

Show HN: A free ISBN/UPC/EAN database and API with 30+ million items - outpan
http://www.outpan.com

======
chatmasta
Cool! I think a cool idea for a related service would be crowdsourced local
price comparison. Take pictures of items in store with an app, which uploads
to your servers to do OCR/mturk and get the UPC. In exchange, users get
coupons. Then when they want to buy an item, they go to your website to find
the store selling it for the cheapest.

It would add accountability to the claims by big retail chains that they
"match any price."

------
motyar
Great! Is there any call limit?

~~~
outpan
Up to 2000 calls/minute. We will hopefully increase this soon.

------
joshwa
What are your data sources?

~~~
outpan
user contributions, purchased databases, paid moderation and web crawlers.

~~~
noir_lord
I happened to have a can of soft drink in my had so I punched the UPC in and
it was not found (unsurprisingly, it's a small northern soft drink company in
the UK) so I hit Add Product and then it asked for a signup.

I think you'd get better buy in if you could add the product first then sign-
up or not have to signup at all but put those entries into some kind of
moderation system.

~~~
outpan
wow, thanks a lot for your thorough advice :) tbh I really hate putting road
blocks in front of people who would like to contribute to the database,
however we were the victim of a huge spam attack with completely random ip
rotations. I will eventually remove the mandatory sign up once we have a
strong moderation system in place, this shouldn't be too far from now. Thanks
again, I really appreciate your comment :)

~~~
hayksaakian
if people are rotating IPs to dodge your blockers, maybe you could shadow-ban
them instead? that way they don't know that the IP is bad.

~~~
outpan
That's true; the mandatory sing-up is a temporary measure, I'm sure there are
a lot of ways to fight spammers including the method you mentioned. Thank you
for your suggestion.

