This site actually started out early in 2002 as a learning tool for myself. I run the site http://www.schworak.com which is mainly a family site but it also serves as a platform for experimentation and personal development. It keeps me on track with new concepts and technologies.
At one point I needed to learn about optimizing large amounts of data for rapid access, but I simply couldn't get enough data together to qualify as large volume and I really couldn't create enough traffic to my site for any one area to get the experimenting off the ground.
At one point I had to do some research on barcodes at my regular job and that got me to thinking, what about UPC codes? There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of them. So I started searching around but at the time couldn't find anyone that had anything for the public beyond a couple hundred thousand entries. So I started the project as a subsection on the schworak site.
I created tools to rome around the Internet and scavenge any UPC data they could find. I started validating some of the data and even scanned several thousand products myself by hand. This project helped me in many areas, web bots, data optimization, barcode processing and and barcode creation. It was very a educational experience all together.
After a while I started connecting contact information to the company codes and found that people started using the site like crazy. In July of 2005 I reached over 700,000 UPC code records and 10,000 company records in my database at which point I broke the site off to its own domain http://UPCData.info to make it easier for people to access. This allowed me to further optimize the data access because my main site is configured for a different type of data access and the two forms of optimization just don't work well together. This also offered some URL branding in the process.
I am running this entire operation out of my own pocket at no cost to the customers or the companies. I do limit the amount of lookups because in the past I found that others started running web bots against my data and scavenging it. I have had my bots take little bits of data from many web pages over the years but I found a few bots taking large amounts of data from my site without even asking first. I always ask before taking large amounts of data from any other site so I expect the same from people running bots against my site. It just isn't right to steal other people's efforts.
I do allow users to enter data manually and for their efforts they earn credits that they can use for downloading or looking up more UPC data. Each day all visitors get their allotment of free lookups renewed. And if someone really wants to do a lot of lookups without offering anything back I have the ability to buy lookups at a very small fee just to cover some of my costs. I don't expect that I will earn any money really, it is just there in case it is needed. I do earn a few bucks from Google ads. So far just enough to cover the cost of my Internet service and part of my electricity.
This site is a combination of a hobby gone out of control, an educational platform and a public service site to connect people to products and companies using UPC codes.
I hope that this page has answered some of you questions about why this site exists. If you have any more please feel free to ask. I am willing to answer just about any question you can think of. You are also welcome to look over my personal information that I have on the Schworak web to get a better feel for who I am as a person. http://www.schworak.com/family/glenn
