Slashdot Mirror
CueCats vs. Common Sense Marketing
ColaMan writes "I see via boing boing that two million CueCats are up for sale at prices of $0.30 each in quantities above 500K. CueCats, being an integral part of one of the most pointless marketing schemes ever devised, never took off, but they were great for hacking. Has IT Marketing learned its history lesson, or will it forever doomed to repeat it?" Err, I'd go in for a group order, but I don't need two million at once.
Err, I'd go in for a group order, but I don't need two million at once. Timothy
Well, it's a good thing you only have to place an order of 500,000, then - as it CLEARLY states in the very first sentence of the submission blurb you greenlighted.
Does anyone still know where the links are to get things things?
The other thing is that you can get much better readers for $20 or less from Ebay now....
1) Buy 2 million CueCats $0.30 each
2) Sell them $0.35 each
3) Profit!!
I believe Shoeboy had found the most profitable use for these.
Wow, not only is Slashdot getting slower at reporting news, and repeating the same stories over and over again, now it's reporting news from other news sites. It's like watching Ted Koppel sit and watch CNN!
...You'd wind up paying 150,000USD for a bunch of nigh-useless barcode scanners, joy!
Thirty cents a unit is very cheap, but, frankly the cuecat sucked. The range is zero (literally) and the scan reliability was very poor unless you had the dexterity to move the thing across the barcodes at an exact, constant speed every time.
:)
I got a small box of these from a Radio Shack which was trying to get rid of them, and briefly tried to set up a POS for a client based on the 'Cat. Two weeks of constant phone calls later, I had the client fork over $100 per seat for some medium range one-shot LED scanners and life was good.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
"Has IT Marketing learned it's history lesson, or will it forever doomed to repeat it?"
Has this story already been published years ago or are we doomed forever to keep repeating it?
I've never used a CueCat, but I think a barcode scanner that works with my Mac (hence PS/2 CueCats are no good... ) would be great for selling off a bunch of used books i have online.
What was that site where, you know, you could, um, band together to purchase things?
Interesting marketing concept. Come up with a product and try to give it away. When you find that you can't give it away, offer to sell someone the same thing, but without the Internet backup system needd to use it, for 30 cents each, but they have to buy 500 thousand of them!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I volunteer pretty much every year at a local computer tradeshow. I remember a few years back when we started asking for donated cue cats. we used them to track the volunteers.
Each volunteer had a nametag with a barcode on it.
Volunteering for a single shift got you into the show for free (definitely worthwhile) volunteering for additional shifts got you some cheep gifts as well - toll kits and t-shirts, that sort of stuff.
Anyways, the cue cats were pretty useful in reading the barcodes and making the whole thing work easier.
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
Don't barcode scanners have lasers? If so, buy all of these suckers, crank up the voltage on the laser, and sell it to the US army as a weapon of mass eye destruction.
This is typical, cool free hackable gadget and I only hear about it when its unavailable!
This may be slightly off topic, but why oh why do I never get cool free stuff when I'm out and about. A free hackable barcode scanner would have been really cool.
Maybe I live in the wrong part of the world? Maybe I'm unlucky with spoting free items?
I don't know!
The only thing I ever got extra with a buisiness transaction was herpes.
in the long run, we're all dead anyway.
from the for-the-well-equipped-home-library dept.
Yes, because I figure it makes the most sense to have a separate CueCat for each book/item on the shelf...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Of course, It's 40 bucks plus a firewire camera. and not $0.3.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll wait for the BoingBoing article about some guy who made a 5-bedroom house out of them.
You've got questions, We've got blank stares...OH...and FREE CueCats for all!!!
they'll be on ebay soon
No! No! Bolt them onto the heads of the friggin sharks!
30 cents each? Why not just give them out for free? I'm sure that will work. The customers will appreciate the generocity and respect the things for all the great benefits like scanning each advertisement in each magazine you read each week.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Is there a point to this?
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
So I went and got one for free at Radio Shack when they came out. I plugged it in, got the software, did a couple of lookups, and then threw it some bin where it's stayed since then. What do people use these for? I don't even see a $0.30 value in these.
A quick eBay search (hey, I figured they might make a good scanner to keep track of my CDs, so what the heck) found a strange assortment of results. The first being, that out of 42 results, all but one or two were not "modified to output text without software". What the heck did they do to the actual device to make it always output raw text? The second being the fact that one of the CueCats is a USB model. Did they actually make a few USB ones or is this yet another mod?
