Camera phone price checking service

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1 Sep 2004

Ben Hammersley has been publishing ideas that have been on his to do list for some time. Since I have more ideas than time or interest to implement them, I’ll join the fun.

A clever application would be something that allows you to take a pic of a UPC code from a product with a camera phone and send it to the service. The service would scan the UPC from the picture and reply with prices and reviews from around the web. I’m not exactly sure where the business model here is though. Affiliate links are unlikely to be profitable since an in-store shopper isn’t going to typically buy the product from the links you send back.

Anders
September 2, 2004 2:00 AM

That’d be grand indeed; some others have played with the idea already: http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2003/10/02/beholdthemmskillerappishere.html

Charles
September 2, 2004 4:08 AM

Yeah, this is a cool idea. I thought about a similar kind of thing when I first stumbled on the UPCdatabase project…using that as a starting point it would not be hard to develop a price/reviews website/service, which would also be accessible from mobile devices…could be as simple as enter the UPC code into the field…

http://www.surfarama.com/blog/comments.php?id=63010C9

Mellissa
September 2, 2004 6:17 AM

It seems like the business model would be like a Consumer Reports kind of thing. You pay a monthly or day pass kind of fee to get the info because you use the service a lot, or you are researching a big ticket item.

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