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Digital Convergence Bites the Dust
An anonymous reader writes "On Friday Digital Convergence (DC) 'restructured' and got rid of just about everyone without severance pay.
They are still trying to sell the 'paper' company, the problem will be to find someone stupid enough to buy it!
Some interesting quotes from The Dallas Morning News:
DC speak "some employees in NY were let go"
English: about two remain.
Radio Shack: "We have stock in the stores, and we're continuing to distribute"
English: The CueCats are taking up valuable room in the warehouse, we need to get rid of them.
DC: "The staff has been significantly reduced,"
English: You don't have to take off your shoes to count the people left.
DC: "a number of employees throughout the company have decided to stay on as unpaid consultants."
English: The senior people who have millions of shares are still coming in for a few days.
DC: "Quite frankly, we're even going after new business"
English: Are there any suckers out there who want to buy the company?
" But it looks like those CueCats out there are now definitely freely hackable without threat of a cease and desist. If only the MPAA would go under.
Dammit, Scott Adams, Curt Cobain, and Paul McCartney are going to be so upset when the mailing list is sold, since those were the names I used so I could get a cat to hack up... or rolling in graves for two of them...
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity forged upon request
If you put your list of books on a web page, your friends will be less likely to buy duplicates for your birthday or christmas. Same with DVDs. Of corse it also means if I want a out of print DVD or book badly enough I might stop by in the middle of the night....
A friend has a list on his PDA, so when we are out at dinner and trying to decide if we should go to a theater for a movie or off to someone's house he can offer specific movies...
A good catalogue is useful for insurance though, if the catalogue doesn't get destroyed in the fire at least.
Book inventory? Why? Was I running a library?
Do you have so few books that you actually know everything you own? Have you never purchased an interesting book twice by mistake? Do you never loan books to friends?
If ever there was an idea promoted through mendacity, audacity and testicles made of cheap amalgam, CueCat: was IT!
I threw away Wired magazine, canceled my subscription and vowed to do the same to anyone who would be so callous as to treat my and my privacy that way.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well, here's what *I* always planned on trying to do with my CueCat:
Add a plugin to AbiWord/KWord/KSpread/Gnumeric that would put a barcode on the bottom of each printout. Then arrange that scanning that barcode with my cat would auto-launch said office application with the relevant document.
Sounded useful to me, especially if you work for a company that prints all sorts of things out without including the filename in the footer. And even with the filename in the footer it would be quicker and easier just to scan it...
Stuart.
PS You could do the same thing with a web browser to launch at a URL based on a printout of the page.
The whole company brought on their own doom from the very start. Whine and threaten the technically savvy... Now that's gotta be the stupidest thing to ever do, espically when they can't legally tell me what to do with an object given to me freely.. (sorry, but I recieved one in the mail without asking for it also, US mail laws clearly state that it is MINE and only MINE... for those IP law protectors out there) Next they have a business that is based on the hopes that people are super lazy. "ohh I can scan this barcode and it will take me magically to the website" How about typing the url? anyone that is interested in looking at more information on the internet about a device they plan on purchasing will look at the manufacturers site last, and start looking for complaints or other bad things said about it first. (User reviews)
This was one of the last "boneheaded ideas"(tm) companies that are in the start of their death throws. I do have one thing to thank them for..
I was able to make over 20 keyboard port barcode scanners available free to customers of mine (mod to remove encryption and voila it works for P.O.S. (that's point of sale) software!) saving them hundreds of dollars.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have thousands of books - I even used to sell books at SF Conventions. I have shelves all over my house, and cardboard boxes packed with books. And yes, I know exactly what I own.
There's no way I could sit and recite them all, but if you give me a title, author and maybe a bit of the plot, I can tell you if I have it or have owned it. How? Very simple - I read every one of them. I spent a few hours inside the cover of each and every one of them. Even most reference books I can nail each and every time. This is coming from somebody who has a hard time quoting accurately from a movie he has seen at least once a week since 1987 (Rocky Horror). I have lousy memory... but I never forget a book.
Do you never loan books to friends?
Sure. But I never record that I do, and I never *demand* that they come back. I just expect it. That's why I call them friends.
Have you never purchased an interesting book twice by mistake?
