Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All • Hacker News Board

Re: Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

#31

Post by vinothgopi » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 1:18 AM UTC

rosenjon wrote: post #28

rosenjon wrote: post #27

Very cool! This could be really useful for something I'm working on. I noticed in the example queries on your site, the data that is returned looks like it is being piped pretty much exclusively from Amazon. For example, every image url is an Amazon url. Have you licensed this data from Amazon? Otherwise, any customers who use this info on their website are effectively ripping off Amazon's product data, and could be…

So the terms of service answer this question in a vague way. Basically, they say you aren't allowed to use this data for any commercial purpose. But who is going to want to use this data for anything other than commercial purposes? How You Can Use the Service Semantics3 grants you only a limited license to access and make use of the Service for your own personal, non-commercial purposes. This license is the only lice…

Well that doesn't make any sense. All our use cases would be violating our own ToC then!

What we meant was you cannot resell the data. We shall fix the wording of that ASAP. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

#32

Post by vinothgopi » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 1:26 AM UTC

jareau wrote: post #26

vinothgopi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We started out in Singapore and the only payment processor we could use there was Paypal. If started now we would have used something more easier and better like Stripe :) That being said, we should be switching over to them soon.

Check out balancedpayments.com. It's a processing, escrow, and payouts in one API. Also the founding team were early employees at Milo.com and worked on this specific issue of SKU level data cataloging & matching. disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced and this is a shameless plug for my product. :) I was also the head of data acquisition at Milo.com and am fascinated by this problem. I have to admit I'm skeptical…

Sure I'll check out balancedpayments.com :) We should definitely talk! Hit me up at vinoth at semantics3.com

Re: Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

#33

Post by buss » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 6:10 AM UTC

I always thought it would be nice to instantly learn a product's provenance.

An app that tells you where some product was made would probably go over really well in the USA. There are a lot of people who would pay more for a product if they knew it was made in the USA while the product next to it was made in China. It's probably quite difficult to get this information, though.

Re: Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

#34

Post by rosenjon » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 8:08 AM UTC

vinothgopi wrote: post #30

jere wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I noticed in the example queries on your site, the data that is returned looks like it is being piped pretty much exclusively from Amazon. Damn, I really am hoping that's not the case. I got all excited because I really don't like the Amazon Product Advertising API. In fact, I have a project that I've basically given up on pursuing further because it depends on product lookup and I didn't think I could depend on Ama…

Thanks for the comment! Since amazon.com storefronts cover more products that the rest, hence the skewed results - this is specifically true with the long tail queries. As we add more sources, the dominance would be less pronounced :) We did hear that feedback too. Hopefully our API helps mitigate that issue. Hit me up at vinoth at semantics3.com if you'd like to talk about how our API could work for you!

The discussion of the TOS kind of obscured the real question I was trying to ask, which is "What are users of this API allowed to do with the image data?"

The API provides a link to the image, which is probably perfectly legal, but the site that displays that image in, say, an ad for a product on a non-Amazon website may be infringing. I'd like more clarity on this particular aspect of this api.

Re: Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

#35

Post by patternpaul » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 3:33 PM UTC

This service would be excellent for insurance claims. I used to work with a third party insurance claims specialist where they had a manually updated database of products to valuate insurance claims. They would either do all the hard work of doing the valuations, sell access to their reporting app or sell access to their product DB... 90% of their sales was the product DB.