1) Cleaning the data as it comes in rather than in batches so we can use it sooner, invalid data is discarded, outlier detection, normalizing inputs etc....
2) Warehousing of the data with proper indexes so you can perform some advanced queries on unstructured data
3) Some data is sent in bulk at the end of day, some of the data is streamed in fire hose style. How can we preprocess the fire hose data so that we don't have to wait until the end of the day to parse it all.
4) Oh and all of this data is unstructured and comes from 75 different sources.
Soon the average hedge fund will have more people just cleaning and managing data than they do in quantitative research, dev ops, software development and trading.
Oh and lots of the data is considered proprietary so while AWS/Azure, etc is fine, sending it to a third party to process is not.
TL/DR Help me, I'm drowning in data. How do I get the time from when I acquire data to when I trade based on it down to a reasonable time frame, where reasonable is closer to hours rather than days/weeks.
We threw every rule out the window in the name of performance _when fetching raw data from external sources_. So we had weather station networks, NOAA forecast runs and NASA satellite data in a workable schema in our shop way faster than average. Mix of C, PowerShell, Perl, and the nonstandard parts of T-SQL, highly parallelized, tricky but fast.
After the "workable schema" was established, the rules came back and we acted more responsibly. Smart instead of clever.
Ran this stuff all day long, getting every piece of data asap. Things that can only be calculated with a full day of data we poked and prodded the meteorologists to express in "partial aggregates", which to me were just like the map steps before an EOD reduce.
Took a lot of mutual understanding and iterating but worth it in the end. When the ultimate data source (satellite or radar site for us) posted its last hour of data, we were 95% done with the day's computation work. We do our last step, publish our numbers, and bam, Our ag clients have this stuff a day earlier than they are used to.
It's a native streaming platform so your data will be cleansed, processed, scanned for outliers event-by-event rather than in batches. We have dozens of streaming connectors IT/Enterprise/Web data sources. We also support initial load for your firehose data. For unstructured data, we have support for RegEx based parsers.
Shoot me a message if you have any more questions. We have many big name users in Aerospace, Banking, Device manufacturing, and Logistics industries.
I have seen local companies working for months/years to finally use his BI package but the trouble at the step 1 is big (and also, to put the data in a "nice" schema).
The problem is that enter in this space is hard. Years ago I was at a company that have a niche product (in foxpro) for this kind of task, and I have dreamed about build something like this based in my experience, but get the funding for this kind of "boring" task is hard (more in my country, Colombia).
P.D: If wanna help, we can talk. I can't give a magical solution but at least I find this kind of "boring" jobs compelling ;)
https://www.holistics.io/data-preparation/
And on the part about firehose data, you might already know this, but Kafka and their line of work should be aligned with what you're after.
Check out my company, SnapLogic: https://www.snaplogic.com/
I don't know much about Paxata but I think Trifacta are well-regarded in industry and academia. Trifacta founders worked on research / open-source-? project Data Wrangler http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/ and turned it into Trifacta.
I don't know much about either product in truth.
1. The UX is subpar. It insists on running in only a single tab at a time, and attempts to open multiple tabs will instead override whatever it considers to be the master tab. This is a huge pain, because I often need to have a mapping workflow open in one window and some other relevant part of the application open in another. Instead I have to save, go find the thing I want, and go back. Another problem is that when working with data sources containing tons of fields, there's no easy way to search.
2. It offers an expression language to perform some computational tasks, similar to what you'd find in Excel, but it's hamstrung by a poor UI and a limited amount of functions. The built-in editor for expressions is really poor (see Tableau for an example of a great editor for a simple Excel-like language; it even has type linting) and, unless I've misunderstood something, you can't declare any variables so you end up with huge nested expressions. There aren't many functions available, so something as simple as removing whitespace ends up as lstrip(rstrip(foo)). In combination with no support for statements (or at least a let expression like in lisp) this makes any nontrivial data munging completely indecipherable.
I've looked around in this space and it seems like there are a variety of products, but the supplier of our main CRM will only support Informatica Cloud. I think that a company that can offer a product that does what you've said but makes a serious effort at UX could cause users to revolt and demand to use it! I know the joke is that Slack is just a pretty IRC with better UX... but that's exactly why it has become so successful.
In terms of data munging, take a look at Microsoft's Power BI. It's visualization software but it has a nice data munging mode that, crucially, keeps track of all the changes you make and displays them in a linear format. This is great for getting a quick idea as to what was done with the data and is essential for doing reproducible data analyses. Unfortunately, Power BI also suffers from poor UX in insisting on tiny fonts and gray-on-gray palettes that are totally unreadable to anyone over 30.
Omg, so many sales pitches. You should figure out which of those were automatically generated by someone who's bot is crawling HN and using NLP to find posts like this, and then hire them. There's basically 0 chance that isn't happening...
Sounds like a job for Apache Camel?
www.watchful.io
+scaleable
Problem solved on all points.
100% fully functional, fully featured, 100% free download right from the website.
Disclaimer: I work for splunk.
Everyone I know in law is dissatisfied with every part of their tech stack. If someone could come up with an integrated SaaS solution, and be SUPER careful about compliance... they would be printing money.
