Pricescanner not updating?

[Long Read]

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas, all bordeies!

Max here – I’m the guy who, many years ago, wrote pricescanner.ie – yeah. It was a great time - built with perfection from the begging  - design never changed )

I remember I’ve been looking to buy something on Argos and went every day checking it, and then I thought, why wouldn’t I write a bot which checks prices. This is how it all started, and Checkargos.com inspired me[salut, Brain!]

Many of you have been using it for years. I'm still using it!

Since then, a lot of time passed – I had a chance to participate in many interesting projects and learn a lot. On a personal side, things went interesting as well. Now I’m 42 and have 5 kids – challenging at times but great overall!

In the past few years, I got interested in machine learning – 20 years ago, studying high math in college, I was thinking - about how to apply it but to have a PC was a luxury I could not afford. Now running a couple of server clusters in public clouds is easy.

I always had a problem - I'm bad at colour-matching, drawing, styles and everything which requires visual creativity. To dress up to go out - is always a challenge for me - many of you now would say - that is why wives do exist ))). Yes, and she helps me quite a lot there - if she would read this post - thank you - otherwise, I would still be running in my 20 years old Adidas hoodies and runners. I hate overspending, but I'm not Scrooge or anything like that.

Let's go back to the main topic - machine learning ) 

I have an idea to create a tool to help people like myself with the colour/style matching problem at an affordable price. Users would give context to that system. In other words, machine learning would analyse styles created by users, having the facility to virtual try cloth on in any combination and find suitable substitutions among hundreds of shops and secondhand marketplaces. 

It is not a new, wow idea - but implementation is challenging - no matter what picture and how many clothes you have - you should be able to try them on.

I and group developers - started to build such product: 

dress2save.ie 

It looks like pricescanner but for cloth. It collects and classifies cloth images and styles. We collected more than 5 million images and categorised them. Now we are experimenting with different types of machine-learning neural networks. 

Suggest what shops to add - now we can do it fast - more different images the better results should be.

The project is being financed by myself; some google ads now and some affiliates in future.

If our idea with machine learning works, we will move it to the Android and iOS apps.

What will happen with pricescanner?: it will continue to live its own life once Argos.ie is alive - from time to time, it will crash - but I will recover it as usual.