? Maybe he's just not paying attention.
[+] [-] Jayasimhan|13 years ago|reply
Every decade has had a game changer who came in from no where. Who is going to take away the 201x?
[+] [-] ovi256|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dholowiski|13 years ago|reply
Personally I think we're on the edge of a revolution, with the rapid shrinking (and increase in power) of computers, and Google boldly pushing into some pretty deep AI.
Intelligent personal assistants. Self driving cars. Wearable augmented reality.
There's going to be a lot of exciting stuff to write about in 2013.
[+] [-] randomdata|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.autonomoustractor.com/
[+] [-] fatalerrorx3|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
There's no exit strategy, though, so VC aren't interested.
[+] [-] swalsh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_s|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallflower|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
[+] [-] nhangen|13 years ago|reply
I think hardware makers are doing a great job of pushing the envelop, but software not so much.
The question is, what's next for software? At the time Twitter came out, it was brand new...amazing...innovative. I can't recall feeling the same about anything since.
My own personal belief is that embedded software is going to be the next thing, but the problem there is the barrier to entry is a bit higher, both in terms of knowledge base and financial cost. That said, tech like Bluetooth LE is making it easier than ever to try.
[+] [-] wallflower|13 years ago|reply
I've started hearing that embedded software control via cheap Android tablets ($50-$100)/hardware interfaces is beginning to take off and reducing the barrier to entry. Pretty much, you can use a $75 Android tablet to control an embedded device and drive the user interface. iPads are, frankly, a bit too expensive for most hardware applications.
If I had the energy, I would champion an open-source project for niche hobbyists who want to program a particular type of hardware (assuming their particular hardware has some kind of serial/network relatively-open, documented interface - something like ZigBee but less complicated maybe) but aren't necessarily programmers. Build the project such that the UI and hardware control layer run on Android - and can be abstracted out from the actual hardware later. The UI is not going to be snazzy looking (sliding menu) but reliable looking - like an industrial control but maybe a bit better.
[+] [-] j45|13 years ago|reply
Celebrating funding like winning the Startup Lottery is only going to feed the monster of hype vs real innovation.
Is it just me?
[+] [-] jballanc|13 years ago|reply
Now, this may seem like a very, very minor thing (and it's not unique to Turkey). On it's own it says nothing, but the longer I've been away from the US, the more and more I've noticed just these sorts of little things. It's the sum total of these "little things" that indicate to me that the US has, on a very fundamental level, stopped innovating.
Oh, sure, the US will continue to produce new things. It'll probably even produce one or two big new things in the next couple years, but it's not the big things that drive the innovative spirit. Gather enough smart people in one place, give them enough time and enough money, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get a major innovation (or, at least a driverless car).
You'll also waste an enormous amount of resources. A society that is innovative at its core has only to foster that innovation, in any small way, to get a far greater return on investment. In short: America has a tremendous head start, but America has become complacent. The "next big thing" just might come from somewhere where the people are still hungry.
[+] [-] syncopatience|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbs|13 years ago|reply
Geographically-targeted versions of items are custom tailored for desires of local markets. Even if we assumed none of the TP brands in Turkey are multinational corporations, do you really think that the carrying strap idea wouldn't have been nicked by companies that do sell to other markets?
Living in NYC and buying a big pack of toilet paper is an outlier as far as the US is concerned. Anywhere else in the states you would put the pack it in your shopping cart and roll it directly to your car door.
For all we know, those straps could have been designed in the States, and the bean-counters decided adding the straps to the case manufacturing process is only cost-justified in plants serving an average population density of X and above.
I only bring this up because I have, in the past, been working in the States and built better versions of products for sale exclusively in Europe.
[+] [-] hexagonc|13 years ago|reply
As anyone here can attest, innovation is hard -- really hard. I'm a nobody and I see this firsthand in my daily life. I've been working on a side-project for years that I hope will change the world and planned on building a proof of concept prototype last weekend. I expected to be done with the prototype in 2 days. It took over a week. A quarter of the way through construction, the code for the prototype just kept getting more and more complicated and kludegy, even though I thought I had designed it well enough to be straightforward. Although, I eventually had to redesign the whole thing, the final design ended up being much better and more reusable than the original POC I had planned. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could spend time to rethink the design. There were plenty of stories in 2012 to blog about where products were released half-baked because they were released too early.