It's a Sisyphean task. They are, as a rule, extremely anti-technology and conservative. At a previous startup, we had built software which was saving customers many hours a week—yet it was still an uphill battle to get paying approval.
If even after all the warnings in this thread you really want to build legal software, focus on disrupting lawyers instead of selling to them.
In general, law and media are two of the worst fields for technology.
But here's the real problem for anyone looking to innovate in that space: the customers. Lawyers are as a rule anti-technology, slow to adapt new techniques, and set in their ways. Worse yet, they just bill their clients for their shitty software like Lexis or WestLaw, so they aren't even personally motivated to reduce costs.
The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
Note: perhaps my experiences aren't representative of the industry as a whole.
Workers Comp, Social Security, Family Law, and elder law in general aren't as glamorous. Clients for those services don't have such deep pockets as the other corners of the law do.
It's likely that a good SaaS-based system with embedded knowledge of jurisdictional rules (in the US, federal and state rules) could be successful.
But the sales cycle for a new product? Getting early adopters? Prepare for some pain.
Not familiar with the space, but seems like what you are describing.
1. A better system for automation and measurement. Current solutions aren't ideal when it comes to setting up new systems as well as updating and maintaining existing systems. We build several million dollar facilities a month and each one has automation and measurement equipment that has to be individually set up and programmed. Each technician does things a slightly different way, and the end result is a different set of automation and measurement logic at each facility.
2) Fiber optic DATS (distributed acoustic and temperature sensing) data handling and interpretation. This is a fairly new type of technology in which a fiber optic line is installed in the wellbore. The fiber optic line basically acts as a 15,000' strand of thermometers and microphones placed every 3'. The data from one installation is on the order of terabytes per hour. Oil and gas service companies that offer this service don't know how to handle this amount of data. The problem could probably be solved with S3 or something.
3) Drilling optimization. Create a software suite that utilizes ML/AI to help drilling engineers figure out the best way to drill a well is. It's a perfect ML/AI application. Lots and lots of training data available, easily defined input and output parameters, etc. Drilling engineering is full of hard, non-linear problems and humans are just really bad at it. The only way to be good at it is to drill lots and lots of wells and then listen to your gut.
If you are interested in helping us understand the problem and potentially solve it together contact me at kozikow@tensorflight.com
I am work with technology that might be useful for this type of application. Thanks!
Every time I change jobs as an H1-B employee, I've to fill in the same ridiculous data with every law firms weird interface. I wish the US Digital Services would focus on streamlining forms and having auto-import from all the data they already have about me (e.g. automatically translate I-94 records to how much time I actually spent in the US, infer my past I-797 records automatically, have a one time education related upload since that obviously never changes). I realize there are certain valid reasons the agencies don't share data, but I find that hard to believe in an era of infinite surveillance, they can't use the surveilled data to at least make my life easier. I can see how the immigration law industry would never allow this, but I can hope.
The green card process is another minefield.
Also for Schengen countries, I've to apply for a visa every time I travel, and they make me list every time I visited the Schengen zone in the past 5 years, fill out the same application form across different countries, and get the same paystubs and letters from employers. Even a tool that could just machine read all the documentation a particular country requires for a specific visa, and just goes and pulls everything that can be pulled (bank statements, pay stubs, fill in travel dates based on the flight ticket emails in my inbox, hotel reservations and so on.) Just make it convenient for me to travel :)
Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineering.
The software for that kind of modeling is apparently pretty basic, pretty expensive, buggy, etc.
Where I would invest (if I were Autodesk or their competitor) is in releasing CAD tools for free in exchange for a consent to use the designs/details internally for ML purposes. Would love to contribute if anyone is working on such a product.
We are working since 1.5 years with some engineers on a software to solve this: www.valispace.com
I would be curious to hear from you whether what we are building with a focus on the space-industry also applies to structural engineering.
(For what it's worth, I'm doing something similar in the transport planning space. And yes, bridging the gap between that and modern CS is a substantial piece of work.)
My management style is like this: every task/request is numbered, placed in a queue and assigned to a professional.
What I expect from my ticketing system:
- every manager should be able to assign tasks to someone and set the order they must be executed. He needs know what his team is doing and when they finish each task. - every professional should know what to do and what are the priorities. - everything is numbered and linked, all communication recorded.
Everything should be well integrated with email (please, don't send me a notification email about an answer and an url, send me the f* answer). If I answer the email, everything goes into the system, I should be able to send commands to the system by email (for example, add a keyword in order to make it a comment instead of answering).
Personally, I think the optimal ticket system would have this data for each ticket:
* A unique, prefixed ticket # (JIRA gets this right)
* An assignee (like an email To:)
* A reporter (like an email From:)
* A one-line summary (like an email Subject:)
* A multi-line body (like an email body, but ideally with markdown)
* Attachments (like email attachments)
* History for edits of all of these (not like email!)
That's it! It really is basically email, but with a unique ID, and editable with history instead of immutable with replies, and a decent UI, perhaps RSS + notifications.
