

Live Weekend Project: TwoTapTextbooks - Terpaholic

Hi, I'm Vik, a CS major at the University of Maryland!<p>I'm competing in PennApps2012 (http://2012f.pennapps.com/), a 48 hour hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania. My entry is a student-to-student book exchange, www.TwoTapTextbooks.com. It'll be updated nonstop during the competition!<p>A little background:
Last year I created an iPhone/Android map app of UMD called Campus Maps (http://www.getcampusmaps.com) which really caught traction; 25% of the campus downloaded it in 12 months (6,500 students on a campus of 27,000)! This year I'm expanding it to UVA and adding other apps to complement it like a textbook exchange!<p>Are there any caveats, must-do's, or useful tools that come to mind for a 20 year old CS College Senior? Thank you so much HackerNews :)
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jcr
In course names, be sure to handle spaces "Math 141" and handle full course
names "English" versus "ENGL".

It would probably be helpful if you stated the university since course
names/numbers are not necessarily fixed to specific books.

If you can get course->teacher->book data, it would be useful.

If you can get such data for multiple universities, fantastic.

Allow ISBN lookup to match a book to one or more courses.

Allow Title lookup to match a book to one or more courses.

Allow Author lookup ...

If you don't have any listed for sale, access Amazon, B&N, ... --Most of the
book sellers have API's.

if "m" is entered, two MATH141 entires show up, but clicking them does nothing
--are you using a popup?

Good Luck!

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Terpaholic
Good catch on the spaces! I might split it into 2 arrays [Math] [100, 101,
140, 141..etc] and check each part or write a helper function to remove spaces
on submitting!!

Regarding Universities: Only targeting my school, University of Maryland for
the moment so I can test it out before expanding (Like what I did with
www.GetCampusMaps.com!). I'll be looking to use HTML5 Geolocation data to
suggest a school, or otherwise distinguish the schools apart. Faced a very
similar problem with Campus Maps.

I will definitely try to collect all of that information as best I can - I
don't know how yet!

Looking to expand to multiple universities as soon as I vet it out at UMD :D

ISBN lookup coming soon! Like, really soon. Tonight soon.

Great catch with Title Lookup, will do!

Author Lookup - Absolutely. Still designing the database etc, so these are
great things to keep in mind.

I will be using Amazon, Chegg, and possibly others like Ebay(half.com) for
suggested upper and lower boundaries. I will put in a sell-to-me option or
buy-from-me option which will be some delta away from the optimal price anchor
for that book. Say Amazon has the highest buy-back price at $45 - I'd list
that, and tell them they can drop it off on campus for $40 (market arbitrage,
and I doooo like generating profit...). Not sure how to scale this upon
graduation, having affiliate students on campus ready to come to you to pick
up the books? If they have to go to the mailbox, they may as well mail it to
Amazon, so I have to offer better.

There should only be one MATH141 showing up now! I am currently designing what
it does when clicked. Rather than load all of the data user-end every time I
want to do this dynamically from the database. At the moment it's mainly a
client-side demo, I am designing the database right now. Was seriously not
kidding about updating it nonstop for the next 2 days, the competition started
about 8 hours ago and this is what I have so far from scratch :D. The goal was
to inspire other Hackers from seeing me do it from scratch into going out and
BUILDING!

Thank you so much for your time. It means the world to me. If I can ever
answer iPhone questions / you need a favor, feel free to get in touch via
www.vikbhandari.com, it'll always have my latest contact info. You can also
see the types of things I can help you out with there :)

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Terpaholic
I'm posting hourly comments on the progress! It has come a long way already :)
[http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/zx3zy/developing_m...](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/zx3zy/developing_my_product_mvp_in_48_hours_live/)

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meric
If you list the courses like I did in my project last year:
www.textbookcentral.com.au, you can get lots of visitors searching e.g
"Math141 textbooks" from search engines.

By lots I mean only a hundred a day.

Try search "FINC3014 textbook" and see. :)

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Terpaholic
Wow that's awesome! Thank you I will definitely look into ranking for course
words!

