Ask HN: What web services should exist that haven't been developed yet?

[abiekatz]

List any top ideas that you have. It is an interesting exercise to come up with startup ideas.

Back in 2005 Fred Wilson said "Last year, when Brad and I were on the road raising our fund, we used to talk a lot about web services that should exist but don’t." http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/08/indeed.html

This exercise helped them target indeed.com as a potential investment and potentially others.

What services are missing from the internet these days?

[anywhichway]

A reddit/HN clone that customizes the content you see based off your voting history. This has been tried a few times before, but I've just never seen one take off. In fact, reddit had this feature when it started but couldn't scale it well enough so dumped it.

I feel like it would increase the quality of upvotes generally because people would know that their votes will impact the future content they see so it may slow the rate at which people up vote just to show they simply agreement and reserve it for actual high quality they we to see more of. That is just my theory, perhaps in practice it would reveal that people just care more about only seeing content they agree with anyway.

[skellystudios]

StumbleUpon sort of does this, although it's more attuned to drag up older content than new stuff. I guess this is because the older the content is, the more data you have to make statistical associations.

[ereckers]

Product Configurator (eCommerce Web Stores)

Basically, the visual deal where you select a t-shirt, change colors, change patterns, etc.. Toys, computer parts, boat parts, shoes, cheerleading outfits, you name it...

I was asked to build a product configurator a year or so back for a a store that sold customizable backpacks. I looked into building one and thought "hell no". I turned the job down.

During my research I found some Enterprise level solutions, I saw 1 service (a manual thing with a couple guys), a TON of posts on outsourcing websites asking for the same, and I believe a complicated piece of software (it's hard to remember).

I offered to build the thing for much more then they wanted to spend thinking I could turn it into a product, but obviously they passed.

I think there might be a market out there for small and medium sized eCommerce store developers/designers/owners for a plug-and-play product configurator. It would have to tie in with some popular carts; X-cart, Magento, (a few others), but at least for me I thought there might be a business there.

Or there could be a reason why it was never done.

[jsiegz]

A data ETL tool. Now that lots of companies are moving to MPP databases like Vertica, Redshift, Teradata, and Netezza, it's incredible that there is still no straighforward way to do so without extensive systems and data engineering experience.

Every time a customer asks us to recommend a tool to do this, we are baffled that nobody has taken this on yet (and wonder if we should do it ourselves).

The opportunity to build the Stripe for ETL is only going to get bigger.

[sehrope]

You should check us out[1]. We're haven't quite got to the full ETL stage as we've focused on individual databases first. If you've got a decent imagination though then you can figure out what we're trying to get to.

[1]: http://www.jackdb.com/

[viralbajaria]

We are building a generic ETL framework and would love to talk with you about this. My email is on my profile.

[ghostdiver]

Poo Analysis as a Service

Upload image of your poo, computer program will tell you if you have any health problems or you should change your diet.

[jahde]

This would be a great addition to a "Smart Toilet" where it analyzes your urine as well. Through wi-fi it uplaods the results to the website and checks if you have any health issues.

[trafficlight]

How is this not a thing? This should be a thing.

[ig1]

There's a kickstarter for that:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/uchek-universal-the-medica...

[Cyclosa]

Anything that recognizes and encourages the good behavior of people.

[turbojerry]

That would be... people, e.g. the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina memes, you could I suppose do a RL version, GGG t-shirts with individual QR codes for up voting people.

[keshy]

Android and iPhone dev environments exposed as a web endpoint. This would help ease development of opensource applications and improves portability and reuse of components.

We could harness the power of the cloud and free developers from having to worry about hardware performance issues to run the heavy dev environments. If the app has to be debugged on a device, the apk file can be downloaded and injected. The apk can have an default injected script to automatically communicate with the cloud dev set up (sending over logs etc.) to create a really simply environment to work with mobile applications and collaborate efficiently across the world

[apphrase]

SaaS model all-in-one marketing toolset service for bootstrapping apps. The current ones are either to much data analytics, or too dumb mail-list management tools.

[atldev]

We're currently working on this and would love to get some feedback. With just 5 min of your time you can help shape the roadmap and get early access. Survey here: http://bit.ly/15GpvsD

[incision]

The first thing that springs to mind for me is natural language search that really works. Along the same lines, reliable transcription.

[X4]

+1 for natural language detection and transcription. Current systems are too fragile or completely closed. The ones available aren't better than what we had in 2004.

[rada]

Speech recognition: send an audio file, receive text.

[bobbylox]

AT&T offers this: http://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId=...

[anywhichway]

Many people use Amazon's mechanical Turk for this. It allows you to make automated requests like this that are processed by real people. Perhaps it is not the easiest service to dive into, so I wonder if their terms of service would allow someone to make an easy to use front end that focuses on just this task.

[abiekatz]

Check out http://speakertext.com/

[erastothenes]

A solid natural language processing API.

[stephenp]

hemmingwaymaker.com. Makes long sentences short. An online de-obfuscator and English to English translator. Helps me finally read Finnegan's Wake and Of Grammatology.

slantrime.com. bends user provided words to make unlikely rhymes, with seed capital from slim shady.