Only in one field - I own a seriously large chunk of every RPG book published by White Wolf (World of Darkness, aka Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changling and Wraith). The local comic shop waits a few months and then gets in all the books published in the previous months. As a result, I drop a several hundred dollars and pick 'em all up, and slowly go through them. As a result, I occasionally buy another copy before I've had a chance to read the first. In other cases, they've repackaged a few books into one volume, and I grab it (new title, thicker, etc) without realizing I own all three or so volumes reprinted inside.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I think the primary motivation behind it's hackability is the cost - since it's free, you don't feel bad if you break it. It was also a challange to find something *useful* to do with the thing. Other than my concept of "King of UPC", which I couldn't muster interest in, I don't think anybody came up with anything useful at all.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Try AirClic. Nifty little laser scanners made by Symbol.
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I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
If bankruptcy is declared, feel free to make them an offer to buy whatever asset you want to control. If you buy it, you can declare it open.
More than likely, they'll dump them on an electronics surplus place like Weird Stuff Warehouse. Remember "Interactive Network", the gadget that was going to let you play along with TV game shows like Jeopardy? When they went under, Weird Stuff liquidated their stock of the remotes, coffee cups, gym bags, t-shirts, and all sorts of other trade-show goodies. That was 5 years ago or so... I think they STILL have some of the gym bags. I've still got a couple T-shirts.
I was looking for a web site for Interactive Network, and came across This... History is repeating itself. They're trying to make something back from their patents too.
eBay them in a year. Be sure to mark them as 'R4R3!' and 'L@@K". Set the 'buyitnow' for $25.
Somewhere up there, another reader puzzled over what consumer use there would be for a barcode reader. I think the answer is obvious. But it is so pro-consumer that you'll be hard pressed to find a major company to push it. (And its real advantages only come into play with a wireless handheld web device.)
Unwired world:
Start with a mildly populated database. Consumer goes to grocery store. Scans in each item purchased. Enters name, if necessary. Enters price (and marks if it is a regular price or a sale). Repeat with various grocery stores. Finds the best store to buy all items at, or the best two stores to get certain items from in order to save money.
Wired world:
Same. But check against the entries of other users in the area. Possible alerts to bargins on things that are regularly bought (Pepsi 2 liter, 69 cents, Albertsons, on sale). Also, being able to real-time scan an item in a store to see how good of a deal it is. (Especially good on impulse buying.)
Mind you, of course, it isn't as simple as I just described, and there are the usual disclaimers. But we're not using a barcode scanner for its full potential. It could be a real win for the consumer.
This is the result of consumer control in a free market. A company has two choices: either make consumers happy, or go under. DC didn't manage to do the first, so to deserves the second.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Didn't you know? DC was running their rinky-dink operation out of a Japanese employee's house. You see, not having to take your shoes off to count the employees left signifies that there's nobody left, so who cares if you go stomping around their office/home, looking for employees to count, with your shoes on.
At least, that's what I've heard. And you?
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
No I know this... except Slashdot posts these stories like they're FuckedCompany, except that everyone around here only does the dance of joy when a competitor dies. When a Linux company bites the dust, it's like "Oh we lost something important and it's terrible", even though 95% of the crowd is probably divided amongst three not-about-to-fade-away distros.
I dunno. I suppose I don't care about Digital Convergance at all, let em bite the dust. But everyone around here feels the same way about Microsoft, and I guess I'm more concerned about that attitude more than anything... cause for the time being, I guess we all kinda need MS in the economy and in the computer world. When they screw up, then I'll be indifferent about their passing, as well. (However, I get the feeling Slashdot won't be outliving MS... and there will be no one here to do the dance of joy then...)
So they passed on as a company. Big deal.
Now are *you* gonna feed their kids and pay their rent?
I mean, not that they didn't do some assinine things as a company, but I'd like to see a company like that reform, rather than bite the dust and leave even more people unemployed. Besides, it's not like CueCat was an entirely USELESS technology... apparently you people thought it was good enough to try and hack.
I'm not necessarily mourning their death, but I think it's a bit tasteless and uncouth to be dancing on their ashes, eh?
Why lug around a desktop system for inventory when you can plug the scanner into a notebook or a Palm? When we do store inventory, the barcodes get scanned into Notepad running on a notebook. The file is then saved and read into the POS system to update inventory and check for discrepancies.
(It'd be easier still if the scan guns could be plugged into a Palm instead...those are much smaller. Of course, there are also the Symbol SPT 1500 and CSM 150 if you plan on doing lots of Palm scanning...)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
After that, the people responsible for sacking the webmaster were themselves sacked.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
.(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).
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...
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."
The :CueCat has been the only really affordable barcode scanner I've seen in some time, and many people managed to put the thing to industrial use (most often by doing something that D:C didn't approve of). The only upcoming replacement I see is the new expansion pack for Wizcom scanner pens to allow them to recognize barcodes. However, although Wizcomtech told me about 6 months ago they'd be opening specs so Linux drivers could be writen, nothing's come of that, so that solution won't work for me. Seems like hardware to do this type of stuff ought to be really cheap. Does anyone know of low-cost alternatives?