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Okay, so forget all the complex software listed in the article links. Just hardware mod it! Instructions here: http://www.zapwizard.com/MediaPC/CueCat/Index.html .
Oh, and it seems they made lots of USB CueCats. Strange how people don't seem to talk about those. At least half of them on eBay are USB.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Has this post already been published years ago or are we doomed forever to keep repeating it?
[/echo]
I bet that 5 years from now, the liquidator will still have every one of them unless they start selling them in quantities of 10 or so.
Perhaps the lesson is that pumping millions into flimsy ideas is a bad idea. But that's always going to happen - just not in the sort of frenzy with which it happened in the dot-com era, and probably not too easily for anyone for a while. But someone was selling something correctly to get $195 million in VC funding for 265 employees all centered around sending little cats to people in hopes that they'd scan barcodes out of the Dallas Morning News and Wired Magazine.
I can't help but think that either a) DigitalConvergence had grander schemes in the pipes and this CueCat thing was just to be the first, or b) The DigitalConvergence guys were con artists and the whole thing was a scam to get lots of money from VC's. The 260+ other employees were just pawns in a ponzi scheme.
Schnapple
Satan uses RFID! (see anon parent post)
This comes in handy with a lot of hacks and mods using Linux to drive it.
and it's a ps2 ... haven't used it much. My email address got stolen when one of their databases got hacked into, and I've gotten terrible spam at it since. I've had that particular email address for about 7-8 years.
What I'd really like is to get my hands on a usb one, so I can uh... ignore it like I do this one. If it's sitting in a dusty bin somewhere, least I know the usb one is much better.
FLR
Ok, I've heard about these things a hundred times and I've been ignoring it the whole way.
What are some of these interesting mods / uses for CueCats? Has anyone found these to be indispensible for a given task? Is there something I've been doing that would benefit from having a CueCat?
"Psst."
"Yeah?"
"Want one of these?"
"No."
"It's free!"
"Don't need it."
"I'll give you TWO! for free! costs you nothing!"
"It's a pointless piece of crap, I don't need it, nobody wants one, it sucks, get it away from me!!"
"Ok, ok, how about 500 thousand of these things? For only $0.30 a piece!"
"Wow! I'm a sucker for a bargain! Who thought a total piece of crap could be that cheap if you buy in bulk! Give me 2 million!"
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
If the site don't work with Firefox then I am not going to buy them.
"Has IT Marketing learned it's history lesson"
Here's A page on how to use the apostrophe in the English language, and another.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I've been considering the purchase of Delicious Monsters Library application, but have been putting it off since I don't really want to have to lug everything over to my computer for scanning (via an iView, or some other quick cam-like device).
I remember when Library was 1st coming out, I read some blog review of it, and the reviewer was talking about how they had a USB Barcode scanner which contained a small amount of memory onboard. This allowed them to wirelessly walk around the house scanning in barcodes, saving them to the units memory, and then when they plugged it into their Mac, it downloaded all the codes it had scanned and imported the items.
Sounds great, but I've never came across such a unit yet, and most of the USB-based devices I have seen are very expensive, especially when I just want one for "around the house" type scanning.
Does anyone know of a unit such as the one I've described? For that matter, can anyone recommend a decent, yet cheap, barcode scanner which would be compatible with a G5 Mac?
--
Random Signature #2
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
--
Random Signature #2
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Still not convinced to buy the half milion of CueCats?t m
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/cuecat/cuecat.h
It wasn't just that people sometimes had trouble remembering URLs - it was only usable if you were reading the magazine next to your computer. So the only time you could use it was when you could just as well type in the URL yourself. Also, this was back when most computers were desktops, and laptops didn't have wireless on them, so you'd have to be reading your magazine at your desk, not on your couch or the train or wherever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
not bad. Disposable at that price.
I don't think you need a barcode scanner for that purpose. Ever notice that practically all barcodes have human-readable numbers printed below? You can just read those numbers with your eyes, and input them instead (into wherever a barcode was asked).
Maybe there are exceptions, but in general the barcode is just a machine-readable form of same number. And barcode readers serve no other purpose than provide an easier, faster way of entering those numbers (and with fewer mistakes).
