comparison shopper

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

Introduction

If you were shopping, wouldn’t it be nice, if you could point a little Blackerry like device at the UPC bar code on a bag of coffee beans and see on your screen something like the following:

The Market on Yates
Salt Spring Coffee	400 gram bag
price	9.98
cost per kg	24.95
typically goes on sale	every 2 months
nearby store prices	9.90 to 19.00

You could fetch detailed information about the prices at nearby stores if you wanted.

The information would come from a computer database delivered over the EDVO data-cellphone system. But how does the database know this information? Ideally the stores would co-operate and would provide a list of UPC/prices/size/description. But what if they refused?

The people shopping in an area would provide price info as side effect of using the system. For example if the database did not have a sufficiently solid price for a given product at a given store, it could ask the user to enter the price the store was charging. This could be checked for plausibility, and consistency with the price registered by other shoppers. Shoppers who consistently lied could be blocked from using the system.

UPC product description information is fairly easy to come by. If any product is missing, again you can ask the users of the system to fill in the holes in your data.

Most fresh produce does not have UPC codes. For that you have codes for a kg of organic carrots, a kg of organic fancy Gala apples and select them from the Blackberry menu.

You could experiment with the idea using ordinary Blackberries, without UPC readers, but that would be so tedious it would rarely be worth the bother.

What might be possible is to use an ordinary Java-powered cell-phone with camera. The camera plus software might be able to read bar codes. You could sell this as an add-on to ordinary cell phones, rather than a dedicated device, perhaps paid for completely by advertising. To try out the idea, before investing in a technological solution, just upload the UPC images to a small sweat shop for transcribing.

Other Services

The device would do other shopping services:

Maintain a shopping list, and what remains to be found.
Where to look in the store for missing items on your shopping list.
Total tally of what you have in your basket, use to double check against checkout tally.
Leave notes and questions about products for other shoppers.

FlowFinity: UPC readers for Blackberry
UPC database info
UPC databases by email
UPC product description database
UPC reader for the Blackberry
ZXing

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