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Stolen Parts Finder
Use Case 1 – My bike has been nicked – find it
Enter Details for Stolen Item
Select object type = Bike
Enter Date = Today
Enter Location = SO16 5SP
Enter up to 10 Key Words = Scott, eGenius, Blue, Electric, Genius
List of possible sales sites shown and user can add any extra they want (Pink Bike etc)
Hit Search
A list of likely sales sites for this object type (plus eBay, Gumtree etc) are searched each day until stopped for items which match any of the key words.
Found hits are ranked by number of key words/distance to allow dross to be filtered according to users preferences
Daily/Weekly email of all possible adverts sent to user
App tracks which hit results resulted in the item being found to improve search confidence and detect trends.
Can be extended for other items like golf clubs, boats, fishing gear etc. Basically trying to track stuff nicked by opportunist thieves who try to shift stuff on the internet - or more likely the guy who bought the stolen stuff and is trying to sell it on. If your bike is nicked you could have a search for the whole bike and separate searches for the key components.
I was looking for a more predatory hunt for stolen good rather than a check you weren't buying them. We just had Southampton Bike Park storage broken into and £2K or damage and theft has pissed me off.
It's a really good idea. I see it as like a HPI check for a car. If only I had the time....
While I completely understand how this might be useful, what's in it for the app developer (i.e me?). How do I monetize it?
A few options:
- Some sort of payg plan with 1 day trial
- Ad driven revenue
- Donation driven
Keeping this sort of thing up to date and useful is hard. It requires many integrations to be useful, which will probably break regularly. It would also be fairly expensive to run (lots of regular compute). I basically don't have time.
It's a decent pet project for someone though. Definitely a use case. Things like skyscanner etc started life with an idea like this.