Idea! Would you be interested in Screenshot scraper/miner SaaS?
I have this idea to build screenshot processing service that will extract data using OCR and presented it in tabular format that can be exported as excel.
Later plan is to expose this service as an API. It will be subscription base service from basic to prefessional plan.
So your idea is to take screenshots and then extract the data using an OCR? It doesn't make sense for me.
Why are you taking screenshots if you need the text? you can scrape the text directly
What would be your ideal use case / customer?
Idea is you submit your screenshots and I extract data for you using OCR.
For example lets say you a desktop app from which you want to extract leads and it doesn't give you selectable text. Then OCR can help. All you need to do is submit screenshot and website will extract data from it
Oh, that makes sense, when I've read scraper I thought you were taking the screenshots from websites.
In my case, I don't find it useful because I can't imagine a use case for me, this is the first thing you have to do, try to find a problem which exists in a specific niche, know where your users are, and ask if your solution would fix the problem.
The problem should be urgent and repetitive, checkout this video:
https://www.startupschool.org/videos/37
Wouldn't that be much work to take ss of all pages? You know there are scrappers that crawl an entire website and throw out json or csv files after scrapping. Have you seen "scrapy"?
Yes, I have used html scrapy and written my own.
But it is a different product, extracting database from screenshots images.
So my really questions is how much is it the real world requirement to extract data from image whether is a desktop application screenshot or web page it doesn't matter.
Yes. If there is requirement for it then its great but i guess most of the people just use scrappers to crawl whole websites. thoughts?
In the enterprise world. I am processing millions of screenshots per day and extracting different data.
However I need to understand what are other use cases apart from enterprise world that would raise demand for image scrapping. Like you said people would mostly used html scrappers.
I have used html scrapper and also FB api to fill data for yellow pages listings & reviews site pagestan.com (for Pakistan) which I launched few months ago. Its not doing well and with google poking each one for reviews as people step into a place or took photo at that place. Its likely doom scenario for pagestan.com and may be yelp too in future.
Yes, a good idea would be to build a landing page and test user feedback.