Instead of always looking for ideas, lets try and ask this:
What problem in your industry would be a successful startup if someone decided to solve it?
Anybody who can solve fully international import and export customs regulatory compliance will be an easy multi-billionaire.
The market size for international trade logistics is staggering...you have at least a hundred global logistics providers with market caps over $10B, and more than a handful of which are in the $>100B territory. And they have trillions in revenue combined. And they are in a capital intensive industry on low margins, and they dump tens of billions every year buying companies that can give them slightly better competitive advantages. And they ALL suck at regulatory compliance.
But here is the bigger secret: The direct monetary cost of compliance isn't the big pain. What these companies pay for is delay reduction. Customs delays can drastically affect end-to-end SLAs, have a huge impact on customer loyalty (If your shitty compliance led to my product being held in port for a month, I will never use you again), and they have massive impacts on capital utilization due to how difficult it is to plan in the face of seemingly random customs delays. For an industry that is judged on Wall Street almost purely based on capital utilization (return on capital), you can bet your ass that every single one of those companies will be throwing as much money at you as they can.
I'm at one of the few truly global trade (and compliance) management software providers, and frankly it isn't simple, it isn't cheap, and it isn't sexy. Some notes from my experiences:
- Electronic source data is often unavailable
- Each country has unique and often conflicting processes
- Every company has unique and often conflicting processes
- Every port has unique and often conflicting processes
- Deployments of truly automated solutions are easily as complex as some ERP implementations
- There are many cheap point solutions to compete with
- Compliance heads are often more comfortable increasing headcount rather than buying software
- Experienced compliance professionals are crucial to development
- Experienced compliance professionals who understand and care about software are few and far between
- Logistics and compliance professionals do not play nice
- Very driven by the regulatory environment. Nobody wants to pay for compliance until they get fined.
- You'll also be expected to interface with multiple government agencies, none of whom are overly concerned with your business success.
We started Flexport.com (YC W14) for exactly this reason. It's a very hard business but we've found that we're surrounded by boundless opportunity to solve important problems in every direction. Would love to connect to learn more about your experience and see if there's an opportunity to get you involved in some way. Email me: [email protected]
A family friend runs a logistics analytics company and I'm always blown away by how complicated international shipping is. I feel like this would be an extremely complicated venture and it would not be the get rich quick scheme that VCs want and back more easily.
You'd need dedicated people to go through stuff at individual major ports, speak the language, know all the people, etc. As you rightly point out, trust is paramount, and I think trust absolutely requires people on the ground.
Can someone explain what "logistics" is? I've always just understood it as shipping and handling, and doesn't FedEx do that? (Therefore, I assume it's not shipping and handling)
Agreed, but it would be a difficult problem to solve. The technology part is straightforward.
Things happen like shipping containers showing up on the docks without a proper cargo manifest or other documentation errors, which of course leads to the shipment sitting in customs until it gets sorted out. This is because the humans creating those forms often have poor tools, and of course there's the usual factors like staff who are too busy, incompetent, or lazy (in an ideal world they should not be doing that job, but this is reality we're dealing with).
The obvious answer would be a shipping management system integrated with the company's supply chain software (typically, their ERP), but usually these problems are coming from OEMs, subsidiary companies, and occasionally 3PLs that have aren't part of the company's systems. Any integration with those systems is usually rudimentary at best, and it's not unusual for the "integration" to be human-based.
We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power generation). Each company has its own supplier registration process for procurement, usually it involves entering our company's basic financial info, customer and project references list, etc. into some kind of custom Java web application.
There should be just one place that asks us to enter our DUNS number, our tax id, upload our W8BEN form, our ISO certificate, our company contacts, our references, our company financials, etc. and then mass-submit to all supplier registration forms within the industries we want to target.
This is a really simple business problem with a clear technical solution. Honestly you could just solve it by:
- WuFoo form to collect the company's information
- Excel spreadsheet to list the vendor registration portal URLs for each company, with different industries in different tabs
- Human labor to go through and find the data from WuFoo and plug it into each supplier registration webapp.
You could make money on a pay-per-registration model. All that would be required would be a simple portal for users to see the progress of each supplier registration application. It's basically CRUD.
Maybe some ambitious company would try to innovate by building the One supplier portal to rule them all, but for now, this is an opportunity for a quick win & a business that could be run for cash.
