View Thread mobile widget to support automating the population of the pantry database by photographing product bardcodes   (1 / 0)

	

		

			
 
		
		

			

			

			Category 5 Wind Turbines | a spigit founding company

			http://innovation.spigit.com/Idea/View?ideaid=39 
			
			
		
		

			
Spigit: Clean Technology Sector
		
		

			

		
	

but how does this work?

I am in the bigining stage of the manufacturing company,I am very new to the spigit community.I wish to Invite all the related companies/person can come forward.

It's a world full of patents out there and the mobile barcode reader industry appears to be no different.

Here is a Japanese vendor of a solution that would theoretically meet the need:

http://www.camreader.jp/index.html

You would then wrap your own mobile widget around this product and use it to send information to / from your server.

This product is the only one I could find to support standard barcode types, whereas most of the other support the new "web-ified" 2d barcodes that are used to translate into URLs and re-direct users to websites, e.g. http://www.qode.com

Hi - haven't seen much activity here over the past week. Have you disappeared mksasaki?

 

I'm here!  Everyday!  What should we talk about next?

I'm just wondering if you've put any thought into whether building support for mobile barcode reading is a worthwhile value add?

 

Maybe I'm missing something here but if the idea is that customers are going to scan the items in their pantry... I will suggest, not. Not, anytime in the near future.

I say this with a bit of experience in 2D barcode development - see user icon. I will conserve ink here before expanding on this because I'm guessing I'm missing something, not to mention that this thread seems to have all the intentional direction of a helium ballon with a hole in it. :)

john

 

How much better does it get than the bolded statement :) Euphemisms

	

		

			
 
		
		

			

			

			Category 5 Wind Turbines | a spigit founding company

			http://innovation.spigit.com/Idea/View?ideaid=39 
			
			
		
		

			
Spigit: Clean Technology Sector
		
		

			

		
	

And thanks to the wonder of the Net, you could use the following service's API to automate the translation of the UC barcode into the actual product. I seemed to work for a few things in my cupboard.

http://www.upcdatabase.com/ 

rather than being obtuse,...

Thanks, I've been working out. :)

I should point out that I am not saying it is a bad idea, (I'm not qualified for that) what I am doing is making a prediction or two. I make a lot of predictions and sometimes I don't do so well. By the way, my all time greatest prediction miss was Wikipedia - boy did I get that one wrong. I should point oute that I have talked with Mike and I think there is hiden value in what he is doing - they idea has a ton of cross industry potential. I also think that your comments here are helpful in an exploritory way and hopefully mine won't deter anyone from adding to or supporting a barcode system as a viable feature for his existing service.

So, my prediction is this: I predict Mike will not market (implement) a barcode solution into his current model anytime over the next 365 days - (it wouldn't take much for me to swap out 365 with 'ever'), nor will consumers manually inventory their pantry (365/ever). Exploring the idea would reveal a bad ROI.

Implementing a barcode model into the current pantry model would be equivalent to digging a mine shaft 500 feet down for coal when there is an option to work on efficient ways to pick up what is already on the surface. Mike has coal on the surface.

I'm not sure where to begin on why I believe the roughly defined barcode model will not work, but here are a few.

1) Consumers will not add effort (scan pantry) for something they are trying to make simpler

2) Mike would need to expend considerable resources to implement a barcode database

3) No practical device to scan with ( however, I did like Satish's 2 speed roller device idea posted above)

The list is actually huge, but unless there is a serious definition of the model that I'm commenting against it may not be necessary to list many.

John

Physical World Hyperlinks

I agree with John and I have personal empirical data to back it up and Nielsen's probably has real data to back it up. I participated in a Nielsen (actually a subsidiary of Nielsen's) survey where they mailed me a barcode reader and I was to scan all the items that I brought home from the grocery store. In return they paid me somewhere between $30 to $50 a month for my trouble (and believe me, it was a hassle).

The equation to be considered in this case is this. Does the added effort of "scanning stuff" provide a *marked* improvement in results or just marginal. If the latter, which is what I believe is the case, then it is not worth the effort. Furthermore, the scanner does not support typical items in the refrigerator like an onion (how big, whole or half, red or white, etc.), a half-eaten block of cheese (how many ounces?),   you get my drift.

Finally, the challenge is to fit into the current status quo of the *market segment* that you are going after and the way one would do things in that market segment (I don't believe adding a piece of equipment into the process is maintaining or simplifying the current process). Are you going after the single mom, the single male, single female, married mom, dad, etc.? In each of these cases, I suspect that the general behavior would be different. Perhaps (and I don't presume to know), the single male would decide to not worry about what they have in the fridge, but instead just go out to the fast food joint down the street and get some food.