Unfortunately, everybody else seems to think that their ticketing system should embody their vaguely defined and ever-changing workflow, prioritization, approval, and release management system, so they want to be able to add any number of possible statuses, approvals, workflows and and all the rest. Once you add that, you end up with another JIRA or ClearQuest or BugZilla, and the cycle repeats itself.
http://www.storytotell.org/constraints-and-semantics/
In a nutshell, I argue that the problem with most ticket systems is that they do not constrain the domain enough, so they wind up having similar problems to email (sifting through a chronologically-ordered pile of text rather than structured, semantically-ordered information).
Your comments make me think the crux of the problem is that people want tickets to be like email and use email to manage them. I'm not sure you can ever overcome the "chronological pile-up" problem if you allow email as a user interface to ticketing.
Full disclosure: I'm part of the maintainer staff.
[1] https://github.com/zammad/zammad/ [2] https://zammad.com
For my latest startup I went looking for a service desk tool. The key criteria was "feels like email". The moment any alternative required a user signup just to lodge a support request, I ruled it out.
I ended up choosing Groove. I don't recommended it. All ticketing systems suck, this one just sucked the least for my support desk. Groove doesn't extend to other ticket types, and it's nowhere near as flexible or extensible as JIRA, and the mobile experience is horrible. But it does "feels like email" for my customers better than every alternative you care to mention.
That sounds like unnecessary micromanaging. You couldn't possibly have enough detailed knowledge to know the proper order of tasks in all cases. Possibly even most cases.
I agree that communicating the priorities are important, but the boots on the ground have a much better understanding of what they're working with than you do.
I don't know about you, but I despise filling out the same forms over and over again when seeing new healthcare providers. I'd love to start a service modeled after granular smartphone permissions where
(a) I check in at a new office (scan a code, they scan my code, beacon, something like that)
(b) the office then requests x, y, and z information
(c) a push is sent to my phone where I can review the information and approve or disapprove some or all permissions
(d) a final step of either entering my pin at the office, using my thumbprint on my device, or something else.
The key components would be storing the data encrypted at rest, following HIPAA and then some, having a solid auth protocol (keys, jwts, etc).
I think adoption would be helped because the public are already used to permissions like these when installing apps.
The benefits are a lack of paper trail, no one is going to not shred my SSN, my most up to date data is now available, and instead of hosting N apps/databases, I'm storing 1 and can reduce my maintenance, customer support issues because one for all, all for one.
Edit: edited for readability.
I'd suggest something much more low-tech - a website where you can punch in all your details - insurance, allergies, medical history, etc, etc... and then you can print it out (or a subset of it, for different kinds of providers) or generate a PDF that they can copy & paste into their horrible legacy system (an improvement on retyping), or, for those truly at the cutting edge - the kind of electronic transmission you speak of.
They also offer identity document verification with facial recognition crosscheck. They want to use this to detect visa overstayers for immediate deportation.[3] That now looks like a market with potential.
[1] http://www.card-reader.com/medical_cards.htm [2] http://www.acuantcorp.com/autofill-software/ [3] http://sandhill.com/article/its-high-time-we-build-border-te...
Edit to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Vitale
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rancar2
I would love to hear from anyone else with big ideas relating to or are working on driving outcomes towards holistic wellness with patient-center healthcare, patient data collection/quantified self, and patient-powered research networks. In the bigger picture, I am passionate about making the world a better place through innovation and working on what really matters for humanity.
"So what happens when the Douglasses are no longer around? We have every reason to believe that we'll be around for a good long time, but we wanted a plan to provide for our loyal customers just in case we aren't so lucky. So we made one.
Here is how the plan works. Immediately upon learning of our deaths the executors of Dick's estate (his two highly computer literate kids) will post two files on our www.compmngr.com web site and will send out a broadcast email advising our customers how to download the files. The first file is a small standalone computer program called RegisterEvent.exe, which allows you to create your own registration files. So you won't have to register with Douglass Associates and you won't have to pay a registration fee. You can read more about RegisterEvent and how to use it below. The second file is a ZIP file containing all the source code for COMPMNGR and its supporting programs. This file will only be of interest to those few users who want to continue COMPMNGR development and who either know C++ programming or or willing to hire a C++ programmer."
Would it? See, here's a dirty little secret: people can't deal with change.
Any change made to the software means people have to learn something new. And that results in tech support.
I once had a very nice chat with the CEO of a CNC company and asked him why certain features weren't implemented since his hardware was clearly capable of it. He was quite blunt that a single new feature added about 30% to his tech support budget for almost 3 years, and his tech support budget was almost 1/3 of his annual budget.
So, he simply will not add a feature until it results in an expected 500K in increased revenue or he has to fend off a competitor.
> Still, it's a real opportunity.
Is it? Actually?
And do you know ballroom competitions well enough to get all the corner cases correct? The Douglasses have been to a LOT of competitions and probably wrote this because they got tired of the grief caused by badly run competitions.
How many ballroom competitions exist (<1000)? How much are they willing to pay (<$1000)? And how much will tech support cost?
So, this is less that $1,000,000 per year in revenue MAX. And, this software is already in place with people know how to use it.
Your revenue will likely be $10-20K per year for a long while unless you completely displace this. And they can always drop their prices and block you out if they feel like it. And your tech support costs will be quite high.