So you only need a barcode scanner if human-readable numbers don't match, are missing, when you're in a hurry, or have a huge pile of items to process. Or when the application can't handle manual input of numbers, which would be stupid for any system that uses barcodes.I can finally stop imagining what a Beowulf cluster of Cue Cats would be like, and actually build one!
And to complete this mod discussion (well...maybe, unless I find something else), instructions on how to mod the USB version: http://www.mavin.com/cuecat/index.html. Enjoy!
WASTE - The Secure P2P
they are worth that much? they were giving them away at Radio Shacks...
i got one unrequested from Wired that also had cables to connect my TV to my computer so when special commercials came on it would automagically take me to the product's web page (OH THAT SOUNDS FUN!). did that part of the plan ever happen?
not that i intended to look up internet ads for soap or whatever, i have a Mac so the PS/2 cuecat lives somewhere in the random old hardware boxes (probably near a nubus video card and appletalk boxes). silly me has trouble throwing things like that out... as worthless as they seem.
I have been using a CueCat with Readerware for years to catalog my stuff. http://www.readerware.com/
It is a good cheap barcode reader.
Little known fact: it's possible to buy them in 250K quantities; however, the price then increases to $0.60 each.
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
those scanners exist, but i don't know how cheap they are. if you look in the back of any mac magazine there are often little ads for POS (point of sale, not the other meaning) Mac based systems.
if i remember right you can get scanners for $150. i understand the pen/wand ones are far crappier than the gun ones. though at that price you can buy an isight. it may not work as easily, but it has a lot more uses. maybe ebay has old scanners that will run on OS X? all the scanner really does is convert the code to a serial number and enters it in the selected field. delicious library just has a nice database and a system of looking up that bar code (via amazon.com i think) to get the info on it.
i started to look into Mac based bar code scanners for a project that never really got moving. it was going to be for an inventory kind of think.
Last time I was physically down there I think I saw a few.
http://www.weirdstuff.com/
Their website seems to be down at the moment but check back later...
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
Is this program available somewhere?
Not only did I have no idea that people were still using CueCats, I also had no idea that people were still using Guzzlefish.
I'm going to buy 1,500,001 of them, then they will be left with 499,999 that they can't sell because it's less than the 500,000 minimum order.
Suckers!
Actually, I had a friend who worked at Radio Shack when the CueCat was being distributed free from them.
The deal was, they only had a limited number of CueCats with USB ports. The vast majority of the units they received to give out were PS/2 models. They had one or two specific models of PCs they sold (as I recall, certain Compaq Presario models) that only had USB ports - so they were instructed to only give away a USB CueCat to a customer who said he/she wanted to use it with one of those particular computers.
The fundimental idea behind the cuecat was good. Barcodes are everywhere and it seems the next logical step to actually intrigrate with our web browsers to lookup product information. Need more CD-rs, just swipe the bar code off an existing product and poof, you get the same product shipped to you. Catalog ordering seemed less popular for obvious reasons. But commonly ordered supplies... poof ordered in a flash.
But Digital Convergence decided to use broad strokes rather than hitting a nitch market first as demonstrated by companies like Readerware. Had they decided to start smaller and hit mediaphiles before the general public, this would have at the very least defined an application for their product rather than the unanswered question, "What do I need a bar code reader for". People who actually had an interest in creating a database of what they own who were already hip to the concept of web ordering who would gladly trade their demographic preferences for this service and consider recommendations based on what they buy would be useful feature. Oh look you liked "Tank Girl" might we recommend Barbarella available at your local Hollywood video, click to have it ready when you come in, or order it now.
So I say no, the cuecat was far from pointless. It was a good idea executed poorly.
AudioCues are another story.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Would it be possible to rig up a barcode based key exchange using the CueCat? I bet barcodes can't hold enough information. Ah well, it'd be geekily cool.
Still IMing in the stone age?
Will they bury them next to the thousands of unsold copies off E.T. for the Atari 2600?
These were free at radio shack...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
So you "save time" by printing barcodes, writing database code, labeling, photographing and cataloging all the useless crap most of us throw away?
How does guzzlefish compare with mediachest - http://www.mediachest.com/?
the site renders worse than Slashdot does in Firefox.
Get your Unix fortune now!
My grampa gave me one a few years ago. Maybe I should install it.
