[akkartik]

The two of you have a disagreement, but it's not here, this is just conflicting names for ideas. Putting words in your mouths:

You: if people don't know how to make something cheaply enough it's not a market.

Ivan: it could be a market if you solve the technological problem of making it cheaper.

You: making food cheaper isn't a market because the poor have no money.

Ivan: making food cheaper isn't a feasible market because nobody knows how to make it happen.

There, now you can return to the interesting question, continue arguing about what fraction of the needs you can think up are technologically feasible :)

[hhm]

Actually, I was just trying to be precise. I think market != needs and I was giving some examples... in the best of the cases, all needs are potential markets, but you haven't markets for all needs. And, what is more important and what was my original comment: not all needs generate interesting markets for you (because of tech possibilities, as you said, because of costs, because of logistics, etc).

I can think of all kind of needs: a google maps with 2d shading would make it fun for kids (to say something stupid). But they wouldn't pay for it, it would be very expensive to do unless you are google, and it would probably be expensive _even_ if you are google (because the raw data are photos and no 3d info excepting some selected places), etc etc etc. That's not an interesting need if you look from the market perspective... but if you fall in the trap "anything useful for anybody is worth doing" you might fall in the trap of creating that kind of worthless project.

[curi]

Now that their kids are starting to get laptops, it shouldn't be too long before you could make a web app which helps third-world poor people learn to farm better, or do other types of work more efficiently. It's easy to come up with things which poor people want. And web hosting is cheap enough for targeting them to be feasible.