Samsung’s Tweeting Refrigerator Could be Overkill | Hacker News Reader

Samsung’s Tweeting Refrigerator Could be Overkill

mashable.com

5 pointssolipsist9 comments

I remember having the idea for a refrigerator that scanned the barcodes of any items inserted or removed from it. If a carton of milk, for example was removed and not replaced, the refrigerator would add it to the grocery list. If an item stayed in the fridge for longer than a certain period of time, the fridge would alert you to possible expiration. There would also be a feature that would give you recipes you could cook using items in your fridge. I'm still waiting for something like that to come along.

I said the same thing for a PM interview at a big tech company and that was the main topic of discussion for that interview slot. I did have image recognition with learning for expired food detection in addition and a big line up of other possible features. Definitely something like this will come up within the next 5 years! Many interesting and open ended questions can arise. How about products without a bar code (apples from the street vendor)? How will the scanning take place without the user having to do it?

How about products without a bar code (apples from the street vendor)?

I keep my apples in a bowl on the counter, so that wouldn't be an issue for me! To make sure we got a more accurate inventory of everything in the fridge, I would imagine a combination of barcodes, rfid tags, internal camera with image recognition (and maybe crowdsourced image tagging), and maybe cross-referencing with Mint data (if I put a CPK bag in the fridge on the same day I have a credit card charge from CPK as recorded by Mint, there's a good chance there's BBQ chicken pizza in it). Of course since I'm not actually going to build this product, the sky's the limit on technology and programming.

Ha.. I had a similar idea. Mine would also know when you were running out of item X (eg, based on weight and average delta) and order groceries for you based on this. I like your recipe idea better though. Mine involved getting planned meals for the week and using that information to also pre-order groceries.

An automatic inventory of everything in your fridge and apps that could build on that inventory (Grocery List or Recipes) - genius!

Something along those lines has been a common idea for a while - it was one of the major use cases for RFID tags when they were still fairly new, for example. I'm surprised that it doesn't already exist, given that I first heard the idea several years ago (possibly >5, I don't really remember).

Quite disappointed to find out that it doesn't tweet on its own.

Me too! >:[

Perhaps Zawinski's law should be modified to say "tweets" instead of email.

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