--
When we look back on all we accomplished we think, oops.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
Well it's a good thing Slashdot covered this little nugget. It's not everyday you can get a failing product to turn sales around overnight as a novelty item.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Well, I suppose there is the Dolphin when i was in 8th grade the library at the school had one that they had me set up and configure. It seemed to run a full blown copy of DOS, and would dump you at a C:\> prompt until you set the thing up properly. In any event they would scan quite a bit of the library before returning it to the sync thingy. My thought though is this thing is probably expensive.
I have accepted Provolone into my life!
Is the technology for barcode readers much different from that wich most optical mice use for position tracking?
If not, why not create a custom mouse driver that can recognize a barcode when the mouse rolls over one?
8==8 Bones 8==8
"Err, I'd go in for a group order, but I don't need two million at once."
As if you actually HAD a spare $600,000 just lying around in the first place, right? let alone the $150,000 you'd need to get the discount in the first place.
I know it's a toss-up between those CueCats or a Ferrari, but...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They didn't actually ever make it for the Mac ... at least i don't think the Cue software was ever ported to the Mac.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
If I were building stuff to give away, I'd start with, say, a few thousand, but two million? whoa.
-Don
The History of the Hello Kitty Vibrator
Peter Payne
Sanrio is one of the top character licensors in the world, having more or less created the business model of doing business by creating something that doesn't really exist and licensing its use to other companies. Sanrio produces nothing -- all their characters, like the Little Twin Star, Minna no Ta-bo, Bad Batz-Maru, exist as legal entities and nothing more. Their most successful character, Hello Kitty, or Kitty-chan as she's known in Japan, is now now thirty years old.
One of the many companies that license Sanrio's characters for their products was a Japanese company called Genyo Co. Ltd. Genyo made a wide variety of products, from bento boxes to children's toys to chopsticks, many with the Hello Kitty character on them. They scored big in the late 1990's with an off-the-wall hit, a series of Hello Kitty toys which featured a different Kitty figure from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, each representing something the prefecture was famous for. (The figure from Gunma Prefecture, where we live, represented a wooden kokeshi doll.)
In 1997, Genyo designed a product that would live in infamy: the Hello Kitty vibrating shoulder massager, which really is a shoulder massager (trust us -- it says so on the package). Sanrio approved this design without batting an eye, and the product enjoyed modest sales in toy shops and in family restaurants like Denny's and Coco's. It wasn't until 1999 or so that people began to catch on to the fact that the Hello Kitty massager had other potential uses, and with amazing speed, they started popping up in adult videos in Japan. The next thing anyone knew, they had changed into a cult adult item, sold in vending machines in love hotels -- after all, what self-respecting man wouldn't buy his girl a Hello Kitty vibrator when she asked him for one?
The emergence of the Hello Kitty vibrator as a cult adult item caused friction between Sanrio and Genyo, and Sanrio ordered the company to stop making the units. Genyo refused, since it had paid a lot of money to license Kitty for their products. There seemed nothing Sanrio could do, since they had approved the item for sale (see the official Sanrio sticker on the boxes). The answer came when the Japanese tax authorities raided Genyo on suspicion of tax evasion. It seems that some creative accounting was going on between the president of the company, a Mr. Nakamura, his vice president, and the owner of the factory in China where the units were made. All three were arrested, and Sanrio had the excuse needed to yank Genyo's license. They seized the molds used to make the vibrators and destroyed them.
And so, the sad, weird chapter of the Hello Kitty vibrator is at an end. In a short time, the last of the Kitty vibes will be gone, and then what will the world do for wacky comic -- and sexual -- relief?
(c) 2004 J-List. Not to be reproduced without prior permission.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
You're a hardware freak. Decoding can be handled in the device driver.
Well, Mac the Finger said to Louie the King,
"I got forty-eight red, white, & blue shoestrings,
and a thousand telephones that don't ring.
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?"
And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son...
Yes, I believe that it be easily done. Just take everything down to Highway 61."
Imagine, two-fucking-million cue cats!
Who made these things? What were they thinking?
Why didn't they just make 10,000 and see how well they did in the market? Who is responsible for this? Someone should have to be a night-manager at Wendy's for the thirty years and then retired on $200 a month Social Security with a bad back and no health insurance for approving the manufacture of two-fucking-million cue cats!
Well, the floating gambler was very bored.
He was trying to create a next World War.
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor.
Saying, "I never engaged in this kind of thing before!"
