5. A buffer against bad customer service.

[JakeCarpenter]

A lot of companies (to say nothing of government agencies) have
appalling customer service. "Please stay on the line. Your call is
important to us." Doesn't it make you cringe just to read that?
Sometimes the UIs presented to customers are even deliberately
difficult; some airlines deliberately make it hard to buy tickets
using miles, for example. Maybe if you built a more user-friendly
wrapper around common bad customer service experiences, people would
pay to use it. Passport expediters are an encouraging example.+1

Wondering what sort of thing would be easiest to attack though...
with the airlines/miles example, and the myriad of rules... yeah

Well aggregators are one place to start, a la Hipmunk +1 where
else could we apply that+1 to looking somewhere else to apply that.

^ Only problem with aggregators is once you get out of structured
data that's predictable and therefore relatively easy to parse it
becomes a real PITA<what about parsing social for peoples reactions,
and crawling the data from there? So you can get outside of RSS/yada
yada, and still get good stuff, even if you don't have the structure
sources?

^ Are you talking about something kinda like http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003
where they used a standard psychological survey to predict mood from
twitter messages and correlated that with stock market trends? < To
some extent, yeah.

Biz model?

Im a fan of finding pain and inventing an innovative painkiller --- a
bunch of hackers coming up with what's possible - that could be a long
dicussion...Ha, yeah. ... haha fair enough

[Jasdeep Hundal]

I like this one. As for my skills, I'm mostly a coder. Pretty
agnostic regarding specific technologies, I can pick up things more
than fast enough. That being said, Python is what I prefer (also have
some experience with Django), but I've dabbled in lots of different
things.

As for the aggregators idea, I was thinking something in the other
direction, How does this sound?: person wants to sell something,
person goes to one single website, enters info and with one click an
ad is posted on relevant online marketplaces.

On Dec 28, 2:16 am, JakeCarpenter <jakearthurcarpen...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>  A lot of companies (to say nothing of government agencies) have
> appalling customer service. "Please stay on the line. Your call is
> important to us." Doesn't it make you cringe just to read that?
> Sometimes the UIs presented to customers are even deliberately
> difficult; some airlines deliberately make it hard to buy tickets
> using miles, for example. Maybe if you built a more user-friendly
> wrapper around common bad customer service experiences, people would
> pay to use it. Passport expediters are an encouraging example.+1
>
>     Wondering what sort of thing would be easiest to attack though...
> with the airlines/miles example, and the myriad of rules... yeah
>
>     Well aggregators are one place to start, a la Hipmunk +1 where
> else could we apply that+1 to looking somewhere else to apply that.
>
>     ^ Only problem with aggregators is once you get out of structured
> data that's predictable and therefore relatively easy to parse it
> becomes a real PITA<what about parsing social for peoples reactions,
> and crawling the data from there? So you can get outside of RSS/yada
> yada, and still get good stuff, even if you don't have the structure
> sources?
>

>     ^ Are you talking about something kinda likehttp://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003