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Making something useful?

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2014 2:04 am
by Script47
I want to make something useful which will help people in their daily lives. Something which people would use. Any ideas? Web based. :)

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2014 2:22 am
by Chris
Something that makes money for everyone automatically.
Something that can control the temperature of your home.
A way to instantly communicate crime amongst one another.
A way to prove that America was behind the attack on MH17.

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2014 11:36 am
by vitinho444
That's what every developer wants i guess.. Chris' ideas are pretty good though :D

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 2:25 am
by Valkyrie
I always though it'd be interesting to aggregate twitter results into a graph based off keywords, like explosion or bomb, to detect potential events as people are tweeting them in certain regions. Like scraping twitter for all users with a location set in Egypt, during the protests for example, and then as tweets include keywords denoting things like an explosion or attack, a bubble grows over the region so you can see that a common event is trending. Never really got too far into the idea though, but predictive models like that are always useful at the least from a big data standpoint

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 4:34 am
by Verahta
Might want to use R for the analysis part.

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 9:54 am
by vitinho444
Valkyrie wrote:I always though it'd be interesting to aggregate twitter results into a graph based off keywords, like explosion or bomb, to detect potential events as people are tweeting them in certain regions. Like scraping twitter for all users with a location set in Egypt, during the protests for example, and then as tweets include keywords denoting things like an explosion or attack, a bubble grows over the region so you can see that a common event is trending. Never really got too far into the idea though, but predictive models like that are always useful at the least from a big data standpoint
That's a good idea, but it's kinda sad that when something bad happens people just tweet about it... Even those you suffered tweet about it, what is wrong with this world?

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 1:08 pm
by Xaos
Well it is a good, fast way to spread information and condolences.


To do something useful, you need a problem or a question. Think of a question or problem you have and solve it. I'm working on an economical model because I'm curious about the difference in revenue of income tax vs no income tax but increased sales tax. This can be your question/problem or it can be someone elses, but chances are if its yours, its also someone elses :D

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 1:30 pm
by kaos78414
Check out this article by Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Even if it doesn't lead you to something you want to build, it's a great read with loads of great advice.

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 1:38 pm
by vitinho444
kaos78414 wrote:Check out this article by Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Even if it doesn't lead you to something you want to build, it's a great read with loads of great advice.
Thanks ;)

Re: Making something useful?

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 2:13 pm
by Xaos
Great read, and I reiterate 100x what he said.