I'll second this, before becoming a programmer I was a mechanical engineer in piping, we have tons of inefficiencies like this still. Partly it's that the people who run these industries are comfortable to keep using fax and e-mail, but another issue is that companies often don't have access to good technical knowledge to pick the right tool or develop better ones. Huge opportunity here.
Sounds interesting. I'm not seeing who the customer would be? How would you charge for it? (Feel free to email me if you want to discuss offline in more detail)
Are you looking for a way to automate the registration process on the web? Not sure if that's what you are looking for, if so I have a product that can be customized to do exactly that, can you send me a quick email in my profile?
Ever log every single sensor output (as well as 200 more) every 50ms of a vechile over an 18 hour road test while recording audio and thermal video from 2 dozen different points? How about on fleet of 40 vehicles daily, for 2 months, in the middle of Alberta or Death Valley.
Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour? And can keep up with the expected geometric growth? (I've got a decent solution for this actually currently needs to be vetted). (Also security has to provided on a per-channel basis, not per-test, T1/T2 companies need access to their test data, but not global data).
Contact me. I'm a member of the ASAM standards committee that recently met to discuss how basically every auto-producer and tier 1 has NO CLUE how do implement this. And easily 2 dozen companies are just waiting to throw money at this problem.
Currently one doesn't exist, and the solutions that do exist manage paths to raw data blobs, not actual records/data points.
If you want to know how to capture and handle automotive test data, look into process automation systems for manufacturing industry. I used to work at petrochemical facilities in 90s as process control engineer, we not only received data from Thousands of I/O inputs (for example, from temperature, flow, pressure, vibration, rpm sensors) every second to every tenth of a second, but we processed them, made decision and sent out I/O signals to controllers (for example, flow control valves). We used combination of programmable logic controllers and distributed control systems.
Talk to companies like Honeywell (I believe they do something similar to what you are trying to do for aviation industry), ABB, Foxboro, etc. These guys have been doing this since 80s.
I could go on for hours about all of this, but long story short, I'm the head of product of a company that builds a data system designed exactly to handle this kind of scenarios (we provide data collection services to Pioneer to mention one).
>Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour?
Is this data logging the changes or the states of your sensors? If it's the states, then I am guessing most of this is highly compressible. If it is actually 100TB of changes logged, then that's a pretty difficult problem.
CloudFlare has an approach that may scale to the levels you are looking for; rather than storing the logs, they analyze and rollup the expected responses in realtime, and store additional detail for items that appear anomalous. John Graham-Cumming performed a talk on this topic earlier this month at dotScale:
> a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data
Could you expand a little more on what sort of features you would like to see in a solution? I have some relevant experience and I could see myself taking a stab at this problem
Having looked at just the raw data from OBDII on a few vehicles; data format standardization there is none. Not between car makes, models, years or versions (ie 2014 Suzuki Swift vs 2014 Suzuki Swift S) - this would require either months (or years) of reverse-engineering, or unfettered access to auto maker's internal documentation (for some I know it's minimal). (Likely require partnership with the auto industry to avoid litigation.)
If you pulled that together and offered it in a usable format.. Wow.
I couldn't see a way to contact you. I was about to email you some ideas but looking at your angel.co page it seems like you'd already know how to do this?
Knowing what certifications are required and optional for a given physical product and how much it is going to cost to get said product certified for sale in a given country (like FCC, CE, CCC, etc) and how much optional certifications cost (UL, ETL, etc).
Right now the process is pretty much that you (or someone you pay) have to do a ton of reading and become an expert in import/export and RF law for any given country which you wish to sell or distribute a physical product in. Then you have to get written quotes from a few vendors who you find that actually do said testing and generally the test houses are just test houses, they don't necessarily know the laws of each country they just know how to run the tests and issue you a report, which can take weeks, at best (or you just go to the local place and it costs what it costs). But you have to know what tests to ask for.
There should just be a simple one-stop online form that you fill in your product's information and get an instant quote back with each country in the world and what's required for your product along with instant quotes (price and lead time) for each of those certifications. Then, you can check box all the certifications you want right now (likely with discounts if you pick more than one, so a live-updating pricing matrix will be useful here, and a live world map highlighting countries which you can sell in) and pay via credit card for the certifications themselves. You get in return a mailing label to ship your prototype device to the testing company along with instructions on how the testing company uses your device so they can test it.
