Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Barcode Shopping Idea

Okay... still don't think Keliso is a good idea? Not convinced that my ideas are worth anything?

Here's another one, totally free. Go set up a website and make a bundle. If you do, or if you want to skip the middle and jump to making a whole lot more than just a bundle, then come talk to me about Keliso. It's a way better idea.

Barcode Shopping Website:
  • Make a website that lets people make accounts and do the regular forum stuff.
  • Each account has one or more shopping lists attached.
  • If you login and upload a photo of a barcode, it automatically identifies the product and adds it to the shopping list you specify.
  • It lets you print out these shopping lists.
Sound simple enough? Just a forum-based website with the ability to upload photos that then get processed through basic barcode software. A link to some fairly authoritative barcode to product cross-reference tables would complete the system. Not that hard to do. Let the phone-geeks make smartphone apps to link the phone camera to the website... not really your problem.

So, how do you make money doing it?

Well, if you haven't figured it out by now... you sell adds for various local and online retailers (you ask the people their postal/zip code when then sign up, right?) that sell the products they want. If you want milk, why LowBall Foods, just down the road, has a sale on it right now... here's a coupon to print out. Oh, you're in a store... here's what our "best price found" is (from our list of advertisers).

It's the Google model actually, provide a useful service - in this case automatically building your shopping lists - and then sell discreet yet relevant advertisements to people that might actually care what they say. Of course, you could mine the resulting data you get to collect. What you do with that depends on how evil you want to be.

Feel free to take this idea and do with it what you wish. I expect no remuneration, but do expect attribution. Like I said, you could make money doing this with relatively little start-up capital. Of course, Keliso will make way more money, way faster, with much less work (you don't need to find advertisers), and will cost about the same as this to setup. Of course, Keliso is not free.

You can view more about Keliso here

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