posted 14 years ago
Thanks Sebastien, that is a most generous offer.
Well, simply put the application in mind is a 'shelf scanning' application. The idea is that ssomeone can go into a retail store or supermarket, scan the barcodes on the products, have a few 'special' codes probably done at a touch of the screen for things like items stacked two high or other such scenarios (end of row on shelf), and enter the price of the article. This effectively captures a type of picture of the shelf itself. The data would then be sent bacck to a central database where the shelf design can be compared to the sales performance of the store and its articles. This would help retailers to identify both dead areas in their store as well as articles that take up too much space, or dont have enough, etc....
Most of the heavy processing would be done on some server arrangement, but the shelf capture is best done in the hand. If the retailer wanted to they could contribute the product data and pricing to a 'global' database and maybe gain a few sales from price competition or simply adjusting their own prices relative to others.
This is an area I have spent many years dealing with but never found what I believe to be a simple and reliable solution. You usually get one or the other but not both together. Existing software for this area is all windows based and extremely expensive, so it puts it completely out of reach of the little guy. The goal of the software would be to correct that and help make the little guy as capable as the big guy - or as close as you can get. I have the knowledge and experience to build such things, just not yet with Android. Android is still new to me from a programming point of view but I firmly believe that it is the best thing to happen to embedded hardware since electricity, and being able to combine that with a web interface to the parts that do the heavy lifting makes a lot of sense to me.
There you have it. Nothing super complex but it might just be pushing the limits a little from the sound of it. Still, I think the reward could be worth the risk :-)
Cheers and Thanks
The Frog