I suspect we will see many interesting things in 2013, much of which has been incubated and polished during the time that Michael thought nothing was happening.
[+] [-] kylebrown|13 years ago|reply
Looking back, I was more surprised by the rise of Google (and Android/Linux) in a world dominated by Microsoft. But at 28, I'm probably just a little older than you.
I'd also argue that the reason the last milestone was in 2007 isn't because of the iPhone, but because that's just before the global financial superbubble popped (foreshadowed by the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble in 02). IMO, that was the earthquake which stymied true attempts innovation. Many people stopped trying to innovate and starting worrying about finding a safe place for their retirement fund (still are), or worse, finding a job.
Shoot me an email u feel like sharing your POC project with a fellow dreamer.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|13 years ago|reply
Thiel said that most of our vertical progress comes from Silicon Valley, which I agree with. But I think SV also has a lot of horizontal progress, which is what Arrington is complaining about. Everyone and their mother is working on a social app, and every software company is going apeshit about mobile. Granted, tech news coverage is probably skewed in favor of horizontal progress, since vertical ideas by definition are so brand new and "out there" that most people would dismiss them as crazy. Still though, it would be great if someone came up with the next technology as innovative and groundbreaking as the iPhone or, to a slightly lesser extent, the iPad.
[+] [-] edw519|13 years ago|reply
You'll never be bored again.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lubujackson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swanlegs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miami-dade|13 years ago|reply
Be advised, however, because even if you manage to identify one such sharp pain point, and even if you have a solution, only rarely will you successfully be able to repackage it and market it to the masses. But to put in perspective, if you're working towards an affordable solution 99% of the world is compelled by extreme pain to use, you might very well be working on a billion dollar business.
The question is, when are more startups going to realize that the biggest pain in the room is as clear as day? It's right in front of every single one of us. It's only a matter of time before people in massive numbers realize that 24/7 surveillance of all telecommuncations isn't fucking cool. People are already flocking to VPNs to get around downloading restrictions, so what happens when people realize they need a VPN to send a private email? Here the truth is contagious, and government elements can only repeat lies successfully for so long. The problem of the surveillance state is the very definition of sharp pain:
Compared to the markets for cosmetic surgery, real estate, knee pain, back pain, ANY market you can think of - the prospect of having all of your telecommunications stored indefinitely if not monitored in real time by regimes teetering on the edge is an order of magnitude more concerning. When you consider that a 24/7 surveillance state by definition constitutes neverending pain, it's really no contest.
Unwanted, unconstitutional surveillance measures are creating a seering hot, absolutely intolerable pain for the entire human population. This is a pain that demands a solution, ASAP.
As a startup and as a developer, there are very few pursuits more worthy of your time than furthering human rights and averting absolute tyranny.
Curiously, thanks in large part to Bitcoin, the startup community now has the power to fund itself anonymously and innovate solutions that actually matter, without outside interference.
The clock is ticking.
[+] [-] b1daly|13 years ago|reply
But I never hear about what the harm is except for the exceptional cases. Anecdotally, none of my aquaintances has had a single adverse life event that can be attributed to these trends.
On the other hand, adverse events related to money/jobs, health issues, issues with intimacy and social isolation, being too busy: these are daily occurrences.
I'm bringing this up here just because your post reminded me I wanted to run this question by the HN community.
[+] [-] Too|13 years ago|reply
The funny thing is that techcrunch is one of the most guilty sites when it comes to writing about these things.
[+] [-] jjb123|13 years ago|reply
We didn't get flying cars at $250,000/car. We got 140 characters for free because that's what people wanted. We didn't get hoverboards, not for lack of technology, but it just turned out that we wanted to search the world's knowledge with Google.
We're frogs in boiling water, not knowing just how innovative we're becoming as a people. And sci-fi writers are just bad (or as bad as typical entrepreneurs) at guessing what people want.
[+] [-] icebraining|13 years ago|reply