My project hits this assistive technology realm, check it out if you're interested.
A one-hand keyboard layout designed for former two-hand touch typists. Based on the same muscle memory you use to type with two hands, thus extremely quick/easy to learn.
Seems like an awfully high price for something that would be fairly trivial to accomplish with an AutoHotKey script. I can appreciate the ease of downloading an app ready to go, but $99 seems really high.
There are a handful of simple AHK scripts based on the same concept, but that make you hold a modifier key such as [space] to identify which key you want. The advantage of my app is that determining the characters is all done naturally and automatically via predictive-text as you are typing. Much more in tune with your muscle memory and faster and easier to learn as a result.
P.S. One of the most well-respected members of HN sells a self-described "Hello World attached to a random number generator" for $30.
I wish the HN readers would take on projects as a group. There are enough technical people that as a group would could actually accomplish a lot. I guess the trick is to find the right problems to crowdsource.
There are a bunch of statups popping up in eHealth. Two new incubators have popped up as well http://rockhealth.com and http://www.blueprinthealth.org. Stanford graduate school of business are doing some interesting things in bringing new technology into medicine from an startup perspective. http://recoveryrecord.com came out of Stanford GSB - from an Aussie female phycologist who learnt to code.
fix that extra "low priority" a11y bug in your queue. Missing/incorrrect a11y text or event is nothing to you, and an un-detourable pothole for the person relying on it.
But how do you convince a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in something like this? If you say "we're building devices to help people walk" and some YC-funded group says "we're building a location-based restaurant recommendation app" who do you think is going to get millions in funding?
>But how do you convince a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in something like this? If you say "we're building devices to help people walk" and some YC-funded group says "we're building a location-based restaurant recommendation app" who do you think is going to get millions in funding?
while i'd share you sentiment at emotional level, at practical level lets be just toward the VCs. They don't have the scale of money to invest into "building devices to help people walk" - to reach the stage when it can be sold (ie. FDA approved, blah-blah-blah, and without that your device would just not be able to reach the majority of the people who would need the device) it would take not millions, at the best case scenario it would take high tens of millions.
On the other side by financing "a location-based restaurant recommendation app" the VCs' millions help to generate super-wealth which can take on the next scale challenges - look at Musk for example. Unfortunately, there aren't many Musk-s around (honestly i don't undestand why whouldn't Brin or Page or Ellison do something like Musk, they even have much more money than he does (he is even not that super-wealthy, more on the lower side of the range))
Your note about FDA approvals rings true. It can take a very very long time for things to progress to the stage where they're available for sale - particularly when it comes to the medical industry. I've been watching a company that's been able to dramatically speed up the detection of things like Tuberculosis (from 21 days to 4 days), E.Coli (from up to 24 hours down to 4 hours), MRSA (up to 24 hours down to 6 hours), etc. ... and they've made what I consider to be remarkable advancements. Yet they haven't yet received the FDA approval necessary to achieve wider adoption of their technology.
To get silicon valley, or other investors to see the opportunity to back these types of ventures the approval process needs to be streamlined and prioritized in a way that accelerates the time-to-market for technologies that stand to benefit society on the whole.
it isn't only FDA per.se. The financial aspects of biomedical R&D is very peculiar. Different time - first half of 199x, different country - recently post-Soviet Russia, different scale of money ... i was involved in the project to secure financing (high tens of thousands of dollars, the project would have become profitable at the 3rd, possibly 2nd year - too long of a shot in the environment where trading in metals, vodka or electronics would bring 50-100% scale profits on the first turnaround, ie. on weeks, rare few months, time scale) for productization of some wonderful technology developed by a leading brain science institution. Well, we failed.
These days, with all the supposed and expected high/bio-tech boom and the marvelous advancements just around the corner, we see biotech layoffs, and a couple of PhD degreed with years of experience biomedical professionals i personally know here in the Valley can't get a job even at half what i'm making in the software. One of the reasons of such a state is that financing of the industry requires bigger scale, amount- and time-wise, of money, and thus is coming from banks and other institutions who have significantly decreased imnvestments following 2008. Talking about stimulus and the dirty cheap Federal money the banks have access to - it just isn't trickling down as lazily pumping the money though treasuries and QEs is much more safe way to profit from the money.
Comments
I wish more hackers would invest their time and energies in this kind of projects. Inspiring.
My project hits this assistive technology realm, check it out if you're interested.