The actual testing can be contracted out to 3rd parties. This could just be a broker, but it would have to be a broker that knows the rules of the world and can express those rules in a straight forward way along with instant pricing. The prices don't need to be the best prices, they just need to be straight forward and competitive.
As an engineer & founder going through this process right now for our product https://www.pantelligent.com/ , I understand the pain acutely. (We'll be doing a blog post about our experiences; just waiting for the testing & certification to wrap up.) It feels a bit like incorporation lawyers before https://www.clerky.com/ existed -- something that should be a fairly standardized process for 10^2 dollars rather than a mostly custom process for 10^4 dollars.
However, my experience with the test house has been different: (1) they actually do provide the knowledge and experience with regards to your specific product and needs, (2) it takes a bunch of conversation and bi-directional education to get the manufacturer and the test house on the same page, and (3) it's still fairly unique to each product. For example, we had to build custom firmware and custom hardware just for the testing process. (Remember, this isn't dealing with an efficient marketplace; this is dealing with multi-country government regulations that are designed by big companies to erect barriers to entry for smaller competitors.) And the volumes and willingness-to-pay from small hardware startups are low, and the test houses make most of their money from bigger companies that do more product variations, more iterations, etc., which requires relationship building, rather than a one-stop online form.
So, while I'd really like your version to exist as a customer, unfortunately I don't believe it's a match for what most of the hardware testing market looks like.
Having dealt with health problems this past year, I would love to see somebody write something that simplifies the voodoo going on between health care providers and insurance companies. Even though they both have online portals these days, trying to reconcile and make sense of the two systems is infuriating.
Advertizing -
Everyone is trying to get more and more information about the users without their permission by building free services or hacking it with cookies etc. So users can be better targeted with useless ads.
On the other side, its very hard to find good products online since the search results are full of SEO optimized junk.
If only there was a way to combine these two together. e.g Users could enter what they are looking for in an app and they only get very targeted advertising from business big or small inside that app. Matchmaking algorithms help make the initial connection. Think of a combination of Magic and Tinder.
I get recruiter spam pitches for ad-tech companies trying to build what you're describing every single day. they all go out of business within a year. I don't think anybody actually wants this product. I think it just sounds good (to VC's anyway) on paper.
For EU mainly, US had some alternatives like these, but they seemed to be shut down due to legal issues.
A place where I, or anyone trying to contact me, can send snail mail to. These then get scanned and forwarded to mail mailbox and/or dropbox and/or stored online with an OCR PDF.
This would allow me to
a) send my bills, invoices there
b) able to move house more easily without having to keep track of address changes.
How about advertising for small businesses? With the death of local newspapers and phone books, I'm not sure what effective ways to advertise are.
Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole. And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign.
Integrated settlement / closing software for Title companies.
The market leaders right now are God awful. Market leaders include Adeptive (Resware software), ISGN (Gators software), and Ramquest (Closing Market software).
Their platforms usually include a desktop app (not really necessary), in most corporations accessed via Citrix, or installed locally (host of issues with versioning), and an accompanying database and web application. The web app usually offers a very limited view into orders, and some limited ability to place orders and is customer facing. The desktop app is usually internal to the title company.
The amount of money spent supporting these applications is staggering. In one company I know, it's ~$3mil a year in application support alone. That cost alone would make a strong case for switching to something more intuitive. The worst part, however, is that they're also extremely glitchy. When someone misses a closing because of this software, it's a huge deal. That's somebody in a hotel somewhere, and a very unhappy bank.
Some of them suffer from insanely limited UI's, application design that is prone to database blocks, and various bugs such as accounting data updates not being wrapped in transactions and failing to update 2 tables when needed (so you get 'half' of a payment and your ledgers are out of sync).
In practice, here's all these boil down to: It's a task list (provides user with a list of tasks to complete) that has some attached functionality to help you do the task, and is customizable. The reason most are desktop apps is because the most used functionality is document preparation, which seems to be universally done in Microsoft word using templates by all these companies. They're also horribly dated.
If this could be a web app, work well, and port data over from the current market leaders into your schema, you would not have to work hard to convince title companies to switch.
I'm setting up a brand new postgres solution to replace an existing highly-tuned MSSQL solution, and the pain points are all down to differing performance profiles. I have an SeoKeywordsProfile query that takes 3.5 seconds in MSSQL, and >12 hrs on postgres. Clearly there's an index that would solve my problem, but the query is 3 pages of SQL with no whitespace!