I suspect the Douglasses made this same calculation and that's why they aren't improving it. It's just not worth the money.
See http://www.topturnier.de/ for what he is doing.
If one would like to do something in this space I'd go with a solution where you can rent the equipment, get it shipped to you in boxes and ship it back later. For larger organisers you could arrange for leasing options or an on-premise installation that has an auto-update.
The advantage would be to provide offline capabilities including a controlled network environment for adjudicators.
It looks like it's offered for free now. The thing with this kind of software, is it must be "good enough" for the task.
Geez. Small world.
I would suggest we make a monthly of these as they provide important insight into industries.
Perhaps Quarterly?
Think somewhere on the order of 10,000 models per day throughput.
There's $BNs waiting for you. It's ridiculously hard.
I assume that process would be easy to speed up if the requirement for absolute accuracy was removed. The 8' ROMER arm we use is accurate to ~!2 microns over its entire volume which is absolutely overkill for something intended to produce models for visual arts applications. A quick and dirty approach to generating the mesh might increase the inaccuracy by several orders of magnitude but when coke can has dimensional tolerances to the tune of tenths of a millimeter, the quick and dirty mesh will still be representative of the end product.
Who would be the primary customers? The entire 3D capturing market is currently several $B per year, including services. Where would be the customers that aren't getting served today that would double this market?
http://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/architecture-and-techn...
10K scans/day is way beyond their limits, and I'm not sure that's a very common use case. But I bet they could get there if they wanted.
That's been turned into an industry with very high throughput.
And inside the object as well?
It's quite mind-boggling; nobody is really doing it on an industry-scale level. Every video game developer has their own way, all of which have their own problems.
It is a very hard problem. Blizzard actually came up with a very good system, but it's not in a state where it can be commercialized or open sourced.
I actually think whoever comes up with a system which solves these problems in a clean and consistent way will be sitting on a little revolution for content distribution.
Some companies are even selling more or less standard solutions for that, but in reality from any given 1000 games 900 will have very different data formats and all have fairly good reasons to do so - using universal "patch systems" really creates more problems.
Quoting Wharf's spec intro:
Wharf is a protocol that enables incremental uploads and downloads to keep software up-to-date. It includes:
A diffing and patching algorithm, based on rsync
An open file format specification for patches and signature files, based on protobuf
A reference implementation in Go
A command-line tool with several commands
It is used to power itch.io's Steam-like application, itch: http://itch.io/app, delivering multi-gigabyte game installs & updates.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/saving-dat...
It's exactly what you want, but this service isn't poplar. It doesn't work because everyone is on Steam. Network effects. It's like when app.net tried to replace twitter. You can get mad at users, but users are using Steam & Origin and Battle.net and they don't care.
This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry.
The main problem is this:
You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company meeting.
What do you do? You can either:
1) Find a speaker yourself by searching Google and sifting through the mess of results
2) Call a speaker's bureau and get raked over the coals on price
3) ???
Ideally, there would be a marketplace for speakers. Where you would be able to search for talent that fit your criteria (available these dates, for this price, talks about these things, is well-regarded, etc.) and book them online.
Nothing like this exists.
It is super easy to get going with their hosted service. (Not an employee, just a satisfied user.)
Of course that turns this from a technical problem to a marketing and sales problem, which may be less appealing.
- There are over 900 regional MLS providers each with different schemas.
- You use RETS, a complicated, non web standards interface for downloading data.
- MLS data is plagued with errors and denormalized data making queries difficult.
10+ years ago we had other "agents" that made a lot of money, e.g. "Travel Agent" in Travel&Leisure industry. Then internet came along and now we have 1,000's of websites that have replaced what Travel Agents used to do...
For Real-Estate I think MLS is just a start a small piece of the puzzle, someone very smart is going to disrupt the whole industry and make many billions of dollars.
It's a solved problem to make a system that stores information about home listings and transactions. Other countries have done it. Yeah, houses are annoying because of all the weird combinations. But the thing is just a CRUD app.
This system still exists because of organizations that are based on information asymmetry. A small group of experienced people could make a really, really nice platform for sharing real estate data in a month and it would never get anywhere.
This problem is hard to solve at the root because each MLS is independently owned and heavily influenced by the National Association of Realtors and local governments. As an active RE investor myself, I'd love to work on a problem in this space.
Right now I'm only pulling from a couple of different RETS services but already it's hellish. Regular short term schema changes, terrible lag in pulling data (10+ minutes to pull 30 listings!), low API limits (cut off for pulling image URL's too fast but they won't give a limit - just saying "if we feel it's too much", so pulling images lags for hours as I have to be extra careful. Also no option to pay extra to speed up). That's before you get to matching up fields across multiple MLS's or dealing with weird crossover effects (MLS X cannot be shown in Y from RETS #1 - buts that fine in RETS #2).
In fact, I will give you all my money right now anyway, I'm going to go live in the hills far away from it all.
The problem is that you need volume for it to make sense. One way to get that is aggregating a few people who want the same recipe. The other way is ordering those meals, frozen, for a bunch of days.
