Show HN: An interactive comparison chart of the 300 most popular tablets

productchart.com

9 points·no_gravity··4 comments

The first new product category since I renamed the project to Product Chart a month ago. With Smartphones, Laptops and Tablets, I now have the main mobile computing devices covered. If there are additional parameters you want to see incorporated, let me know and I will add them on to the chart.

This is excellent. How do you get data into the system? Scrape amazon? I did a PoC correlating data between the manufacturer's site and amazon, messy business.

When I started out with the simple items like flashdrives, I experimented with automated import via the Amazon API. But meanwhile I switched to a completely manual process. Everything has to be checked and proofread anyhow. So it makes the process simpler to keep out the automation completely.

"PoC"?

Proof of Concept.

You are on to something with the display/search. Maybe sell to newegg?

I think a valuable approach would be semi-automated import of data from various sites (write some adapters) and then have a manual check/proof stage before it makes it into the live system. One thing I noticed, is that some stuff is refurb or on the end of the product cycle where the value gets a whole lot better. It would be cool to know what the price of an item over time is and how likely it is to be discontinued [0] . Like the refurb samsung tablets or the lenovo [1] ones.

The next step is to scrape reviews (forum posts xda, amazon, newegg, etc) of each item and roll them up into something meaningful using sentiment analysis.

[0] guess they are broken now http://camelegg.com/products?pc=Tablet+PC+-+Tablets

[1] Might add, http://outlet.lenovo.com/outlet_us/

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