Sorry for the lengthy dissertation here, but if you understand the behavior of the market segment, then perhaps your offering gets restructured to start with a main ingredient like chicken or fish or garbanzo beans (for the vegetarians), then present a bunch of recipes that have the item (chicken, fish or garbanzo beans) as the main ingredient. Then have the user select the recipe they like, to which you then present the ingredients and have them check the ingredients that they have out of the list of ingredients for this recipe. Once they've done this, you can then present them alternate recipes that have all of the ingredients that they checked or a subset, but with the option to always go buy the items for the original recipe that they liked

Finally, some of my experience may be dated and user behavior might have changed since then, but when I was at Intel, I worked in the home products group and we conducted a bunch of ethnography studies that focused on some of the issues I mention above. My first startup was also focused on providing software for Internet appliances (market never materialized) that sit in the kitchen and this was discussed as one of the features (and we explored a bunch of use cases around this subject). 

I agree that there should be a rule that one try the idea out before commenting, although I think that would be hard to enforce. In this case, I have tried out your site and offered some feedback based on it. Please accept it for what it is, feedback from a sample size of "1".

To further qualify my comment, your site asks the question "What's in your pantry"? I made it past the question, although a nit would be that I store my chicken in the fridge and not in the pantry. My point was to first, understand the characteristics/behavior of your market segment and then structure the questioning based on the segment.  My suggestion was based on my view of how the market segment may mentally approach the problem of determining what to cook. It is most likely completely wrong, but it was based on my assumption of how a likely market segment may approach the problem.
 

"Sorry for the lengthy dissertation here, but if you understand the behavior of the market segment, then perhaps your offering gets restructured to start with a main ingredient like chicken or fish or garbanzo beans (for the vegetarians), then present a bunch of recipes that have the item (chicken, fish or garbanzo beans) as the main ingredient."

There should be a rule that you must use the idea before you comment. otherwise, the entrepreneur gets a bunch of great ideas that are already incorporated into the website. We offer search by ingredient. For example, if you have an ingredient you just have to use (chicken breast is going bad in 2 days), you can search using that as a must have ingredient.

I agree that there should be a rule that one try the idea out before commenting, although I think that would be hard to enforce. In this case, I have tried out your site and offered some feedback based on it. Please accept it for what it is, feedback from a sample size of "1".

To further qualify my comment, your site asks the question "What's in your pantry"? I made it past the question, although a nit would be that I store my chicken in the fridge and not in the pantry. My point was to first, understand the characteristics/behavior of your market segment and then structure the questioning based on the segment.  My suggestion was based on my view of how the market segment may mentally approach the problem of determining what to cook. It is most likely completely wrong, but it was based on my assumption of how a likely market segment may approach the problem.
 

"Sorry for the lengthy dissertation here, but if you understand the behavior of the market segment, then perhaps your offering gets restructured to start with a main ingredient like chicken or fish or garbanzo beans (for the vegetarians), then present a bunch of recipes that have the item (chicken, fish or garbanzo beans) as the main ingredient."

 

There should be a rule that you must use the idea before you comment. otherwise, the entrepreneur gets a bunch of great ideas that are already incorporated into the website. We offer search by ingredient. For example, if you have an ingredient you just have to use (chicken breast is going bad in 2 days), you can search using that as a must have ingredient.

General Comment: It is the responsibility of the entreprenuer to explain the function of the idea sufficiently so as not to solicit redundant suggestions. This should be in lew of login requirements into every site as a user, downloading executibles or otherwise requiring time investments by contributors that may not apply or otherwise require a membership to review any idea. The ideas with quick tours and feature try-outs, get more valid feedback than the ideas requiring downloads and sign-ups.

A logical advertising model which can be incorporated is to tie features into the weekly coupon and circulars which publish across the net and in every newspaper in the country. This creates an action item and provides a pantry list of grocery items which can be experimented with.

	

		

			
 
		
		

			

			

			Category 5 Wind Turbines | a spigit founding company

			http://innovation.spigit.com/Idea/View?ideaid=39 
			
			
		
		

			
Spigit: Clean Technology Sector
		
		

			

		
	

That was an interesting read. What are 'Internet appliances'?

So was Intel involved in or researching barcode technology?

Regarding your first question; the link below is a decent summary from wikipedia and a couple of sentences from that summary that accurately describe the market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_appliances 

Internet appliances were promoted by a variety of technology companies during the 1990s but, as the price of full-featured computers dropped, never met the market expectations. Jim Louderback would later describe the concept as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".

As far as I know, Intel was never specifically involved in developing barcode technology (but it was a large company even back then and there might have been an effort somewhere in the company). The concept was, however, used in a couple of studies as a *supporting piece*.