In either case, the people to talk to it about it are probably cooks on https://www.josephine.com/ .
Look for "lattice light sheet microscopy" or "superresolution microscopy" such as (3D)-STORM or STED.
These techniques are adopted at a high pace. Groups spent $ 500,000 and often more on the hardware. They can produce terabytes of data within days, but we hardly have any tools to view and interact with it. (And the people are overwhelmed with the analysis.)
Imagine a holographic video of living cell (potentially in near real time) where you can zoom by grabbing the hologram.
The point of the service in the music industry is to inspire new sounds and the device can either be kept or given away to somebody without a lot of second thought. Getting stuck is a big problem. Also in music it's important to collaborate and giving gifts is a good way to make connections and impressions.
Great tie-in with various Manufacturers or even retailers to get rid of excess stock / failed impulse buy items / etc.
Subscription boxes are a thing :-)
But I feel like I'm stuck with repairing his shit because there's not a nice and clean solution anywhere in sight. I thought of Wiki systems but the actual data entry will be done by people who would be completely put off by any kind of syntax/markup whatsoever. I'm neither good enough a Web developer to roll something similar myself nor can I dream of creating something like an entire documentation system.
I think the problem might apply to other smaller businesses in the EU and especially Germany, too. Lots of docu to have ready in the unlikely but not impossible case of an inspection.
For the cosmetics industry it'd need to be able to track ingredients, lots of external evaluation docu, internal procedures and so on. While at the same time it would need to be usable by people who are far removed from tech literate.
Enterprise intranet/extranet apps often start out small and then spread like kudzu, eventually prompting a major project to replace them wholesale with a huge consulting-ware solution (like Sharepoint) that never fulfils the promises made (The exception being the specific niche you're asking about, compliance, which does have proprietary solutions that work, but are incredibly expensive).
To avoid that fate, try to pick something that you know can start small but you have evidence that it can also easily (ie. without a huge consulting engagement) scale to an organization-wide solution with 3rd-party as well as in-house extensions.
Good luck!
I'd be very interested in discussing the needs for a compliance and documentation tracker system and see if there is a market for it.
You can reach me at clement@clement-weyer.lu
It's almost as though if we had a Procedural Consulting firm that could come in, look at the big picture, and help companies to create EFFICIENT and WORTHWHILE procedures that ACTUALLY do justice to the customer requirements without breaking the bank. Then they can sit everyone down and explain the procedures and enforce the assimilation that most companies usually have growing pains with.
I noticed that when moving to a new company that is trying to grow and achieve higher levels of accreditation. Management had intended a two-way assimilation to take place between my procedural knowledge and the procedures they already had in-place. What happened instead is old procedures are etched in stone and new ones are seen as an obstacle... The assimilation was one-way and the other middle-managers like myself are mainly concerned with keeping everything the same, despite there being improvements that could easily be made.
But another (part of the) solution is using workflow software. Something that allows you to define and share procedures, indicate status of various taskings along the defined workflows, move data and such along. This clarifies to the employees what's needed, and gives an opportunity for them to provide feedback for improvements (too much granularity, not enough, too inflexible, etc.). Management, then, also gets better insight into the actual status of projects and taskings. It's part of continuous improvement to constantly be evaluating these sorts of procedures and clarifying, culling, adding to them. Management that's unfamiliar with these concepts is just bad management.
In the manufacturing world, the Procedural Consulting firm would conduct "lean events". (NB: Many, if not most, places do this incorrectly.)
The correct way is to collect metrics (meaningful) over time, encourage and reward employee feedback about ways to improve things. Then improve them (sometimes as a move across the board, but often by conducting experiments to see how well the new concepts work, then roll out to everyone). The risk is that improved efficiency will obsolete employees, some fear this (like may have actual panic attacks about this level of fear). Instead, you need a culture that sees this improved efficiency as an opportunity for growth (the same number of employees can now do more once people get retasked to new things).
It sounds like your processes are either immature (no one really knows what the best way to do things is) or tribal (you have to know the right guy to talk to to find the information or knowledge you need).
Premature optimization is god awful, because it locks you into a world of pain - your business is inefficient and the people actually trying to follow the procedure find it incredibly painful and limiting.
If your process is immature, you need to invest some time and money into finding out what the best way to do whatever it is you're doing. If your process is tribal, you need to find the guy or guys that understand what's happening and pick their brains about everything they know. Their implicit knowledge needs to become explicit. In my situation, I found that just agreeing on common definitions was a huge help.
If you're grossly inefficient, don't write a procedure for a bad process...you're just ingraining inefficiency. Once you've found a good process, then write the procedure so you can train your people to repeat good, efficient practice.
And maybe most importantly, train your people to the procedure but make sure they understand it on a level so they know where it doesn't apply and give them authority to deviate from the procedure when necessary.
Sorry if none of that applies to you. I'm just speaking from my few limited experiences.
Imagine a giant (3-5m reach) monitor arm that can be operated manually, but that can also remember the moves and repeat them. All of that on a mobile base that can do the same, along with a stabilisation head that can do a pitch/roll/yaw. Must be usable with and without power.
Just being able to record and play back what happened on the table has changed the way I work on things. A commercial version of this project would be huge.