"But, yes, I believe it be easily done.
Just put some bleachers out in the sun and have it out on Highway 61!"
Bob Dylan 1965
Cat copies CUE!
I still use mine for encryption purposes. When I need to encrypt something I use the output from a scanned barcode from an item in my house. The output is great because it's a large digit output with many numbers, letters, dots at different lower and uppercases.
Instead of sticking barcodes to all your stuff and scanning them with one cuecat, you could stick quecats to all your stuff and scan one barcode.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I work at a major medical center. Hospitals use barcode scanners all the time and usually have boxes of old but still usable scanners laying about.
A visit to the IT department of any good sized hospital will supply you with a real, programmable, barcode scanner for a few bucks at most and many times they will be happy to have you carry them off.
Hmm... back then, almost all PCs at least HAD PS/2 ports (the iPaq PC and the ThinkPad X series were the exceptions), and they still usually shipped with PS/2 keyboards, right?
Still, I'd much rather have a USB Cat than my PS/2 Cat - easier to neuter, it would work, and my laptop (both this and the used ThinkPad I'm getting) only has USB (well, the ThinkPad has a PS/2 port on the media slice, but that doesn't count...) Of course, they may well have made it for laptop users - b/c otherwise you'd have to lug around a keyboard, or modified keyboard guts...
Try giving the URL for slashdot to a non-geek sometime, you insensitive clod.
to me, this seems like a not-so-bad idea. let's say you have an item and need the owner's manual for it - just scan and go right to the page that has a link to it.
granted, tech has changed a bit since they first came out, and a bar code reader (or RFID reader) integrated into a cell phone or PDA might make more sense, but they weren't quite so ubiquitous when cue cat came out.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
but of course that'll never happen.
let's say you have an item and need the owner's manual for it - just scan and go right to the page that has a link to it.
Each Cue Cat has a built-in unique serial number that gets sent to the company along with what you scanned, so it was basically spyware.
granted, tech has changed a bit since they first came out, and a bar code reader (or RFID reader) integrated into a cell phone or PDA might make more sense, but they weren't quite so ubiquitous when cue cat came out.
I suspect attitudes toward spyware have changed (or perhaps there are just tens of millions of people on the Net now who don't know or care what spyware is), so ironically it might have been ahead of its time.
Tag lost or not installed.
Seriously, my trace-cut Cuecat still works perfectly.
Sweet zombie Jesus, the slashdot editorial gods have smiled upon us!!!! This is better than 24 hours straight of nothing but SCO stories!!!
This was a better "deal" than the CueDog .. . .
There was an internet startup that was giving away free IBM keyboards, that had a row of orange and green buttons across the top:
http://journal.ocliw.com/2000/0519/keyboard.jpg
If you loaded their software, the extra buttons took you to their sponsors shopping sites .. . .
I never used their driver . . . So, all I got out of the deal was a free keyboard for the PC bench in the basement :-) Actually, it wasn't a bad keyboard .. . .
Any of the applications at www.collectorz.com, for cataloging your collections, will accept a barcode input. I purchased a declawed cuecat off of ebay and used it to catalog my 5,000+ book collection. Ditto for my movie collection but that one's FAR less than 5,000. This saved me a TON of typing.
:D
I then purchased a copy of listpro, for my PDA, and imported the book database. Helps me find books that I need to flesh out my collection. Helps me IMMENSLY in keeping me from purchasing something I already have. This USED to be a problem. Not any more.
Caveat: YES, I've read all but about 50 of the books. They're on the TO BE READ shelf. NO, these aren't Romance novels. Mostly History and Biography, then Sci-Fi, Medical texts, Various Science books, Computer stuff, etc.
I'm waiting for WOOT to offer an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. I need one.
This hardware mod sucks (for what I want).
Yes it is cool to be able to have it send a bar code as if you had typed it, but I want it to send it somewhere special - not to the default app. If I swipe a can of beans (or whatever) I want it to be automatically entered into my shopping list, or some such. Not into the word processor that I am currently writing a letter to mum in.
From memory the unmodded cat sent a Cntl-F12 or something at the beginning of the string which you could trap and start up the appropriate app.
Zilch.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's some software and info, courtesy of Brian Connors.
you had me at #!
I mod'ed 'em and sold 'em on eBay ... made about a grand of profit.
-Palal