> Paul Graham/Ycombinator weren't interested, so I gave up on trying to sell it.

They can't take every idea, even when they are good ones.

I like your idea, if you could make it more of a turn key system.

I believe the customer would want a photograph of the vehicle, the license plate (in plain text), and time/date, and statistics on how many autos an hour/day/month pass by to add extra value.

It could be sold to gas stations or even city governments for deployment in high crime areas.

It would compliment video tape / dvr systems. If you can get the price below $1,000 then it would be affordable to security conscious companies. It would have to be automated, and be a server so the company can login and view the data.

Surely this technology is fairly well-known and widely deployed these days (for example, to enforce the London congestion-charging zone). What did your software do over and above what's currently being used?

It runs easily on personal computers, and because the development costs were low, it's cheap. So I was trying to compete on price and accessibility.

Did you try talking to governmental and non-governmental agencies about your software?

No, I only talked to other OCR companies, who didn't reply.

Maybe I should give it a try, thanks for the hint and the positive response.