I'd like something that could just monitor my database for a fixed period of time and tell me what indexes aren't being used, what indexes ought to be used, and make any other suggestions that might help (partition this table, vacuum that table, etc).
I want somebody to take on PTC and Rational and do for ALM what git did for VCS.
More than that ... I want somebody to make an open and hackable ALM platform that I can build my own tools on top of.
The product should be license-free (ideally but not necessarily FLOSS), so I can put it on my CI servers and VMs without worrying about license files and license administration. (Flat-fee site licenses would be OK, but anything that stops me from freely cloning VM build-machine images is a big no-no).
I want diff-able plain-text-backed requirements management, defect tracking, and project planning, with everything (or its hash) co-versioned alongside the source, so I can use my VCS to provide a coherent, branch-able, change-oriented view of project state and project history.
I want the text-based backing files to be a simple, accessible format like JSON or YAML, so I can write quick hack-tastic Python scripts to build my own development analytics and reporting tools.
I want all this because I am fed up with having to do it myself ... and because I would rather spend my time writing tools to analyze classifier performance and tune algorithm parameters without having to do so much book-keeping with difficult-to-automate requirements management and configuration management tools.
I have a theory that there are a lot of interesting and successful businesses that could be build on insights that people have gathered over the years.
For example, I would love to talk to a series of very experienced (read older people) people working in various industries what they consider the biggest problems they have to deal with. People who are on the verge of retiring.
This is why I asked the question this way, so far some really good problems to tackle.
A meta-problem for many startups: selling to SMBs at scale at a reasonable cost.
Lots of small businesses can unlock significant value with better software, and could be convinced to pay for it. But the upfront cost of acquiring those customers is too high to make it worthwhile.
If you could offer a highly-curated marketplace, you could spend the customer acquisition cost once and sell to them over and over again, so they're buying all their IT through you, trusting you to vet the products and get over their risk-aversion. You could sell bundled solutions that are guaranteed to interoperate out of the box, lowering per-transaction integration costs.
Can someone please build a good IoT solution for the home. For example, my sump pump backup battery beeps incessantly when it runs out of distilled water, sometimes in the middle of the night. I just want to have an app on my phone or laptop, showing me status/integrity of all my home devices, turn them on/off, etc.
Trustworthy "clued up" onsite engineer callouts.
One of the hard things to do is manage hardware that is in the field. Quite a few companies have awesomely great ideas but need in-field engineers to go and fix / replace / repair.
If something is going to be plugged into the wall, it will be badly fitted, upside down, unplugged by the night cleaners for her Hoover and when you are on the phone to the engineer he won't know his arse from his elbow.
Get good young people in a dozen countries - give them decent wages, half decent travel options and a training and upgrade path.
Logistics in India. If you solve this, Flipkart, Snapdeal and everyone else will buy your services. The reason for this varying state tax laws and shitty bureaucrat
Varying taxes issue is also something in the US. Wouldn't it be possible to solve it by creating a giant spreadsheet and just mapping it all out and then turning that into a service?
Some kind of trust system or network to allow assured, secure outsourcing for large financial institutions which would in turn mean lots of little start ups doing lots of little things well. Currently large banks, funds etc spend huge amounts doing back/middle office processes internally, or best case by outsourcing to similarly inefficient very large service companies. Costs are way too high. Financial experts with MBAs spend hours emailing each other spreadsheets instead of conducting their core business. The industry needs stronger mediation than that provided by simple contract law/service standards to enable outsourcing and general break up of supply chain that they are missing out on.
In my industry creating digital solutions for the construction sector is really a problem that constructor have to be more profitable. Construction is a sector that hadn’t changed so much in more than a 100 years, we still use steel, concrete and others to build things, and hire worker to do most of the activities related to that. So it will be interesting to see startup disrupting the sector with
* Online blueprints
* Budgeting tools
* Materials marketplaces
* Logistics tools
* Machinery renting
* Marketplace for workers
* New sustainable materials.
* Shared Economy solutions for the sector
* Crowdsourcing solutions for the sector
[+] [-] darksaints|10 years ago|reply
The market size for international trade logistics is staggering...you have at least a hundred global logistics providers with market caps over $10B, and more than a handful of which are in the $>100B territory. And they have trillions in revenue combined. And they are in a capital intensive industry on low margins, and they dump tens of billions every year buying companies that can give them slightly better competitive advantages. And they ALL suck at regulatory compliance.