Who are we going to tormet now? It was kind of fun peeing in their petunias on a regular basis. The RIAA and MPAA are not nearly as inept as they were and it was kind of fun to sit back and chuckle at their lame-brained attempts to defend their "IP." They served a vital role as an open source whipping boy and now that they're gone, we'll have to find another.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You're correct that this doesn't change the legal situation proper. However, the legal position proper was never the problem. Legally the little felines are and have always been freely hackable. The problem was simply the threat of big bad company with presumably deep pockets sicking the landsharks on individual hackers that couldn't afford to defend themselves, merits (or lack thereof) of the case be damned. The troubles at DC mean that threat just lost all credibility - they obviously are not in a position to engage in such tactics.
Sure, it's possible some other big bad company with deep pockets and no ethics could come along and buy the property and turn around and start in on the same route, but it surely is very unlikely. The "property" is obviously not worth the trouble, and even stuffed shirts that didn't understand that before will now when they see how much good it did DC.
As another poster pointed out, there are already at least two such databases. Your objection that they don't include the elements of DCs intended setup that most of us found objectionable in the first place doesn't seem like any big deal to me. There's no need to buy anything from DC. Their copyright on the windows only spyware they distributed with the cuecats is not needed or even desireable, as cross platform Free Software programs that perform as desired and don't spy on the user are available.
It'll most likely be auctioned off to the highest bidder, before or after the bankruptcy declaration. They can expect to be spammed and junk mailed and telemarketed out of their minds. It sucks, but really, wtf did they expect when they happily traded off their privacy to DC in exchange for a little promised convenience?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
As for the workers, yeah, it sucks to have lost a job, but they should've seen this coming the minute they found out what sort of company they got hired by, and started looking for a job right then. If they had even the slightest illusion of job security at a company that advertisers didn't give a damn about and whose only business was giving away hardware that appealed to a crowd of hackers, then... well, I suppose numbnuts like them made the company the great big hunk o' crap that it was.
Plus, I hate'em for never offering the cuecats in Canada :)
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Free Mac Mini
Who's going to maintain the database? Cough* www.upcdatabase.com *cough Cough* www.rnrcomputing.com/upc/ *Cough Yeah what a waste... a perfectly good google search unused....
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
"Who's going to maintain the database of translations of UPC codes, ISBN codes, There are sites that do this already, CueDog for example had a feature like this built in IIRC. Just don't have the url handy and specially paid-for :CueCat codes into URLs?"
Who says I WANT all that stuff??? I like my data raw, that way I can use those brain cells to decide where I want to go to read about the items instead of where the highest bidder wants me to go. And if DC goes down whom are they specially paying anyways??(Can I volunteer) Maybe I want walmartsucks.com to read about Wal-Mart... I like my freedom to decide
Care to rub those two brain cells together again and try to come up with another spark of enlightenment?
And I could lower myself to your level of name calling, but I got over that in middle school, most adults have...So if you don't like my answer that's your right, but at least act like a civilized adult and hold a conversation instead of a name calling contest, cause I won't play. Recently this has been my biggest problem with posts, you think a group of intelligent people could give their views and be willing to have a discussion with those who don't agree, doesn't anyone teach debate in high school anymore? I would like to thank those that do know how to have decent conversations, you are appreciated.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Is there some web design rule that you must have an employment page full of jobs? To me, if just fired a bunch of people and you can't afford to hire, don't advertise that you have jobs!
I got one from a cooperative RadioShack manager -- he said he wasn't supposed to but gave it to me anyway. He didn't even give me the chance to offer him a bribe...
And now I have it plugged into my Mac.
/Brian
Seriously. DC was about as much fun and welcome as a neighborhood bully. Everything about the company -- from their business plan to attitude towards geeks to the way they tried to strongarm the UPC industry -- stunk. Not only did they prove the limitations of free-as-in-beer, they set over a dozen exampled of how not to run a business, how not to conduct PR, and how not to treat your userbase. DC was a closed minded facist group that didn't open its eyes and ears until it was far too late. It's hard, if not impossible, to feel sorry for them.
I would really like to know what kind of surveys they did before they released that Cat. Did they think anybody liked to bring various products to the computer to scan them in?
;)
I actually brainstormed for a while trying to come up with something I could do with one that would make it entertaining to use... Nothing.
-- Book inventory? Why? Was I running a library?
