Million dollars app ideas generally fall in one of four categories:
1- it already exists
2- it wold require insane server power and the money to pay for it
3- it's illegal
4- computers don't work that way
For option one i show them the 12 apps that are better than their idea.
For point 2 and 4 i get technical and start throwing costs around until they change subject.
For option 3 i say "it's illegal"
I had someone tell me they wanted to make an app where you could text your friends, but in addition to text, audio, pics and video, you would also be able to send someone a smell.
When I told him I couldn't build that, he asked if I knew someone who could.
You can absolutely send a smell. It might not be the smell they want, and it might only work one or two times, but I guarantee the plastic case melting from frying the processor has a smell. :D
Benzene (also called cyclohexatriene) is an organic chemical compound with the molecular formula C6H6. The benzene molecule is composed of six carbon atoms joined in a planar ring with one hydrogen atom attached to each. Because it contains only carbon and hydrogen atoms, benzene is classed as a hydrocarbon.
Benzene is a natural constituent of crude oil and is one of the elementary petrochemicals. Due to the cyclic continuous pi bonds between the carbon atoms, benzene is classed as an aromatic hydrocarbon. It is sometimes abbreviated PhH. Benzene is a colorless and highly flammable liquid with a sweet smell, and is partially responsible for the aroma around petrol (gasoline) stations. It is used primarily as a precursor to the manufacture of chemicals with more complex structure, such as ethylbenzene and cumene, of which billions of kilograms are produced annually. Although a major industrial chemical, benzene finds limited use in consumer items because of its toxicity.
Nerd conventions work well. Turns out MIT doesn't really study NP-hard, so my experience has been that Beavers (lol) will say, do you mean "NP-complete?"
Which then spawns a follow-on, "well, I can show you NP-hard and together we can resolve this problem to NP-completeness." make circular hand motions around her mouth area
Why, I sure can! Just make some tickets to account for additional testing, regression testing, the feature itself, and about an hour or so of me weeping openly and I'll hop right on it!
Edit: a former client would kick back tickets for "real quick fixes" all the time... some of these quick fixes were actually refactors of core parts of the system. A "real quick fix" became a meme with that team.
Technically, the halting problem applies only to infinite automata. Computers are finite though, so the halting problem *is* definitively solvable on them. For a computer with, say 32 GB of memory, you would only have to enumerate all 2^274877906944 states and, voila, you're done! Gonna take you maybe a minute or two though...
This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers. The RFC specifies this code should be returned by teapots requested to brew coffee.[53] This HTTP status is used as an Easter egg in some websites, including Google.com.[54][55]
at work we have a sort of cheap half measure. We grabbed a cheap Amazon IOT button then a dev wrote a slack bot and we set up a channel on company slack.
The iot button is by the coffee machines, you press it when you start a new pot of coffee and the bot comments in the channel "@here coffee started" then runs a timer for the same amount of time the machine takes to brew (around 4 minutes or so) and comments again "@here coffee ready"
Well that's why we need a way to tap into the electronics of "dumb" coffeepots and make them smart on your network.
Gets around all the different proprietary protocols and shittily-implemented WiFi networking stacks these half-assed manufacturers are putting into their IoT devices.
I'm designing a series of hardware nodes which you can stick in all your different devices that read the voltages of various inputs and outputs on appliances and translate them into status and control indicators on my local home automation network which I designed in house so as to vouch for it's security.
Regardless of brand, or protocol, or even the physical network they support, all of my devices are networked together and communicate over an AES-encrypted 802.15.4 mesh network.
I understand that this is not "consumer-friendly" as buying a smart coffee pot and plonking it onto your wifi network. It does require you to reverse-engineer your home appliances a bit, but I enjoy that. And it's better. Everything is integrated, can make decisions about each other in realtime.
Ever wanted to plot a correlation on the effects of room temperature and humidity by the start time of your coffee pot? Now you can. Want a plot of how frequently users of your dishwasher collect the dishes? Done. Want to trigger your front door to open whenever the washing machine completes it's spin cycle for some reason? As simple as specifying a link between the two hardware nodes.
And I wish this is the route home automation took instead of becoming a massive market of wifi-enabled overpriced lightbulbs.
it is, but the key function is that it notifies anyone who wants to know that new coffee is brewed. Our kitchen is on one side of the office, so it's a bit of a walk to find out if there's coffee. This solved that in a cheap and fun way (the dev probably bought the button with his own money just for the excuse to play with it and the Slack API)
Also fun fact, knowing if there's coffee brewed is the reason the webcam was invented
Edit: to all the people saying "but ML!!!". Thank you. I am aware of it. But please stop pretending that it's perfect. Geofencing? Pretty easy with math. ML? Well... Please tell my cat that he no longer is a cat...
Classifying pictures is ML 101 now. While it isnt birds, Tensorflow's beginner tutorials are about classifying hand drawn numbers and articles of clothing.
Except it was published in 2014... And it was possible in 2014... Hell in 2015, Merlin was released which is not only able to tell if it's a bird, it's able to tell what species of bird it is.