Some sort of attorney targeted simple revision tracking front end using git would be a mighty step forward.
One question: is there a use case for live group-editing? Same way live code editors work. I have to admit that I'm not super familiar of the workflows in that industry, so I am mostly just designing features the way I would like them to work.
http://thomsonreuters.com/en/products-services/legal/large-l...
that said it doesn't look all shiny and new.
We all know why this is happening. One way to try to "solve" this problem is fighting the change (Luddites), but this doesn't work. Also if people don't have enough income, they stop spending - who's going to buy products and services anymore?
Another possible solution would be that companies which automate most of it's work are owned by the community in which they operate.
Let's take banks for example. Most of the jobs in banking system can and will be automated. Imagine a country/state that has three banks - each of them is owned by a third of the population (shareholders). When a bank makes profit, each of the shareholders gets dividends out of it. The same example can be applied to other industries and in total people would get (in a form of dividends) the Universal Basic Income (which everybody is talking about these days).
Don't get me wrong, this is not communism. Companies would not be government owned, there would still be competition and private companies would still exist.
Anyway, there are also other ways to tackle the problem mentioned at the beginning. As Brexit and US elections showed us, it's starting to affect many people and needs to be addressed asap.
People cook food in their homes. You select the food from several cooks in your area in an app, drive to their house and pick the food.
I imagine a housewife/househusband that is already cooking for her/his family to prepare more portions. Snap a photo, a description, and price. It can be extra income for something that she/him is already doing.
People would use the product because it is convenient, saves times and they get more food variety.
Instead of "selling" the food, though, maybe the structure could be a food club or other value swap.
I feel like there's a big opportunity for a tool/tools that are installed in apps as a package and then customized from there. Many teams build a version of this in house (Instacart open-sources theirs), and I think it should be a product.
A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law firms), and create some very valuable software.
Most of the time I spent selling my software was assuaging the risk-averse mindset that exists in the profession, rather than advertising the benefits. I actually gave a TEDx talk on this point as I think it's an enormous issue in the industry.
So the ease of creating the software isn't the issue, it's the culture. That said, legal tech now has a pretty healthy ecosystem which is a delight to see!
This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.
Connecting/disconnecting utilities, address change, car registration, new laws I should be aware of.
End the piecemeal.
Lots of services solved the just sending email part. And lots of mailchimp type services offer a complete product geared towards marketers. Not much in between and most existing players have laughably poor APIs that make custom integrations and extensions painful.
I'd tend to agree with the other comments that the hired out management companies would be a much better sales target since they have a real profit motive to efficiency gains. At best a neighborhood HOA is looking at periodically saving some time and being a bit better organized.
Problem is these who would benefit (residents) are often disconnected from those against it (the employees). You would need boards that really are sold on the benefit.
It's a decent industry my friend (not after this posting) makes ~300k a year working on it. However the race may be ending as these companies lock apartment managers into long complicated contracts. Not sure how many apartment managers at scale still need.
Basically it is either build your own large messy setup or buy a complete novel piece of crap that will barely support a single meal... aka aerogarden.
It would be nice to have basically a large self contained opaque cabinet with drawers of growing food.
Basically I want a food growing appliance with plumbing and electrical hookups.
I would easily be willing to spend a couple grand on something like that.
A turnkey package tracking system for small-to-medium shippers.
In much of the world the shipping (as in DHL, FedEx) markets are still very fragmented and do not look like they're going to consolidate all that much. (As to why, I have guesses but I don't know for sure. I'm looking at Central Europe right now but I expect this is true in many other regions).
As far as I can tell the package tracking systems are something the companies compete on, with the result that a lot of them suck or (worst case) don't exist.
Case in point: I'm currently waiting for a shipment that the seller swears they gave to the shipper, but the shipper's system doesn't recognize the code. Both parties maintain it's probably just not "processed" yet at the shipper's, going on three days now.
As a software guy, I find it crazy that nobody has a generic white-label tracking system that any random shipper can use in combination with some smartphones/tablets for label scanning. It only has to cost less than the company pays the owner's cousin's teenage son to write the tracking PHP code these companies would otherwise use, and I bet you could upsell all kinds of premium add-ons if it worked well.
I would love to see this, and I think it's a big enough market to actually accommodate a startup.
Article about the other companies (one was doing a handheld inkjet printer for skin, that was not a normal startup pitch): http://www.slush.org/news/winner-slush-100-announced/
Recently I returned to Australia to spend some Christmas time with my extended family.
A few mornings ago, I put some real bread I cut from a sourdough loaf in a toaster. Due to its irregular size, when it popped it didn't pop out completely, resulting in a sort of "toaster is too hot to insert fingers, toast is too hot to hold, toast is ready, find metallic implement to insert in to mains-powered device to extract toast" problem.
I mentally facepalmed.
Someone should really fix toasters.
Mine are nothing so fancy as this image I could find online, but you get the idea.
A pair of popsicle sticks secured together at one end would be fine.
They have. They're called dualit.
https://www.amazon.com/Dualit-20293-2-Slice-Toaster-Chrome/d...
