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Don Henley of the Eagles? This Don Henley? He cries fowl (sic) claiming that big business will trample our rights? Shock! Horror!

What a crock of shit

... Vince Patton tried to show viewers how easy the technology is, but when he pointed his finger at the computer in expectation, nothing happened--except for us nearly wetting ourselves.

and more hilarious stuff.

Although they've had it coming for some time, and I can't think of any other dotcom outfit that deserves to bite it as spectacularly as DC, I have to admit that I'm going to miss those crazy bastards.

I really thought if anyone had a shot at revolutionizing the way that advertisers and media exploit consumer data, it was DigitalConvergence.

What continues to amaze me about DigitalConvergence is the sheer enormity of it. The scale of the undertaking, the breadth and scope of it all, it dwarfs some of the larger dotbombs of record. If/when it actually completely explodes, it seems like it would signal the definitive end-of-the-dotbomb-era... .(who else at this scale has yet to bite it?) DC is the archetypical dotbomb. A privately held company valued most recently at well over $500,000,000.00, which reported revenues in 1999 of only $1,500,000 (and a loss of $4,000,000).

A company which continues to incur enormous costs in the manufacturing and distribution of their devices (what might 10,000,000+ CueCats cost to build and ship to retailers? who can imagine?) and seems to have no hope of profitability, ever...

A management team populated by players from Time Warner, AT&T, GE, Disney, Barings, etc.

A CEO (who owns 50% of the company) who seems pathologically given to making unfathomably exaggerated marketing claims, including, "We think we're the fourth evolution of computing. A cat can do everything a mouse can't!" , and "It's a torrid love affair I'm having with the power to mold not only an industry, but also the mind-set of America's consumers..." (As an aside, this man should be forced to eat his every press release and media clipping as punishment for this sort of hubris...).

In his prior career hosting a tv show called "NetTalkLive", he claimed, "Our show reaches into 802,000,000 million homes each week..." - Yes, roughly 1/6th of the world population is tuning in to watch an informercial (although conveniently, the Nielsen ratings system didn't track shows like NetTalkLive that run during the dead-zone of infomercial hours on d-grade & public television channels...)

Other gestures of indulgence include spending a ton of money in decorating the offices of DigitalConvergence to be "feng-shui" compliant ("...the building should face in a direction that is positive for the company's owner or chief executive...", plants and water are added to the environs because "....plants represent growth and water represents money..." (well I guess they've been smoking the plants and lighting the water on fire...).

I look forward to the case studies on this corporation. I suspect that we'll see lots of people conclude, "It probably doesn't make good business sense to entrust hundreds of millions of dollars to people who claim to be marketing-geniuses, and yet somehow fail to focus on that most basic of marketing fundamentals, determining the needs of the consumer."

Other interesting reading material, for those concerned....

a funny "Dallas Observer" article and a not quite as funny but still very interesting article from "Editor and Publisher" online.



"If you build it, they will laugh."

An aging Space Truck that costs bazillions to launch, and they cancel it's replacement, but not before driving any competion into the ground. Your tax dollars at work, friends. Check out the mess at Love and Rockets

If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?

This article from the Dallas Observer tells the story of Beal Aerospace. Billionaire founder Andy Beal put about $200M of his own money into creating a private launch services company. Warning: it's not a happy story.

Hey, I've been doing my part all evening to spam investment boards about the upcoming Digital Convergence IPO. The more the merrier, though! Bust in! Here's a sample:

Digital Convergence (DGTL) recently filed plans for an IPO. This company gives out free barcode scanners (called "CutCat") and accompanying software. The idea is that you can scan things and their software will pull up an appropriate web page in your browser. On the side, they can collect demographic data. For example, they could determine which gender and age group most often scans a certain type of product.

I think this is a horrible company, a must avoid stock for the following reasons:

