| What are your interests in terms of CS and startups? Domain specific search is one area that fits nicely into both categories, there are lots of things for which search algorithms are pretty poor at the moment, for example clothes or sofas. Fraud detection is another interesting area, although getting the data to analyze might be tricky. Some other specific ideas: If you're interested in board games you could build an online competitor to Zillions of Games (a windows games engine that allows non-programmer to create games using S-Expressions). There's probably some interesting things you can do with Google's english language dataset, for example build a tool that can estimate the age of a work based upon the words used. Apply cryptography to a modern privacy issue, for example see if you can use cryptographic hashes of DNA for identification purposes as opposed to the DNA itself. Develop a dynamic pricing/yield-management algorithm for an industry that doesn't normally use them. |