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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.
When did you get here? Slashdot has always reported news from other news sites.
Deleted
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
Wow, if it's that easy to get an angry response out of you, that just gives me all the more incentive to complain!
You assume his library is of books. What about CDs or other media? Maybe he's useing the cats for an automated storage and retireval systems based on bar codes on the media? What do you have to say about that now!?
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
"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 can finally stop imagining what a Beowulf cluster of Cue Cats would be like, and actually build one!
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.
Skunkworks research (off the clock, no official budget) can produce a prototype of a system which management would not approve (or maybe believe possible) without seeing it in action. A field which two guys in a garage can meaningfully contribute to (like software) is always going to innovate far faster than a field that requires a bureaucracy just to make resources available.