I built a home-grown scanner like this one (not with ZBar though) for my asset tracking web app (www.assetbots.com) and agree that for 1D barcodes a cheap bluetooth or USB scanner is hard to beat.
We support both (camera and external), but surprisingly a lot of our customers find the camera good enough. Code 128 is our second-most scanned symbology behind QR.
A big factor in my industry was scanning damaged barcodes, which was frequent since they're attached to indoor/outdoor plants and physical boxes that get moved around. They get weathered and scraped.
If there's even slight damage to the barcode, forget the browser scanners, you can scan that thing until the next Olympics and not get a read. HID scanners don't skip a beat.
I launched Assetbots (https://www.assetbots.com/) last year and went through a lot of ups and downs transitioning into the "people give me money" phase of the SaaS journey.
This year I plan to go all-in on scaling customer acquisition and getting the business out of infancy and into the next level of growth.
I never realized just how bad this can be until I started selling/marketing my startup. I was so confused by the reaction to my participation on a few subreddits where my target customers hang out - I had never experienced anything like it before.
I started to see patterns (not only against my posts personally, although I quickly stopped trying to participate) because I began to understand the market players. It's unreal how inauthentic most of the content actually is and how much of it is straight up shill marketing. I suspect this is true for a large number of niche forums where specific products or services become "blessed" by the community.
The only way to accomplish this is with either a large network of puppet accounts or with the support of the moderators. Probably both.
I've been a Replicache user since v7 when it was distributed as wasm - it's now v10 for General Availability. My use case is quite a bit different than this demo - I'm making a bog-standard back office SaaS with it [0]. It's been great though. Very productive and the end result feels very fast.
I'm also working on a similar product, but targeted toward small businesses (https://assetbots.com/). I agree that the simplicity is nice here. I've done a lot of customer interviews and demos at this point, so here's my free advice:
- Custom fields are a must.
- An IRL link (an "asset tag") is nice, but honestly not critical, even for most small businesses. This changes as users become more accustomed to having an inventory.
- Users say they want hierarchies but they almost never do in practice (e.g., nested folders or containers).
I'd love to chat inventory product design any time. Feel free to email me (my email is in my profile). Good luck!
This is really cool! I'm working on an asset tracking application right now (https://www.assetbots.com/), and generating labels are a big part of the workflow. My roadmap calls for simply generating Avery sheets.
But it would be AWESOME if I could let a user click a button and send them to a labellive:// URL and have it just work. I'll explore a little and see if there's a mom-tested way to make this usable.
Label printing is still a world of hurt. My hope is to make it incrementally better, a smaller dumpster-fire, if you will.
I definitely have users triggering labellive:// integrations. The nice thing about the URI is it automatically launches the app if it isn't open - which is not true of HTTP integrations. The downside is it can be slower, especially on windows. Been there, done that. Maybe there's a workaround because Windows optimizations like this are a black box/art.
The other challenge is going to be referencing a standard design. Today, the integrations reference an absolute path or a "pinned" design file. I've had a few subtle requests to allow pulling down a standard "reference" design from the cloud (that you host for your users), and the app will cache the design based on a computed hash that you include in the URI. If your design changes, update the hash, Label LIVE will pull the update on the next invocation.
There's a lot of fun room to play with this. Let me know if you'd like to team up by emailing help @ label dot live. Now that I've got a fairly sturdy base of features my 2022 focus is to really hit and deliver on the potential for integrations like this.
I just launched the marketing site on Monday. I'm 38 with a spouse and two small children. I've been a CTO of two SMBs over the last few years and needed to build something of my own. It's the craziest thing I've ever done.
The industry is end-of-life IT assets. It's a big industry with a lot of steak dinners that you can make a decent living at by grinding. I was introduced by a buddy of mine who's managed to build a good no-tech business in the niche.
My thesis is that there's opportunity around "platforming" the service with integrations and automation. Compliance and convenience are big drivers for customers, so traditional marketplaces have failed to take off.
Looks great. Can I make a small headline suggestion that might boost your conversion?
Consider saying ‘Sell your used computer...’ Using the word ‘your’ in a headline has been shown to improve conversions. I also think it would just read easier in the context of this page.
Love the home page. Instantly tells me what you do and what I need to do to get started. I'm not your target market, but wanted to give you a thumbs up!
This looks great and seems like the unglamorous-but-useful idea that will pay.
Offtopic: I believe that in the UK, you used to be tax advantaged if you threw away old IT hardware and bought new kit. But you had to throw it away - you couldn't sell it on. Imagine the incentives to landfill that created.
Hey thats a sweet landing page, looks very solid from what I see, if you're planning on scaling fast, use an Auto-AB testing toolkit like Quicksand.ai to optimize from the get-go.
Shotzoom is an app development company that creates market leading mobile and web experiences in sports and fitness. We pride ourselves on creating the highest quality products in our industry, and have received numerous accolades such as the Apple Design Award. Our newest app, Golfshot: Golf GPS, has been featured multiple times on both the App Store and Google Play.
We’d really like you to:
• Be a great Android developer, with one or more fully-developed apps under your belt.
• Have 2+ years of experience developing mobile applications.
• Be action- and detail-oriented.
• Be comfortable working without much organizational hierarchy or direct oversight.
Ideally, you should:
• Be an expert in object-orientation, eventing and delegation, and other modern programming styles.
• Be excited to develop on all of Android’s myriad form factors, from tablets and TVs all the way down to watches and Android Wear.
• Have familiarity with or an interest to learn other mobile platforms such as iOS with Objective-C, or even Windows Phone with C#.
• Have some technical presence on the web, such as a GitHub profile, StackOverflow profile, or a personal website.
If you're interested, please feel free to contact me personally: chadb@shotzoom.com.
We're actually unsure of market size, except for anecdotally because we are the market. We're hoping to better understand the market and our place in it doing this sort of phase-in, rather than writing all of our code first and hoping for the best.
The social proof is a great idea, and something I completely forgot. We've gotten a number of sign ups so far, some with some very good comments. So I'm not planning on investigating that immediately.
I've never dealt with an ultra-long trip like the one he's talking about in the article. However, for "normal-"length vacations you might take as a software engineer (i.e., 2 weeks or so), I've found that my body actually benefits from the time off.
I've done two two-week trips this year (Peru and Spain). In both cases, I was in excellent shape before the trip (155-160lbs at 5'11" with low body fat and good muscle definition). I work out three to four times per week, plus box twice per week.
I lost about 10lbs during each trip. When I got home from Peru (the first trip), I was mortified. I tried to bulk up like crazy by eating a ton of good fat and protein, and I lifted almost exclusively heavy weights. I was bigger and stronger than before the trip in three weeks.
After the second trip I was less scared, because of the previous experience. I was just as strong as before the trip in about three weeks again, but I didn't gorge myself as much, so I stayed a bit leaner.
I guess what I took away from the experiences was that you're bound to loose body fat while traveling, simply because you do so much walking. If you're in good shape beforehand, though, your muscles will "remember" and come back to you remarkably fast. You may even be able to improve your overall fitness level and put on leaner muscle afterwards.
We support both (camera and external), but surprisingly a lot of our customers find the camera good enough. Code 128 is our second-most scanned symbology behind QR.