Show HN: ThingCounter - You upload an image and we count things for you
thingcounter.com> "You upload - We count - Everybody's happy"
I have no idea what this "thing" does. I can't even try it without paying you $10.
The homepage could probably use a bit more detail. The idea is you upload a image, tell us what you need counted in it, and then we get you back a number.
You could use this for gathering statistics about an audience at an event, inventory counting, or field research. Part of our goal in putting this out is to see where it will get used.
We'll definitely work on improving the homepage and look at making a free option.
A free option might not even be necessary, just a "See how it works" page would probably suffice. Take us through a common use case, maybe even use that convention scenario I saw in Saaspire's blog. Take a picture at a convention, upload it to ThingCounter and ask us to count heads, we get back to you with a count of heads.
A video would be even better. Videos are very easy to consume, and it is typically very easy to win people over with a well-done video.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback!
I don't even know if I want to try it without seeing a demo or at least a product tour.
I found a little info on Saaspire's blog. [1]
Here's a relevant experpt:
> Sean gives a lot of his time towards helping to organize the local developer community and in particular gets involved with running conferences like DjangoCon. One of the problems he encounters as an organizer is figuring out how well different talks, activities, and events at a conference are performing. Basically, he needed a somewhat accurate idea of how many people were involved and didn’t want to have to do manual counts everywhere. His solution was to provide a service that allowed you to upload a photo and get back a count for the number of people in it. When he shared this idea with me, I thought there might be even broader applications for counting anything (e.g. marketing agencies needing to count SKUs on a shelf or biologists counting birds in flocks). Enter thing counter, a service that lets you upload a photo and request a count of something.
Sounds like you're paying to have someone count the number of X's in your photo.
[1] http://saaspire.com/blog/2012/8/our-lean-product-experiments
I'm one of the people behind ThingCounter, feel free to ask me any questions.