For the last year and a bit I've been contracting with a company, and the recruiter who found me has fees of around 10% per day of my work, which they bill the company.
They found me via LinkedIn, sent me a couple of emails, arranged a Skype call between me and the company, and sent me a bit of paperwork. Not bad for €10k.
The other problem similar to health care is regulation and compliance but mainly it is because the industry is a very human industry despite all the big-data machine learning promises. Getting rid of recruiting is like getting rid of sales.
The big players in the industry are pretty much equivalent to google and facebook -> indeed and linkedin. The problem is you can only make so much money on advertising so they are trying to automate recruiting but still rely heavily on a service based approach (that is you still need humans). This is because advertising exacerbates the signal to noise ratio.
When google enters the industry (which I believe they just did recently) expect linkedin and indeed to become even more service based (ie highly efficient super recruiting firms).
Consequently cutting edge recruiting software has now become more focused on marketing automation which is what my company does (albeit we are more focused on the traditional inbound aka websites instead of the annoying email nagware you have seen). That is giving recruiters better tools to do their job.
That being said my recent idea is instead of giving recruiters (or corp talent acquisition marketing) sales automation what if we give individual candidates that software? That is give the candidates drip campaigns and automated sales replies and beautiful personal career portfolio websites. That is allow smart candidates to sell to recruiters and company at scale.
I haven't figured out the monetization for it or the actual demand but I think it would be interesting and potential disruptive empowering candidates.
Hard to find boat from pier to ship
Also cost prohibitive alot of unnecessary middle man
The biggest hurdle would probably be organized crime. It might sound crazy, but most ports are infested with deeply rooted criminals who are involved with even the most mundane aspects of the import/export arena. Of course, even organized crime can be disrupted with the right tech.
This is still a big problem in tech industry.
Yesterday my friend in LA invited a few of us in Toronto to come to his BBQ this weekend. The group chat became us discussing the logistics and price of how we might do that. 150 years ago, that would have been an insane concept.
http://masterkeypro.com/ is sort of the only entry in the market and cores/companies-that-need-key-schedules change just often enough that say $5-10 month could gain traction.
One quick challenge though, my understanding is that the average org that needs this either contracts or has full time staff who manage their locks. Those are normally guys who manage this by placing the 10 cores they need to re-key on their work bench, maybe putting a tape label on, and then just going to the individual locks and dropping in a new core. I get the value as a management tool, but does this really improve things for the average staff locksmith?
The problem: privlidged access management and auditing.
The solution: Cyberark, but not $250k to cover 1,000 servers. Ain't nobody got money for that.
It is somewhat "possible" to get a subset of the features above today but it always feels more like proof of concept rather than a complete product and you can never get all of them in one environment.
The problem is that there are so many free tools that are "good enough" so it becomes quite a luxury to pay for the last mile. Barrier to entry is very large because of this and because it is a very big and complex problem space. Would love to see some competition here, only serious actors today are intellij and VS.
We're working on a startup to bring all together into a modern search engine. It's called UpCodes.
There's a lot of space in the area of construction compliance that needs improving.
We'd like to run learning algorithms on robots, but there are no great options for hardware. (Happy to discuss in depth if someone wants to build it)
We want to train large models much faster than any GPU box you can buy. (There are several new things announced, but there's room for more).
Providers today offer uncapped bandwidth, some, like Amazon, without any cost cap, some, like KeyCDN, allow to set a cost cap, but take the resources off-line when the limit is exceeded.
Mind sharing the name? I have friends doing ASR in college and they may be interested in your company. Though since their focus is on research/publishing papers, they may stick to standard datasets. But knowing about a new data source is always welcome.
Thanks.
I want to be able to go to a website, ask for demographics that I am looking for and be able to purchase an advertisement and hire talent to record my commercial.
As it stands, you have to deal with salespeople.
1) how about you find ways to make retention a continuous objective 2) get used to the fact that not all customers will be retained. I try stuff all the time that I have no idea if it will solve my specific problem. If you do #1 right, I would know that you want to hear about my specific problems and offer ideas on how your saas can solve them. That's the most you can hope for if your service doesn't immediately do what I initially hoped it would (or is more burdensome to implement that I thought, etc)
I imagine being able to create a structure or assembly from stuff in the McMaster-Carr or ThorLabs catalogs without having to be a CAD expert. When I'm satisfied with the thing on my screen, I press a button, enter my credit card number, and the parts arrive from their respective vendors in a couple days.
A search feature would be vital, of course. Being able to modify some parts would be useful, e.g., if I need 14 inches of pipe, I can cut down a 24 inch piece. Drawing from multiple disciplines would be necessary, e.g., combining an electrical box, optical assembly, and structural framework.
Maybe you get paid via a little kickback from those vendors, who also agree to integrate their catalogs with your service.
It would put me out of a job, but better than shooting myself in the head next time I have to face 40 hours of slogging through data sheets.
P.S. If any of you are in Austin I recommend Hull Supply, they're good people.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...
Edit: probably without android.
I don't know why the few companies that are in the IoT space for oil and gas aren't scooping up literally billions in missed opportunities for sticking cell-enabled sensors on oil platforms, fields, etc. Then there's the next billion dollars waiting for whoever starts sticking controllers next to the sensors on valves, etc.