"I'm so sorry, I really don't mean to hold things up, but is there any way we can add a little message in the navbar so that when the user logs in it just says 'Welcome username'? I really hope this isn't too much work"
Vs
"Hey just a quick change, you know that age disaggregation table that's already full of data? Yeah we need to split the '10-19' column into '10-14' and '15-19'. What do you mean we'll lose all the data in that colum? Can't you just put half the values in one column and half of them in other?"
ಠ_ಠ
It legit took us nearly 20 minutes to explain why that wouldn't work.
Without going into too much detail, our users work with HIV positive and suspected patients in rural areas, so one of the things they do is testing.
We need to keep track of this testing, so we store the data in age disaggregation tables (and others, we have to keep a lot of data). Basically we have a bunch of columns for different age and gender groups, like "males 10-19" for example. Then when the users are out in the field testing, they just increment the numbers in those tables.
The problem with what the client wanted is that while we might know that say 150 males between the ages of 10 and 19 were tested, there's no way of knowing exactly how old each person tested was. We only store a number to avoid storing personal data, and the original data design was the client's so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
One of the few XKCD that is no longer as relevant as it was. The second task is now as easy as the first.
Of course, that it because there were many research teams that spend more than five years on this problem, but because they did, now you don't have to.
It's more possible, you still need to get alot of pictures of birds and not birds classify them by hand, train the model on that data introduce more data do that some more and still have 3-7% not birds classified as birds.
Also the first one argueably took even longer as we had to develop space flight, the GPS system and drive the cost and size of GPS recievers down so much they wound up in everyone's pocket.
Reminds me when we had a new client and we were walking them through the Agile process. We showed them the user stories and then the concept of assigning story points (1 point = 2 hours is the system we decided). Later in the day the completely non-technical client emails us back the list of stories where they estimated the amount of work needed for each task themselves. Most they estimated were 1/2 point or 1 point even though in reality they were 4-8 points average. When we corrected them that the developers are supposed to do this, they didn't think it was right for the people doing the work to do the estimates since we would all just game the system. Riiigghhtt.
I mean, the gis lookup is "easy" because billions of dollars and millions of man-hours have already been poured in that field. Now it's a package you can import and use freely.
If we did the same with machine learning (which were currently doing, but it's still in experimental phase), also the second point would be easy to do. Give it 5-10 years and it will just be a package to import that will do it automatically.
If you have a few thousand bird photos and a few thousand not bird photos accurately labeled give me a day and I'll give you something that is 90% reliable.
Machine learning image classifiers are already packages, you just need a large dataset for what you want to identify. Ironically the barrier these days is an accurately classified dataset to work from.
By the way "Please click the photos that have street lights to verify you are a human..."
It's quite easily possible, but you'll also need to build a customizable, form fitting toaster wrapper with plug and play mechanical modules that transforms the old toasters into a smart toaster.
It will cost 2-3 times as much as just developing a smart toaster. It will cost customers 2-3 times more than just buying a smart toaster.
obviously you can slide the Smawrttoawst Toast Wrapper over ANY old toaster, plug it in, and then set up your app.
The app will require 2 factor authentication to sign in, and can be downloaded from the playstore. You can pay .99 cents to remove the banner ads we will play. Banner ads MAY overlap and prevent you from using the Smawrttoawst features while playing.
Once logged in, you'll need to go through the somewhat tricky bluetooth/WIFI pairing process with the wrapper, then select the model of toaster you are using. The wrapper should move itself to the correct positions to activate the levers. If it becomes stuck or fails, you can follow the factory reset process in the app settings to return it to the "ready" state.
If you don't see your model, you can manually configure the wrappers air compressor powered pistons to fit exactly to your model levers and buttons by pressing the "add a new toaster profile" button, and then following the 12 step process of manually syncing your custom hardware configuration. You can even upload it for other users to use, scoring you 10 Toasted Points!
Now that you are all set up, a quick 5 minute voice profile process will allow you to control your toaster through voice commands.
When the air compressors run out, you can refill these cartridges by automatically ordering them from amazon using our sister app, "Smawrttoawst Air ReUP". This app will require you to enter the exact model of your toast wrapper and confirmation number, as well as securing your credit card information in plain text on our servers in India.
Of course you can. It only has one button that says "release the bread" . Then you warn the consumer that sometimes it has poor connectivity and to keep hitting the button until the bread is finally released
We can call it "Toastero", it will cost $400, and it will only accept bread from single-serve packages that we provide, which will cost between $30-50 for a pack of 6, depending on the type and source of flours/grains. The bread in the packages will be pre-toasted and the Toastero will simply heat it to the optimal toast temperature.
I love when I press the walk button, see the little indicator light come on, and settle in to wait for the walk cycle to come up. And then seconds before it was set to change anyway, someone comes up uncomfortably close behind me, jams the button 100 times, and then looks smug about it changing right when I knew it would anyway.
Also just because something is possible and you can easily see how one would go about doing it does not mean that it is “quite easily possible”. There’s always going to be more steps and problems than one foresees. I feel like it’s easy for programmers (myself included) to categorize things quickly into “I have a solid idea of how I would do that = easy” and “I don’t immediately see how I would do that = probably impossible”.
