[jakecarpenter]

It seems like getting a wide enough adoption to make this useful would be really tough, since as soon as you started to get traction (if at all) you'd get bought by someone who was scared of you or a more established player would break into the space. Further, inventory and sales systems are long established and are big investments for a lot of places, so kind of tough to upend. As many have said, widespread retail adoption would be unlikely.

The meat of the concept is fantastic, but why not come at it from the consumer side of things. Try to figure out a way to take transaction information (like, from a receipt) and upload it at the point of sale. You'd get a live data stream of what was being bought, where, and for how much. You could entice consumers to use the product by providing them with mint-like app for day to day purchases. You wouldn't have inventory for individual stores per se, but you could make a lot of inferences.