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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.
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.
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!
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?
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."
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No! No! Bolt them onto the heads of the friggin sharks!
What rock have you been living under?
People have been hacking cue cats for like what? 3-4 YEARS? Slashdot alone has had at least half a dozen articles on the cuecat.
In case you want one, you can find them on e-bay for rather cheap these days ($3-6 buy it now).
It is too bad they won't sell in lots lower than 500k. This could have been a great money making scheme considering how many geeks are still hacking and using these things.
Check one out. You need a ps/2 port for it to work and when you get one off of e-bay look for one that has been hacked already, otherwise you are gonna have to declaw the cat. Google will show you the way.
Happy hacking!
zosxavius photography
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
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
"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
"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.
Better yet, give them to the Borg and tell them it's our most advanced technology.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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.
Printing barcodes takes 10 minutes.
3 column spreadsheet - 1 minute.
Photography - just for fun, but once it was written - no overhead. The barcode scan triggers the camera (using the vidcat command-line tool that works with V4L).
Yes, it saves me time, because sorting things functionally requires extra time and space, neither of which I have. I just track things by location, which is much easier (for me). I'm not tagging trash... I use freecycle for that. however, I am tagging books, multisport gear, bike parts, the original media in my music and video libraries, and boxes of documents that I will need, but I don't want to lose in storage and end up buying again (I had 10 camelbak bladders. 10!) This isn't meant as an apologia for my admitted lack of organizational skill -- it's a hack that works around my deficiency. So it's probably not for you, but it has literally changed my life, as corny as that sounds. I probably should do a testimonial for squalorsurvivors.com.
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