1. pg-bot technology for responding on holidays to posts about funding. The bot should have sufficient business sense for pointing young entrepreneurs in the right direction, but should also contain semantic sense for responding in a witty and lighthearted way... for example, in Haiku.
Until the updated version gets written, just a reminder that's been said several times and that PG reiterated at this year's Startup School: focus more on solving problems instead of ideas.
Perhaps I'm just not seeing the distinction, but can't they be the same thing? You can use an "idea" to solve a "problem". An idea (whether self generated, or off a list from pg's head) could be rooted in a real-world problem.
If you concentrate on the problem (we build the most reliable/fastest/cheapest devices for persistent storage) instead of the idea (we build the most reliable/fastest/cheapest tape drives) then you're less likely to be screwed when the market or technology changes
Unless your problem is "we solve epicycles" - neither is going to insulate you from obsolescence.
The benefit to targeting a "problem" is that you have a preexisting need. An "idea" with no existing "problem" may require several years of extra lead-in where you are struggling to get people to understand what you do and why it should matter to them. It can work, but the ratios are less favorable for a VC-style investment which looks for fast turnaround with minimal risk and orders-of-magnitude payoff.
Slightly unrelated, but here's a question i've been searching to answer. When I worked in the IT department of a non tech company, I saw tech-solvable problems everywhere. Today I work for a deeply technical engineering company. I Engineer for Engineers. I'm very serious about starting a company, however it's becoming increasingly harder for me to see problems I can solve that aren't consumer oriented. I think consulting is the best way to get into a non tech company to find problems... but I'm not sure how to get in.
You got a valid point. A a trick could be to focus on a problem, encounter many ideas (especially from other fields), and see if you could apply that idea to solve that problem. A problem that's hard for a technical person to solve could be trivial to someone who looks at it from a psychological point of view, and vice versa.
But the key is to always have a set of problems floating in your head. Having an idea, and seeing what problems that idea can solve is not as effective, as you often end up trying to force a square into a hole.
Would it be possible for somebody to create cloud-based 'Reading as a Service?' Like you pay someone to read an article to you so you can consume information while you jog or drive or whatever.
Don't know if it would be economically feasible but obviously I'm thinking of the leveraging the fact that billions of people can speak English and many of them can get buy on a very small wage (by western standards).
Could also cache the recordings and make them available too. Although might run into copyright issues at this point.
It seems that you'd be better off using a text-to-speech engine, thereby supporting not just one language but all languages. You'd be right in suggesting that they're not good enough yet to be nice to listen to, but I doubt that's more than a year or so away.
Well, I mean the reason I'm suggesting this is precisely because txt to speech engines are so inadequate. And no matter how much they advance in the next year, they'll still never be able to put things in context like a human reader can (of course, many of the non-native English speakers won't be able to do that particularly well either).
Yes, TTS quality is far from real people reading. I think the service must be something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk but with a SLA since recordings must be quickly generated.
I use very few consumer-facing internet services---but this would be one of them. Some of the things I read are lengthy(e.g. thelastpsychiatrist.com) and having someone read them to me would be awesome.
That depends. Has the idea been implemented only in one country, or on one continent? Do the creators have the ability or capital to develop strong barriers to entry that would take tremendous capital and/or years of effort to overcome?
Spotting an idea abroad and bringing it to your own geography is a perfectly viable strategy.
Check out resources like SpringWise dot com or TrendWatching dot com (full disclosure - I subscribe to both) to learn about new ideas being launched abroad that you could potentially bring to your own country/city.
Yeah this has worked pretty well in the daily/ group deals space as you really need people on the ground in each locale to push it to business there. Only so many people in so many countries someone like groupon on living social can hire.
I'm always bothered when people tell me an idea I want to work on has already been solved. Imagine if people gave up, and let MySpace keep it's position. There's a lot of crap out there that deserves to be improved.