• DGTL gives away CueCat barcode scanners and software, hoping to get money from advertisers and publications. The problem is that their software is inessential: it took folks a matter of hours to write substitute software that reads a barcode without contacting DGTL. So at the key step where they're supposed to cash in, they're completely cut out of the loop! Whoops!
• Apparently realizing the enormity of their error, DC has been sending vague, threatening letters to people already distributing alternate software. Unfortunately, these letters appear to be legal bluffs. Decoding software is available on dozens of sites and appears to have no real legal strings attached.
• A clearly disconcerted president of the technology group at DGTL fired off a letter showing gross misunderstanding of intellectual property law-- upon which the health of the company critically depends. (Or would depend, were the IP law favorable to their cause-- which it isn't.)
• These threatening letters have incensed the open source community-- a group well-qualified to undermine DC's business model by providing alternate software to drive the CueCat, shutting of DC's revenue.
• The product raises privacy concerns. You register with DGTL and then every time you scan something, they know it. Apparently DGTL has given assurances about privacy. Then again, they left their entire customer database unguarded for hackers to take. Read their own toned down account. (DGTL has also touted the scanner's "built in encryption", which turned out to consist of XORing each byte with the letter 'C'. I fear these some of the stupidest people ever put on God's Good Earth.)
• A key asset that DGTL hopes to develop through the barcode scans is a database of demographic data. There's a problem, however: Digital Convergence has a lot of enemies now. It would be a simple matter for ONE PERSON write a little program that sends fake scans with fake user IDs to DGTLs servers. This could permanently corrupt the demographic database, making it worthless, because-- quite possibly-- there could be no way to distinguish real scans from fakes after the fact.
• Just as the company's fundamental business model has fallen under shadow, they file for an IPO. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

These are just my opinions, of course. I did my best to get the facts straight, but I'm not perfect. Additional comments on this corporate disaster slouching toward NASDAQ are available at:

• Salon : ...there are a million problems with this concept.
• Linux World: In the end, the :CueCat is a classic example of a broken business model.
• Dr. Dobbs Journal: What ought to scare Digital Convergence more [...] is a database of all CueCat barcodes/URLs, whereby users could go to a specific web page without being tracked.
• Dallas Observer: ...you can simply drag the scanner 600 or 700 times over bar codes printed next to stories and ads, and presto, you get an error message.
• Internet News Radio:The CueCat is starting to look like a mangy stray.

A working URL is here.

Wow, who would have thought this thing would suck after spending so much money and time on it.

Everyone should read the story on Ion Storm that ran in the Dallas Observer (here is a link to it) for a picture of too much ego + too much money.

On the plus side, instead of saying "Oh, that's the Heaven's Gate of Computer Games", we can say "Oh, how Daikatana"

Actually, they talked about Dominion: storm over gift 3 in the great Dallas Observer Article as well. Apparently, Todd "preacher boy" porter convinced the rest of Ion to buy the game from his old employer for a cool $1.5 million, saying the game was 'almost done' and would only need a few touch ups before burning. Since they were guaranteed $3 million from Edios, for there first 3 releases, it seemed like a good deal.

But, as you can already guess, that wasn't what happened. Ion spend the whole $1.5 million of profit they were expecting, and then another 1.5 million. Supposedly the game was going to have to sell nearly as many copies as DOOM or something like that to turn a profit. They were going to have to sell millions of copies.

They sold Four Thousand Copies. Four Thousand, about the number of hit's I've gotten from my slashdot sig.

The game sucked.

There's quite a bit more to the history of Ion Storm and the 'breakup' of Id, I believe Mike Wilson also quit to form Ion-Storm, but quit after a while.

One of the biggest problems in that company was the management. Romero didn't want to do it, and Todd Porter, a worthless weasel who was able to con himself into controlling a majority stake in the company sucked at it.

Romero can design a game, that's for sure. He had no trouble with Quake and Doom and all of that. Sure it wasn't him alone, but he does deserve a lot of the credit. The problem at Ion was that he couldn't manage a company. Edios is basically running the place now, and if they weren't We probably wouldn't have seen DK in a long time. This company has probably burned through a total of 20-40 million dollars, and produced nothing of worth.

There was a good article, god over a year ago on The Dallas observer (and this Other one from july), If you're interested in all the details. It's a pretty entertaining read, and probably worth the time you wasted playing the DK demo, if any :)

There's quite a bit more to the history of Ion Storm and the 'breakup' of Id, I believe Mike Wilson also quit to form Ion-Storm, but quit after a while.

One of the biggest problems in that company was the management. Romero didn't want to do it, and Todd Porter, a worthless weasel who was able to con himself into controlling a majority stake in the company sucked at it.

Romero can design a game, that's for sure. He had no trouble with Quake and Doom and all of that. Sure it wasn't him alone, but he does deserve a lot of the credit. The problem at Ion was that he couldn't manage a company. Edios is basically running the place now, and if they weren't We probably wouldn't have seen DK in a long time. This company has probably burned through a total of 20-40 million dollars, and produced nothing of worth.

There was a good article, god over a year ago on The Dallas observer (and this Other one from july), If you're interested in all the details. It's a pretty entertaining read, and probably worth the time you wasted playing the DK demo, if any :)

The entire article starts here: http://www.dallasobserver .com/1999/011499/feature1-1.html