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.
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."
True, these are no good for commercial and retail use. But for home use... not bad, considering the cost barrier drops nearly to zero.
I use the cuecat for a home inventory system that has saved me tons of time and space. It works really well for disorganized scatter-brained packrats. 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) but all that is really required is a spreadsheet with three columns (barcode, description, location), a "spayed" cuecat (hw mod is cheap or free), and a bunch of pre-made 3of9 barcodes, which you can do for free on an inkjet printer and a barcode font.
The cuecat increases ease and accuracy of barcode entry (and reduces the chance of error) and you can find all your crap after you store it by searching the tables... for me, the biggest psychological barrier to putting things away is not being able to find them when I need them, followed closely by a strong disinclination to high-level storing and filing strategies that most people use. The barcode & hide method sticks to the Keep It Simple Stupid paradigm, and works much better for a person like me.
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