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Here's your chance to get rich!

I'll bet you that in ten years, not two centuries, ten years almost no one will remember what a QR code is and it will be extremely difficult, nigh on impossible, to find a means of decoding one.

Ever heard of a Cue Cat? There is still lots of information available about it and plenty of software. So decoding should be easy. Right?

So, tell us what the meaning of this is. Where did it point? What did it represent?

My wager is that the ability to decode QR codes will be as easy in ten years as the Cue code is now.

Nokia had it for ages? Heck the CueCat had it some time ago. Seriously, big deal.

Haven't I seen this as a "killer" app before?

Oh yes, now I remember.

Cars and planes take me places, and bring delicious and useful goods to me.

Computers allow me to perform calculations, run simulations, and send fancy signals down the intertubes.

Eye tracking will do what, exactly? Make me look like a goob? Make me support it and the early bandwagon users? Give me eye cancer? Piss me off when it thinks I glanced at the recycle bin? Allow sites to sell ads based on milliseconds of visual focus?

It's a gimmick. A gimmick with potential for certain applications, yes. But this is about as useful as a fingerprint scanner for your desktop or one of those cats (as opposed to mice) that scan in UPC barcodes off of shit you buy. http://cuecat.com/

Sounds exactly like the CueCat.

Which, of course, sucked.

The Cue Cat does make a great barcode reader for cheap.

What no CueCat?
http://cuecat.com/

http://cuecat.com/

Your problem with finding a link is probably caused by it actually being the CueCat: http://www.cuecat.com/

... who thought of this?

You forgot Cue::Cat. I miss those guys.

Cue Cats will be back! Their website says so!

In all seriousness, I know someone that's working on an open-source point of sale project that I think is able to use the Cue Cat. I can't get a hold of him to get the URL for it now, though...

The funny thing is, they still think that their idea is going to fly. To quote their site(here):
The dream was to connect items in the physical world to the Internet, automatically. In January that dream hit a bump in the road and the servers were taken offline. They will scan again...
I can't wait...

(Pardon if any of these links are going stale.)

If you have a Cue Cat, save it. The patents and technology created by DigitalConvergence will again be available for business and consumer use.

If you are looking for a Registration code or To be continued...

Do you share this dream?

I think that if you scan this one with a Cuecat, the world might end ...

The only legitimate argument in the article was that Lego might get a few support calls from users of alternative software. The way to deal with this is the same exact way that Tivo deals with upgrades, AMD deals with overclocking, and Maxtor deals with tinkerers: void the warranty if the user tampers with the equipment and something breaks. Simple.

--sting3r

I just check the link and actually this is more then just a cable, it's wireless too. Hmm....may be worth the trip to get this thing (imagining reversing the link for wireless MP3 playing on my stereo!).

Just give them some time. They spent two years researching and designing one of the more innovative products out there, and so they've run into a few snags. Nothing big, really. They'll bounce back, sooner than you can say ":Cuecat". Why have they failed so far? Not enough punctuation.

My advice to :cue:cat is to increase the number of colons (":"). One thing you learn in business school is that when you're going for an angle with a marketing campaign, you can't hammer home your main point enough. You have to try harder. Most people don't even notice the colons when they first look at ":CueCat", and far fewer remember to include them when discussing the product among friends. It's a losing proposition, I'm afraid.

That's why they need to have more colons. They shouldn't stop until their name at least looks like ":::c:u:e:c:a:t::". They should also get a trademark on "cuecat" without the colons and start harassing people who misuse it instead of ":CueCat". They also have to dump cuecat.com as their homepage, because it unfortunately reinforces the "no colon" mistake. Problems like these aren't often solved so easily. :CRQ should consider themselves lucky.

(end comment) */ }

Even if we didn't have to worry about security, privacy, and potential spamwaves, I still can't get over the shape of this thing!

Just look at it here.

Why did they have to make it that shape? Did they collaborate with the net pr0n industry to prototype this thing??

Leave the cue cat where it belongs: in mom's underwear drawer.

I do. You buy most products outright. With software, you generally buy a (revokable) license to use the product.

No, you buy a physical copy of the installation media for the software, and a piece of paper with a "license agreement" that the company tries to convince you that you've agreed to, under dubious cirucmstances at best.

Contracts (such as, say, licenses) usually provide for a balance of the rights and responsibilities between the licensor and the licensee. That's why both parties have to sign a contract; if either party doesn't like it, they can try to renegotiate or, failing that, refuse to agree and therefore have no claim to the product or service being contracted for. But if you do sign, you know what you're getting yourself into.

Software companies try to tell you that you're accepting terms simply by opening the package, and that they've already signed the agreement by making you the box available to you. (And why shouldn't they sign? They have the deck stacked firmly in their favor!)

And, since you're accepting the terms of a license to a product that you haven't even looked at yet, they're going to tell you that you have no reason to expect any quality or stability from its product and that it doesn't have to work as advertised. Oh, and you can't try to inform the public of your problems with the software, or figure out how it works in case you want to fix it yourself. Oh, and that you can't sell your physical copy of the installation media to someone else if you get fed up with it. Oh, even if you are okay with these restrictions, the company can change or terminate the license unilaterally anyways.