But here is the bigger secret: The direct monetary cost of compliance isn't the big pain. What these companies pay for is delay reduction. Customs delays can drastically affect end-to-end SLAs, have a huge impact on customer loyalty (If your shitty compliance led to my product being held in port for a month, I will never use you again), and they have massive impacts on capital utilization due to how difficult it is to plan in the face of seemingly random customs delays. For an industry that is judged on Wall Street almost purely based on capital utilization (return on capital), you can bet your ass that every single one of those companies will be throwing as much money at you as they can.
[+] [-] totalrobe|10 years ago|reply
- Electronic source data is often unavailable
- Each country has unique and often conflicting processes
- Every company has unique and often conflicting processes
- Every port has unique and often conflicting processes
- Deployments of truly automated solutions are easily as complex as some ERP implementations
- There are many cheap point solutions to compete with
- Compliance heads are often more comfortable increasing headcount rather than buying software
- Experienced compliance professionals are crucial to development
- Experienced compliance professionals who understand and care about software are few and far between
- Logistics and compliance professionals do not play nice
- Very driven by the regulatory environment. Nobody wants to pay for compliance until they get fined.
- You'll also be expected to interface with multiple government agencies, none of whom are overly concerned with your business success.
[+] [-] thedogeye|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meatysnapper|10 years ago|reply
You'd need dedicated people to go through stuff at individual major ports, speak the language, know all the people, etc. As you rightly point out, trust is paramount, and I think trust absolutely requires people on the ground.
[+] [-] personjerry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matrix|10 years ago|reply
Things happen like shipping containers showing up on the docks without a proper cargo manifest or other documentation errors, which of course leads to the shipment sitting in customs until it gets sorted out. This is because the humans creating those forms often have poor tools, and of course there's the usual factors like staff who are too busy, incompetent, or lazy (in an ideal world they should not be doing that job, but this is reality we're dealing with).
The obvious answer would be a shipping management system integrated with the company's supply chain software (typically, their ERP), but usually these problems are coming from OEMs, subsidiary companies, and occasionally 3PLs that have aren't part of the company's systems. Any integration with those systems is usually rudimentary at best, and it's not unusual for the "integration" to be human-based.
[+] [-] ianlevesque|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romanixromanix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiously|10 years ago|reply
1. Acquiring Industry knowledge 2. Getting a sale 3. Developing the software
[+] [-] gargarplex|10 years ago|reply
We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power generation). Each company has its own supplier registration process for procurement, usually it involves entering our company's basic financial info, customer and project references list, etc. into some kind of custom Java web application.
There should be just one place that asks us to enter our DUNS number, our tax id, upload our W8BEN form, our ISO certificate, our company contacts, our references, our company financials, etc. and then mass-submit to all supplier registration forms within the industries we want to target.
This is a really simple business problem with a clear technical solution. Honestly you could just solve it by:
- WuFoo form to collect the company's information
- Excel spreadsheet to list the vendor registration portal URLs for each company, with different industries in different tabs
- Human labor to go through and find the data from WuFoo and plug it into each supplier registration webapp.
You could make money on a pay-per-registration model. All that would be required would be a simple portal for users to see the progress of each supplier registration application. It's basically CRUD.
Maybe some ambitious company would try to innovate by building the One supplier portal to rule them all, but for now, this is an opportunity for a quick win & a business that could be run for cash.
[+] [-] roneesh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mrfusion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perplexes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdolon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiously|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valarauca1|10 years ago|reply
Ever log every single sensor output (as well as 200 more) every 50ms of a vechile over an 18 hour road test while recording audio and thermal video from 2 dozen different points? How about on fleet of 40 vehicles daily, for 2 months, in the middle of Alberta or Death Valley.
Have a good way of querying, analyzing, processing, and securing all this time series data in a way that can handle literally getting >100TB per hour? And can keep up with the expected geometric growth? (I've got a decent solution for this actually currently needs to be vetted). (Also security has to provided on a per-channel basis, not per-test, T1/T2 companies need access to their test data, but not global data).
Contact me. I'm a member of the ASAM standards committee that recently met to discuss how basically every auto-producer and tier 1 has NO CLUE how do implement this. And easily 2 dozen companies are just waiting to throw money at this problem.
