[ippisl]

Why is it?

Is this mostly a social issue , i.e. sexiness of techcrunch like startups ?

Or is it an information problem, i.e. because it's hard for software engineers to come across worthy problems from other domains , that they have the ability to solve ?

Or is is something else ?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

A bit of both. When everything hyped around you is the next "social thing" or Google, or Web x.0 app, it can be hard to look beyond that. Now add in that most young developers don't have much exposure to anything beyond pure software, and it leads to 80% chasing the same 5% of application domains.

This is arguably one of the advantages of experience: you're more likely to have been exposed to a wider set of problems, many of which are not being addressed (well) by software.

It's not at all a difficult box to break out of, but the easy part is finding an application domain that you can build stuff for. The harder part -- without having experience in that field -- is figuring out how to reach your prospects. Many of these areas have little to no web presence. It's easy to say "just look at a few forums" but that doesn't help if your customer base isn't online at all.