I am an avid read of Y Combinator News. Recently Paul Graham added a link to his post on a multitude of ideas that his company would like to fund. Only two of them were great interest to me:7. Application that your company needs
13. Better online learning system
Regarding the first item, I really need an application that projects profit from trading stocks. There are numerous times that I have purchased a number of shares from many different companies. And given the current prices for these securities, I want a number of statistics such as dollar amount of profit per company, percent profit, etc. Yes my brokerages provide these things. However I do not want to log into my brokerage accounts from any old computer. I would rather run my app, enter the data, and see the results.
I can also vouch for the second item. My prior company did not like sending people out to paid training. I guess it cost the company too much money as we were a huge company. So they contracted out the training to another company which provided everything via a web site. Let me tell you. The web site was pretty weak. Yes I understand it is not easy to develop great training materials. But come on. There were lots of problems with this system:
- It was not simple to log in
- I had trouble printing out documentation
- Screens worked poorly at my resolution
- The testing was a joke
- Navigation was not easy
- I could not take online notes
- Images were not that good
Although I could go on, I think you get the point. The training system my company used was weak. If some little start up could generate a better one, I think there is a market for it. I am doing my part as well. I have already prototyped some solutions to the first problem. And when I get a polished version, I will release the app free of charge on my Black of Hat blog.
