It's not meant to be negative. At CircuitLab (Don Dodge's
specific example for "solving boring problems that make money"), we're interpreting "boring problems" as a concise way of saying "problems that people have 9am-5pm (at work) and want to solve faster so they can leave at 5pm". That's not a bad place to be. Or perhaps they are problems that are exciting to our users but boring to Don Dodge. :)
Don't under sell CircuitLab! I thought it was the only cool and useful engineering project of the batch! You actually have deep technical skills that are not easy to replicate. And you can go both ways: web based, educational, makers or go make a native (just use chromium :)) high priced version and go after the incumbent market.
WSJ direct link: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/26/at-smaller-y-combinat...