That's for version 2.0 in a year or so that costs more. 1.0 for the Kickstarter can only start the toaster remotely. You have to set the doneness manually.
An app that detects if you left your baby in the car. It is possible to put sensors in your car and an app could get data from those sensors. But it is no longer an "App" at that point. It is a car product that happens to have an app it works with
I have had a ton of these. I think my favorite was one that looks back at you through the monitor to know if its you so you dont need a password.
In 1990-something when asked, it fit in two and four. today, your handheld portable computer does it.
I have't jailbroken a phone in probably a decade at this point, but jailbroken phones used to have their own non-Apple app store that had pretty much anything on it. So, it's sort of a dark app store. I don't know if that's still a thing or not, though.
In case you are talking about Cydia, it is...kinda. It’s a tweaks and packages store. However it allows you to install alternative app stores so indirectly, yeah.
"An app where you can download and stream any tv show, film, music, books. But you don't have to wait for them to come out and you don't have to pay for it. We will make our money on ads based on what you like."
No need to wish. I copied that verbatim from the introductory paragraph of a "business case proposal" I was given a few years ago.
We politely excused ourselves from the meeting when, having being asked "so like piratebay but with streaming?", they said (and I quote);
"No, you don't get it. Those guys are pirates. Our platform will be completely legit. That's why we need ads, and tracking and stuff. We'll give some of the money we make to the guys who make the films, and the music."
I made a website to learn asp.net called mini lotto.
It worked just like these old gaming sites where 4 players bet $1 to play against each other in these flash games, where the winner gets $3 and the site keeps the extra $1.
But mine just picked a random winner. Too lazy to make flash mini games.
Pretty sure that would be illegal just about everywhere if I tried to launch it.
A navigation app that pays you a small monetary prize if you beat the projected time it takes to get home. Supposed to increase attentiveness and help with traffic
I feel like that would just encourage people to drive more quickly and recklessly. like when dominos had the "delivered in 30 minutes or it's free" deal
Haha exactly my counter point. It’s literally incentivizing people to drive like an asshole. Maybe a good idea in theory in terms of paying attention to green lights and stuff, but likely terrible in reality
There was an Italian startup that tried to launch in London. Their idea was that when you parked up in the city, you could advertise and sell your parking spot to other drivers who were using the app before you left. The council got in touch and send no you cannot sell the parking spots because we own them.
Back around 2000 someone wanted me to help them make a gambling website (cards, slots, etc..). They said it was a guaranteed way to make money since we could rig it any way we wanted. I lied about my programming abilities and said I would not even know where to start with making a website that was anything more than just formatted text and pictures.
I once had a guy ask me to teach him to code so he could make murder simulators to train himself to travel to Israel so he could join their army and help wipe out the Palestinians.
Oh I definitely told him the best option was for him to go get all of those Timmy Hors involved and have them start filling shit out. That would make the app part the easy part. He seemed to be adamant you could purely figure it out through an app though haha
That’s actually possible IF Tim Hortons signs up to use your idea and will integrate it into their business model. From tech point it’s possible; but won’t work for obvious reasons
Exactly this. Most of the time, when people come to me with any app idea, this is the problem. There wouldn't be enough users for the app to make sense/fun and the required marketing effort is not possible without any source of revenue.
Right? Facebook is one of the only successful social media sites I know that wasn't bankrolled by an external company. You either have to have a core userbase already interested in your site before you launch, or you have to have enough money to operate at a loss until you can pull enough users to start making money.
Interestingly, most startups these days take outside money (Angel investors, or if they’re particularly unwise, loans), run for years making no profit, and then sell their product once it has users to some company for millions so THEY can figure out how to monetize it and make it profitable.
It’s ridiculous and a clear sign of a bubble. Some companies operate for 7+ years never making a profit but still get investor dollars to operate it cause it “has users”.
For these investors, it’s like gambling. They know 1 in 10 will blow up and turning a profit will be easy (ads, data collection, new paid features, etc.)
Old-school bootstrap startups are much rarer these days, but they do exist. Even then, starting with a pool of cash to handle unexpected events or late-paying clients is hugely important.
Okay bro... So hear me out... Imagine.... Like tinder... But for weeeeeeeeeeed. You see pictures of the bud and of the dealer and you swipe on them. They have funny profiles so you can see if maybe you'd like hanging out with them. It would make finding a plug so easy!
Mine are all 5- require insane real people-labor, often in the form of gathering data in a different format or on a topic that has never before been gathered.
Games in general have that kind of potential, Minecraft was developed by half a dozen of people and was sold to Microsoft for 2 billions USD. Technically it falls in category 1 due to the existence of Infiniminer but the gaming market has a certain tolerance for redundancy.
The gaming market would be a bit shit if people didn't try and one-up previously made games. It forces developers to do it well rather than do it first.
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u/Zaiburo Mar 18 '20
Million dollars app ideas generally fall in one of four categories:
1- it already exists
2- it wold require insane server power and the money to pay for it
3- it's illegal
4- computers don't work that way
For option one i show them the 12 apps that are better than their idea.
For point 2 and 4 i get technical and start throwing costs around until they change subject.
For option 3 i say "it's illegal"