Drone inspection and repair in oil and gas. People are doing this but it's taking way too long to take off for how much money is there just waiting to be picked up.
Sticking a laser scanner on a drone. Again, people are doing it, but what the fuck, there's so much money just sitting there.
If you're looking for contract work, just start browsing random EPC websites and calling up the shitty ones. Probably a good 10,000 at least that are still rocking 1995 crapsites, and not in the "good" "low functionality low load time" way, the "using tables for layout" way.
Trains should be automated. They already are in Taiwan for some lines, it's been feasible for years.
Motorcycle safety is still subpar for where we are in material science. There are a lot of riders out there that will pay buckets for greater safety. We've figured out how to not get our skin ripped off but I believe there's still a market for preventing broken bones, spinal snaps, decapitations, and the like.
Somehow we still don't have GUI HUDs in our moto helmets. Like BMW is working on something but honestly it would be a relatively simple and profitable thing for a very small startup (2 man team working part time). Literally even just casting your smartphone screen to the visor would be enough to get people buying so they can have a HUD map and shit.
Big market for motorcycle storage solutions. I giggle whenever I see someone with an ammo box strapped onto their sports bike. We already dropped hundreds on gear and thousands on the bike, we spend many more hundreds or thousands on modding the things, there's ample opportunity for more elegant and functional storage solutions.
VR allows for limitless desktop screen space in a portable package. I'd like to be able to bring an HTC vive and a tiny screenless box to plug it into that would allow me to have a "multi-monitor" setup while I travel. Some say the resolution isn't there yet, I say make the text bigger. I have no problem reading the stuff in steamVR.
I get made fun of every time I bring it up but I'm convinced people are stupidly ignoring lighter than air travel, transportation, and data distribution, especially in an automated sense. Google has their wifi balloon thing but they dropped their blimp transport truck project. I think it could've been a thing.
There may be some margins available in teaching low-income people how to cook and eat basic foods instead of frozen meals. It took me to getting scholarshipped into college to realize that we were losing buckets of money eating frozen meals and fast food because we thought it was the "cheapest option," not to mention how unhealthy we were for it. Think like somehow getting low-income folks to buy potatoes, onions, peppers, dried beans, cheap cuts of meat, etc and demonstrating how it's faster, cheaper, healthier, etc. Potentially a gov funding opportunity, would save on EBT and healthcare costs.
Kids learn by doing. Good luck changing anything about education in the USA though.
Someone would be able to take over any industry in Taiwan that they please if they start up the company and instantly pay 2x local salary, give PTO, and have other basic benefits that we take for granted here. It wouldn't be much, you'd be paying ~44k/year USD for an Engineer, for example. You'd be able to poach the best talent, you'd draw shitloads of negative press from pissed of old Taiwanese businesspeople (no press is bad press), everyone would be telling you you're wrong, and you'd Donald Trump your way straight to the top. Think Scranton Oakmont or Gordon Ramsay as well. Just don't break the law. Also learn Chinese.
This stuff should be priced for home and small office use.
"BEEEP" Why is your laser printer's ethernet port issuing tons of SYN requests? Unplug that printer! Factory reset it!
Grow it into carrier-grade implementations.
Think Wi-Fi thermostats that record data.
- 3D Storyboarding for VR cinematic storytelling (mixed desktop/VR)
- VR home tours for real estate
- VR sports training for golf/tennis/baseball
- Rehearsal/Staging VR for event planning.
- VR Training for DIY/Construction.
etc.. In particular if there is a field that you personally work in or know someone that's a great place to start.
Regulations will unbundle research from liquidity provision starting sometime in 2018 (moving regulatory target, but theme seems clear). Sellside will have lower incentive to pay large research groups; buyside will have to pay explicit fees for research advisory. There is a big opportunity in providing platforms, with macro and market data live, where researchers can interact with capital managers, given that said researchers will likely find themselves bereft of their current distribution networks (bank sales forces) sometime in the next few years.
Equities already have a hybrid form of this where buyside earns "credits" to be allocated at the end of each year to research providers. But fixed income is at least twice as big as equities, is much more opaque because is essentially unlisted (mainly "OTC" = "over the counter" ie only those in the know), and therefore much more susceptible to disruption.
As someone in the supply chain and logistics industry, I can list for you hundreds of people that know the traveling salesman problem and precisely why its not applicable to their situation. I know hundreds of people that already know how to better manage their safety stock than someone who suggests using Gaussian demand models. I know hundreds of people who can optimize last mile delivery costs orders of magnitude better than a drone engineer. I know hundreds of people who can manage inventory distribution and ordering automation better than someone who knows databases.
And sure, there are companies out there that are doing everything ass backwards and could use some help, even if it is primitive and simplistic. And when they decide to look for it, who are they gonna choose: the guy who saved Amazon $500M/year with their truck load optimization expertise, or you, with your shiny website and a trick you learned from a textbook?
So as a piece of advice, if you aren't part of the industry already, don't try to do B2B in that industry. B2C is fine, because as a consumer you are ostensibly a part of the industry...but B2B is a death march.