A one-hand keyboard layout designed for former two-hand touch typists. Based on the same muscle memory you use to type with two hands, thus extremely quick/easy to learn.
Site and PC version: http://www.onehandkeyboard.org/
Mac App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-hand-keyboard/id465275525
Seems like an awfully high price for something that would be fairly trivial to accomplish with an AutoHotKey script. I can appreciate the ease of downloading an app ready to go, but $99 seems really high.
There are a handful of simple AHK scripts based on the same concept, but that make you hold a modifier key such as [space] to identify which key you want. The advantage of my app is that determining the characters is all done naturally and automatically via predictive-text as you are typing. Much more in tune with your muscle memory and faster and easier to learn as a result.
P.S. One of the most well-respected members of HN sells a self-described "Hello World attached to a random number generator" for $30.
I wish the HN readers would take on projects as a group. There are enough technical people that as a group would could actually accomplish a lot. I guess the trick is to find the right problems to crowdsource.
I guess the trick is to find the right problems to crowdsource.
Crowdsource that part, as well.
Great idea.
There are a bunch of statups popping up in eHealth. Two new incubators have popped up as well http://rockhealth.com and http://www.blueprinthealth.org. Stanford graduate school of business are doing some interesting things in bringing new technology into medicine from an startup perspective. http://recoveryrecord.com came out of Stanford GSB - from an Aussie female phycologist who learnt to code.
fix that extra "low priority" a11y bug in your queue. Missing/incorrrect a11y text or event is nothing to you, and an un-detourable pothole for the person relying on it.
But how do you convince a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in something like this? If you say "we're building devices to help people walk" and some YC-funded group says "we're building a location-based restaurant recommendation app" who do you think is going to get millions in funding?
>But how do you convince a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in something like this? If you say "we're building devices to help people walk" and some YC-funded group says "we're building a location-based restaurant recommendation app" who do you think is going to get millions in funding?
while i'd share you sentiment at emotional level, at practical level lets be just toward the VCs. They don't have the scale of money to invest into "building devices to help people walk" - to reach the stage when it can be sold (ie. FDA approved, blah-blah-blah, and without that your device would just not be able to reach the majority of the people who would need the device) it would take not millions, at the best case scenario it would take high tens of millions.
On the other side by financing "a location-based restaurant recommendation app" the VCs' millions help to generate super-wealth which can take on the next scale challenges - look at Musk for example. Unfortunately, there aren't many Musk-s around (honestly i don't undestand why whouldn't Brin or Page or Ellison do something like Musk, they even have much more money than he does (he is even not that super-wealthy, more on the lower side of the range))
Your note about FDA approvals rings true. It can take a very very long time for things to progress to the stage where they're available for sale - particularly when it comes to the medical industry. I've been watching a company that's been able to dramatically speed up the detection of things like Tuberculosis (from 21 days to 4 days), E.Coli (from up to 24 hours down to 4 hours), MRSA (up to 24 hours down to 6 hours), etc. ... and they've made what I consider to be remarkable advancements. Yet they haven't yet received the FDA approval necessary to achieve wider adoption of their technology.
http://nanologix.com/test_results.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38404/
To get silicon valley, or other investors to see the opportunity to back these types of ventures the approval process needs to be streamlined and prioritized in a way that accelerates the time-to-market for technologies that stand to benefit society on the whole.
it isn't only FDA per.se. The financial aspects of biomedical R&D is very peculiar. Different time - first half of 199x, different country - recently post-Soviet Russia, different scale of money ... i was involved in the project to secure financing (high tens of thousands of dollars, the project would have become profitable at the 3rd, possibly 2nd year - too long of a shot in the environment where trading in metals, vodka or electronics would bring 50-100% scale profits on the first turnaround, ie. on weeks, rare few months, time scale) for productization of some wonderful technology developed by a leading brain science institution. Well, we failed.
These days, with all the supposed and expected high/bio-tech boom and the marvelous advancements just around the corner, we see biotech layoffs, and a couple of PhD degreed with years of experience biomedical professionals i personally know here in the Valley can't get a job even at half what i'm making in the software. One of the reasons of such a state is that financing of the industry requires bigger scale, amount- and time-wise, of money, and thus is coming from banks and other institutions who have significantly decreased imnvestments following 2008. Talking about stimulus and the dirty cheap Federal money the banks have access to - it just isn't trickling down as lazily pumping the money though treasuries and QEs is much more safe way to profit from the money.