Why would anyone agree to terms like these? This is not an "agreement"; anyone who tries to convince you otherwise doesn't have a very high opinion of you. And why should they? They got you to "sign" an agreement saying they don't have to give you anything more than you've already got, and are laughing all the bank to the bank with your money!

Given that the 99% of the license agreements out there are not printed on the back of the box in big, clear text for everyone to read before you open the box^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hagree to the terms -- gotta have room for all those pretty screenshots of what the software might do once you actually install it -- you're effectively being coerced into the agreement. One might be able to make a case for fraud, as well.

I hope that shrink-wrap licenses do get tested in court and are laughed out of the room. Because anyone who would try to enforce such terms on a piece of hardware certainly would be. (Are you listening, Digital Convergence?)

Jay (=

A method by which items are delivered to the consumer prior to being ordered, or ever actually even wanted. The consumer is then responsible for returning the merchandise if it is not desired, at their own expense of course. As expected, even though the product has been unsolicited by the consumer, all intellectual property rights to the product remain sole property of the company, including it's physical ocnstruction, and the product may not be reverse engineered in any way.

Wait a second, this MAY have been done already....


---There is no spoon....---

You have your wish.

http://www.cuecat.com/getcat.html

Just for my two cents, it seems kind of lame to try and drive a company out of business whose prime sin is that, in their quest to give us all free gadgets, didn't do it on the terms we most desired. True, their response to the whole thing lacks some degree of class and may constitute a minor legal violation. Still, there are far more pressing issues. Woe to the soceity whose members waste their political and civic activism on CueCat and Napster.

http://www.cuecat.com/faq.html

The page is 125K long and seems to be a query run against their support database. There are about 12 differently worded verions of, "Will cuecat work with a mac?", all answered seperately". Ditto for Q's about the red light being on all the time, the safety of the red light, etc etc.

I just submitted a question about using it with Linux - let's see if it shows up :)

check out the cuecat.com webpage by digital convergence:

they say: "We've made it super easy to get your new :CRQ system, including the :CueCat reader, absolutely FREE"

Even Digital Convergence's own page says "Digital:Convergence will distribute more than 10 million of its new :CueCat(TM) devices and :CRQ(TM) software free to consumers by the end of this year."

Even more interesting is who runs Digital Convergence (see link above): "The company's management team includes a roster of industry veterans from Time Warner, AT&T, GE, ING Barings and Disney."

It would seem that they're not idiots. They're just dumb

-V

CueCat has another excitingly invasive product, the Convergence Cable. This connects the audio out of a TV set to a computer, which, using CueCat's software, then responds to "audio cues" from the TV to take over control of a browser on the PC to provide an "enhanced experience". This clearly needs some analysis, first to find out what's going over the TV audio signal (do they have FCC approval for this?) and second to find out what CueCat's PC application does with the data.

It seems to have a lot more to do with their "Convergence Cable" than with CueCat.
--

If there is patent infringement, what is the patent number?

Not that it isn't pretty shitty, what they're trying to pull and get us to believe.

--

Their privacy policy is quite funny. It says, "Digital:Convergence wants every member of its community to understand what information we collect and how we intend to use that information."

But while the rest of the page is quite explicit about not giving out your phone number, it says nothing about the mother lode of data they (surely) collect about what you actually scan. In fact, they don't even mention the possibility!

Okay...we have all the geeks going to Radio Shack to pick up their free CueCats (http://www.cuecat.com).

So, while they are there, get a tube of heat sink compound and send it to the north pole. Motorola then brings down Iridium carefully to the arctic ice cap, and we use the metal to make the worlds largest heat sink. Put the compound on the glaciers (make sure to fill the cracks for better transfer!).

If we all do this and it works, then we can all buy the Intel P4's without worry of more global warming.

Besides, I read someplace a while ago (wish I could find the reference) that we are actually in a warm period in the middle of an ice age!

Great now I can attach a Cat and a mouse to my computer. (Those radioshack marketing guys must have really worked some over time on this one.)
As for the hack I would love to play with one but my local radioshack says they don't have them yet. Anyone else having problems getting them from their local store?
I guess I'll have to get it online at cuecat.com

Now can someone figure out a way to make it so that CueCat isn't so god damn fugly?

Go to the :CueCat website for details on the reader, including the Radio Shack promotion.

They will send you a :CueCat reader and :CRQ System Software for the cost of shipping (I'm assuming this is for those folks without a Radio Shack nearby). Click here to link directly to the order form. Note that they won't be taking orders until August 24th.

So far, the software only supports Windows 95, 98, NT 4, and Windows2000.

Radio Shack is merely one customer for the :CueCat. As mentioned, several magazines are getting on the wagon and inserting barcodes in their advertisements. It's not just Radio Shack getting in on it.

:CueCat have also got this thing that will allow "special broadcast cues to automatically direct your browser directly to where you need to go!"

No need for a scanner at all.