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.

Comments

Re:Hey, genius...

[Seumas]

Yes, but you could make a 1000% profit reselling these once the new world order forces us to be barcoded in satan's name!

Blogdot

[pjh3000]

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!

Re:Hey, genius...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you could make a 1000% profit reselling these once the new world order forces us to be barcoded in satan's name!

I thought Satan was going for RFID now?

Has IT Marketing learned it's history lesson

[frovingslosh]

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!

hehehe

[justforaday]

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...

Throw me a bone here!

[pentalive]

No! No! Bolt them onto the heads of the friggin sharks!

Re:Such a deal!

[ArsenneLupin]

... briefly tried to set up a POS for a client

Hmmm, looks like you did ;-)

It's basic economics..

[wfberg]

"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!"

Re:Turn them into weapons

[ScrewMaster]

Better yet, give them to the Borg and tell them it's our most advanced technology.

Re:Lesson

[Waffle Iron]

Funny article. My favorite part was the scheme that was even more stupid than the CueCat:

And anyway, what the heck happened to last month's dumb Wired idea?

About two months ago, Wired magazine had a different technology for going to a URL automatically from an ad. It was some kind of weird thing where you held up the page to your digital camera, took a digital picture, and ran this wacked out software that navigated your browser to the Altoids home page. So now instead of typing 7 letters I have to find my digital camera, turn it on, wait for it to boot up, take a picture of the page, turn off the camera, wait for it to flush its memory to flash, remove the flash card from the camera, take the network card out of the PCMCIA slot, put the compact flash into it's holder, plug it into the PCMCIA slot, find the picture, run the software which I previously installed, oh, don't get me started. It would be a half-hour trauma just to go to the damn Altoids web site, where you can't even buy an Altoids, for heaven's sake. Curious.

Don't need to buy 500K units

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Little known fact: it's possible to buy them in 250K quantities; however, the price then increases to $0.60 each.

Re:Such a deal!

[radish]

I'm using some scripting to add bells and whistles (like native cuecat decoding support, integrated webcam snapshots, mysql backend and a tcl/tk front-end)

The barcode & hide method sticks to the Keep It Simple Stupid paradigm

You are obviously using some definition of "simple" with which I am not familiar ;)