Currently one doesn't exist, and the solutions that do exist manage paths to raw data blobs, not actual records/data points.
[+] [-] w_t_payne|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akg_67|10 years ago|reply
Talk to companies like Honeywell (I believe they do something similar to what you are trying to do for aviation industry), ABB, Foxboro, etc. These guys have been doing this since 80s.
[+] [-] luckydata|10 years ago|reply
Feel free to get in touch.
[+] [-] kiyoto|10 years ago|reply
Is this data logging the changes or the states of your sensors? If it's the states, then I am guessing most of this is highly compressible. If it is actually 100TB of changes logged, then that's a pretty difficult problem.
[+] [-] tiernetworks|10 years ago|reply
http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/john-graham-cumming-i-got-...
Here is the related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778986
-G
[+] [-] splike|10 years ago|reply
Could you expand a little more on what sort of features you would like to see in a solution? I have some relevant experience and I could see myself taking a stab at this problem
[+] [-] Mandatum|10 years ago|reply
If you pulled that together and offered it in a usable format.. Wow.
[+] [-] jchonphoenix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nether|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cshelton|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradfa|10 years ago|reply
Right now the process is pretty much that you (or someone you pay) have to do a ton of reading and become an expert in import/export and RF law for any given country which you wish to sell or distribute a physical product in. Then you have to get written quotes from a few vendors who you find that actually do said testing and generally the test houses are just test houses, they don't necessarily know the laws of each country they just know how to run the tests and issue you a report, which can take weeks, at best (or you just go to the local place and it costs what it costs). But you have to know what tests to ask for.
There should just be a simple one-stop online form that you fill in your product's information and get an instant quote back with each country in the world and what's required for your product along with instant quotes (price and lead time) for each of those certifications. Then, you can check box all the certifications you want right now (likely with discounts if you pick more than one, so a live-updating pricing matrix will be useful here, and a live world map highlighting countries which you can sell in) and pay via credit card for the certifications themselves. You get in return a mailing label to ship your prototype device to the testing company along with instructions on how the testing company uses your device so they can test it.
The actual testing can be contracted out to 3rd parties. This could just be a broker, but it would have to be a broker that knows the rules of the world and can express those rules in a straight forward way along with instant pricing. The prices don't need to be the best prices, they just need to be straight forward and competitive.
[+] [-] compumike|10 years ago|reply
However, my experience with the test house has been different: (1) they actually do provide the knowledge and experience with regards to your specific product and needs, (2) it takes a bunch of conversation and bi-directional education to get the manufacturer and the test house on the same page, and (3) it's still fairly unique to each product. For example, we had to build custom firmware and custom hardware just for the testing process. (Remember, this isn't dealing with an efficient marketplace; this is dealing with multi-country government regulations that are designed by big companies to erect barriers to entry for smaller competitors.) And the volumes and willingness-to-pay from small hardware startups are low, and the test houses make most of their money from bigger companies that do more product variations, more iterations, etc., which requires relationship building, rather than a one-stop online form.
So, while I'd really like your version to exist as a customer, unfortunately I don't believe it's a match for what most of the hardware testing market looks like.
[+] [-] jakejake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fillskills|10 years ago|reply
On the other side, its very hard to find good products online since the search results are full of SEO optimized junk.
If only there was a way to combine these two together. e.g Users could enter what they are looking for in an app and they only get very targeted advertising from business big or small inside that app. Matchmaking algorithms help make the initial connection. Think of a combination of Magic and Tinder.
[+] [-] metaphorm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davemel37|10 years ago|reply
That made me laugh.
> "SEO optimized junk" This did too.
>"only get very targeted advertising from business big or small"
Wait, did I misunderstand your first points?
Seriously, is this post a joke or were you serious? I cannot tell.
[+] [-] Yeri|10 years ago|reply
A place where I, or anyone trying to contact me, can send snail mail to. These then get scanned and forwarded to mail mailbox and/or dropbox and/or stored online with an OCR PDF.
This would allow me to a) send my bills, invoices there b) able to move house more easily without having to keep track of address changes.
[+] [-] mrfusion|10 years ago|reply
Facebook doesn't seem to work too well, and adwords felt like a black hole. And besides these methods seem to require experienced consultants to run an effective campaign.