-- A quick way to enter commands: I had it hooked up to a shell and printed out bar codes so I could scan in longer commands. Problem is, the longer the command, the less often you use it. Therefore, useless.
-- Fun for a child with some kind of game? Once again, annoying since you have to rescan things slowly occasionally.
So in short, the original reason of having it was stupid, and I couldn't come up with any useful alternate ways of using it.
But on a different note, have they already had there IPO?
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
No kidding. Not to mention that you can't freaking mention them as the bad guys every other story, but then rush to run reviews of their movies (no matter how good the movies are)-- witness the recent reviews of Atlantis (by CmdrTaco himself, does he think Disney isn't using his $7.50 ticket price to pay the lawyers at the MPAA?) and Tomb Raider (by Jon Katz). Then there are the endless promotions of DVD this or that. If you're going to excoriate the MPAA in print, I don't mind if you catch a movie once in a while, but you shouldn't talk about it.
I do not have a signature
how often do I have to tell people.
You NEVER give out your real name and address, unless you WANT to receive something (as if you ordered something)
By giving out your name and address, you're essentially asking for the name to get distributed around in mailing groups.
For example, I signed up once with BMG with a fake name at my house. Only a few weeks later, that imaginary person supposedly won $10 million dollars from Publisher's Clearing House.
And this was BEFORE the internet became popular.
Nothing schadenfreude here :) I know DC were a bit aloof, had a crazy businesses model and legal dept but they kept 225 techies employed for a few months... on the otherhand, `fsck em
I got mine from Time Interactive, that page says "The offer closes June 5, 2001" but the form still works, it's worth a try.
Maybe 'Tandy' (RadioShack) stock them? Not sure.
Well, there were some desperate attempts to get rid of them before, look where that got them :/
I'm guessing it would cost too much in shipping to get rid of them like before, they may just go to landfill, it happens with companies quite often apparently, Palm were contemplating the same thing a few weeks ago with their excess inventories, they can't reduce prices and floor the market for their new models and take the company down the drain with it. So they just do the easiest thing, write the inventory off and destroy it, thereby preserving the current market for their goods.
I'm guessing archaeologists in a few hundred years time will find hundreds of these odd plastic 'probe' type things (right next to the pets.com puppets) and try and workout what the hell they were for.
It seems that promotion on NBC and the international distribution was the last "big push" for DC, if that didn't work, nothing will type of thing.
I received a USB cat last week here in the UK, it was quite slow and it was killing the i/o on my notebook, I presume it was something to do with power constraints, but they don't seem to be high quality.
I'm planning to print some barcodes out and do an inventory of my CD's, and maybe other stuff in the house "when I get round to it" (tm).
Thanks for the free scanner... sorry about the company (well?), it's a shame for the people who have lost their jobs, however you really need a reality check if you think joining a company will make you an IPO millionaire within months, it couldn't last indefinitely, and it couldn't be for everyone.
Just goes to show you really could smoke dope and construct business models in 1999, I guess it didn't look so preposterous back then either since everybody was wearing rose tinted glasses, it's surprising to see the high profile companies who invested in DC, it seems they were giving money out hand over fist to get a piece of the IPO pie.
Just for the hell of it, I went to 3 Radio Shacks today and picked up as many CueCats and CueTVs as I could. Only ended up with 17 of each. I'm gonna do the same thing every few days until all of the places I go to are out. Why? Who knows, maybe they will be worth something some day. I'll pass them on to my grandkids perhaps and have them sell them on ebay as historic relics to an age of stupidity.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Going to have to run out and raid the local 'shacks before the colon cats are all gone!!!
Yeah, right.
This would let *more* people use the service from anywhere with almost no capital outlay. The only disadvantage of this plan is that Bill Gates would 0wn you, but that's pretty much true already.
I didn't ask, "Who's going to maintain a database of UPC codes," I asked, "Who's going to maintain the database of translations of UPC codes, ISBN codes, and specially paid-for :CueCat codes into URLs?" There's a major difference there.
Care to rub those two brain cells together again and try to come up with another spark of enlightenment?
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak
No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.
Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."
Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak
As the guy who runs the Internet UPC database, I'd like to say that we've gotten a lot of questions as to why we don't merge with the other database on the net. The reason is simple, as one user put it, because we are totally open. You are free to connect up, and do whatever you wish to the database (query wise). If you want the database, take it. Yes, there are only 30,000 entries, but each and every one of those 30,000 entries have been entered by end-users. By all means, if anyone wants to contribute, don't let me stop you. :-)
Robert