5 Start-up Ideas That Will Blow Your Mind | Inc.com

5 Start-up Ideas That Will Blow Your Mind | Inc.com:

You won't find apps or Angry Birds here. Check out five ambitious companies pursuing big, bold ideas.

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If you wanted to teach a computer to mimic the way the human brain works, where would you start? Union City, Calif.-based start-up Vicarious is starting with the eyes: It's building software that can “see” and make sense of the world.

When Inc. set out to find some of the biggest, mind-blowing business ideas, we knew what we didn't want. Those smartphone apps with crazy growth stats? Another slickly designed Web dashboard to manage your finances? The next Angry Birds? All perfectly valid start-up ideas--but they don't exactly make your head spin. We wanted boldness.

What we found were the kind of ideas that may not come to fruition this year--or even this decade. In fact, we're not even sure some of them will pan out at all. But they are ideas to watch, for sure, if only because of the audacity and ambition required to pursue them. 

1. A Laser Printer for DNA

The idea: San Francisco-based Cambrian Genomics is creating the world’s first DNA laser printer. Instead of printing ink, this gadget will spit out genetic code. The traditional process of synthesizing DNA is tedious, costly, and error-prone. Cambrian's printer will produce accurate strands much faster and, theoretically, much cheaper once the technology comes to market. Cambrian, which is a product of the nonprofit academic institution Singularity University, is still in stealth mode so little is known about the actual mechanics of the printer. But the project has received funding from Founders Den managing partner Michael Levit and lists Singularity University as an advisor. 

Mind-blowing factor: Because the printer may drastically decrease the time and cost required to produce synthetic DNA, researchers will be able to generate larger quantities of DNA. The end result could be more advancements in personalized medical treatments--and even new organisms. "People get upset about extinction of animals, which I think is pretty silly,” Cambrian CEO Austen Heinz said in aninterview with TWiT Live. “We're going to make new ones and we're going to make more creatures."

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