[+] [-] baakss|10 years ago|reply
The market leaders right now are God awful. Market leaders include Adeptive (Resware software), ISGN (Gators software), and Ramquest (Closing Market software).
Their platforms usually include a desktop app (not really necessary), in most corporations accessed via Citrix, or installed locally (host of issues with versioning), and an accompanying database and web application. The web app usually offers a very limited view into orders, and some limited ability to place orders and is customer facing. The desktop app is usually internal to the title company.
The amount of money spent supporting these applications is staggering. In one company I know, it's ~$3mil a year in application support alone. That cost alone would make a strong case for switching to something more intuitive. The worst part, however, is that they're also extremely glitchy. When someone misses a closing because of this software, it's a huge deal. That's somebody in a hotel somewhere, and a very unhappy bank.
Some of them suffer from insanely limited UI's, application design that is prone to database blocks, and various bugs such as accounting data updates not being wrapped in transactions and failing to update 2 tables when needed (so you get 'half' of a payment and your ledgers are out of sync).
In practice, here's all these boil down to: It's a task list (provides user with a list of tasks to complete) that has some attached functionality to help you do the task, and is customizable. The reason most are desktop apps is because the most used functionality is document preparation, which seems to be universally done in Microsoft word using templates by all these companies. They're also horribly dated.
If this could be a web app, work well, and port data over from the current market leaders into your schema, you would not have to work hard to convince title companies to switch.
[+] [-] knodi123|10 years ago|reply
I'm setting up a brand new postgres solution to replace an existing highly-tuned MSSQL solution, and the pain points are all down to differing performance profiles. I have an SeoKeywordsProfile query that takes 3.5 seconds in MSSQL, and >12 hrs on postgres. Clearly there's an index that would solve my problem, but the query is 3 pages of SQL with no whitespace!
There's https://github.com/cohenjo/pg_idx_advisor, but it only works on one specific release of postgres and not on any other.
I'd like something that could just monitor my database for a fixed period of time and tell me what indexes aren't being used, what indexes ought to be used, and make any other suggestions that might help (partition this table, vacuum that table, etc).
[+] [-] w_t_payne|10 years ago|reply
More than that ... I want somebody to make an open and hackable ALM platform that I can build my own tools on top of.
The product should be license-free (ideally but not necessarily FLOSS), so I can put it on my CI servers and VMs without worrying about license files and license administration. (Flat-fee site licenses would be OK, but anything that stops me from freely cloning VM build-machine images is a big no-no).
I want diff-able plain-text-backed requirements management, defect tracking, and project planning, with everything (or its hash) co-versioned alongside the source, so I can use my VCS to provide a coherent, branch-able, change-oriented view of project state and project history.
I want the text-based backing files to be a simple, accessible format like JSON or YAML, so I can write quick hack-tastic Python scripts to build my own development analytics and reporting tools.
I want all this because I am fed up with having to do it myself ... and because I would rather spend my time writing tools to analyze classifier performance and tune algorithm parameters without having to do so much book-keeping with difficult-to-automate requirements management and configuration management tools.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
For example, I would love to talk to a series of very experienced (read older people) people working in various industries what they consider the biggest problems they have to deal with. People who are on the verge of retiring.
This is why I asked the question this way, so far some really good problems to tackle.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
Finding trustworthy travel destinations for families that don't like all inclusive but prefer smaller boutique hotels that are family friendly.
Despite all the online travel sites that are out there its still often hit and miss how great the places we go are.
[+] [-] ef4|10 years ago|reply
Lots of small businesses can unlock significant value with better software, and could be convinced to pay for it. But the upfront cost of acquiring those customers is too high to make it worthwhile.
If you could offer a highly-curated marketplace, you could spend the customer acquisition cost once and sell to them over and over again, so they're buying all their IT through you, trusting you to vet the products and get over their risk-aversion. You could sell bundled solutions that are guaranteed to interoperate out of the box, lowering per-transaction integration costs.
[+] [-] vasilipupkin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|10 years ago|reply
If something is going to be plugged into the wall, it will be badly fitted, upside down, unplugged by the night cleaners for her Hoover and when you are on the phone to the engineer he won't know his arse from his elbow.
Get good young people in a dozen countries - give them decent wages, half decent travel options and a training and upgrade path.
[+] [-] no_gravity|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new_user_name|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForEnglandJames|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] songshu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabad79|10 years ago|reply