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CueCat Patent Granted, Finally
RobertB-DC writes "Who could forget the :CueCat, the amazing device that would bring 'convergence' between the real world and the online marketing Utopia of the late '90s? Belo, the Dallas-based newspaper and TV conglomerate, spent millions of dollars on the project, only to be ridiculed from the start and eventually becoming a sort of poster kitty for the Dot-Com Bust. Well, the device's inventor and chief cheerleader, J. Jovan Philyaw, didn't forget. His patent application, in progress since 1998, has finally been granted. The story comes from a Dallas alternative weekly, since the local Belo paper is still smarting from its $40-million-dollar black eye."
and write the book ":CueCat for Dummies"? I'll be an instant millionaire!
So, the cueCat was in a box (the patent office) and its state was unknown for years until someone finally opened the box and looked at it? I can only assume the cueCat was dead, but that assumption probably changed the outcome.
First again?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I declawed one with the software patch that stripped the 'encryption' to use it as a normal barcode scanner. It was great for a little inventory problem I had at work. I made an Access DB that kept track of LTO tapes by scanning a label on each box and tape. That way when I had to do a restore from tapes on hand all I had to do was pull up its label in the DB and it gave me the box and row number.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A barcode scanner at every normal person's PC that "allows" them to view advertisements on products they've already purchased? Count me in!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Clearly, this one got approved via the Patent Office's rule that "If you can't decipher the run-on sentence, approve the patent".
Yeah, I know the patent rules pretty much require run on sentences, but Claim 1 here is ridiculous even given that.
Best I can tell, Claim 1 covers doing a lookup of a code at a remote site and receiving something like a URL back, then following that URL. The code has to have been received before the user connected to the network.
That is, if I set up a server which returns a redirect for "8972" of http://www.cat.example.com/ and "1513" to http://www.dog.example.com/ and I send you (via US mail) "8972", which you then enter at my site and get redirected to the cat site, the patented method has been used.
Does anyone know if I can still pick these up for free at Radio Shack? I remember having a stack of them but my Grandma threw them away because she thought they were pens that were defective. No, really, she did.
The plastic bag that my copy of Wired came in had a big hole in it when it got to my house. The CueCat was either stolen or it fell out.
Technoli
What do I do with the box of these that a frustrated Radio Shack manager gave me?
I went in asking for one and he told me I can't have one unless I take his entire inventory of them. I ended up with dozens of them.
On a side note, I then went to the bank and asked for a dollar, but they didn't give me a boxful of them... no fair...
Awesome! I still have a brand new unused CueCat in my desk drawer next to me right now! My ship has come in! ...I think. Wait, what's going on here?
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Ummm....Most authors only get paid if their books actually sell...(Hence the reason JonKatz lives in abject poverty.)
My blog
it looks like a sex toy
all its good for anymore
i guess
i said i guess!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A method for interconnecting a user's location to a destination location on a network. The unique information is received at the user's location, which unique information has no associated routing information embedded therein. Network routing information is associated with the received unique information in response to receipt thereof. The user's location is then interconnected to the destination location across the network in accordance with the routing associated therewith in the step of associating.
I smell a patent troll brewing...what better place than in Texas?
I understand why and how this idea failed, but I think that it had such a great deal of potential. Not for flashy things like electronics, but for mundane things like office supplies. Rather than digging around Corporate Express's web site or typing in a list of part numbers, how much easier would it be just to use the CueCat on a barcode printed in the catalog? I was kind of disappointed that the worthwhile, vaguely interesting applications for this technology never materialized.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Geez I guess it has been that long. I was one of the first to figure out that it sent a coded mix of letters and numbers with the scanned barcode inside so that it could be hacked to function as a proper barcode scanner. I also was one of the first to get a certified cease and desist letter and a followup call by one of their attorneys.
I still have a bunch of both the serial and USB versions wrapped and new... however now they would actually have proper legal grounds to prosecute so I won't be redistributing my code online again :)
Never thought I'd see :CueCat come up again on the 'ole Internets.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Still available, a web page to decode the cat. http://www.logorrhea.com/cuecat/cuecat_decode.html
1011 1010 1101 1100 0000 1111 1111 1110 1110
A bit offtopic, but with the aforementioned "hack" to enable it as a more generic device, a friend of mine uses it to catalog his book, CD, and DVD collection. He has a whole spreadsheet for his books that tells him how many pages, how long it took to read, his overall "review" (couple of sentences) of the book, etc.
A bit anal retentive? Yes, but I could see it being useful for making a record of just about any "collection" you had that already had barcodes on it.
Hmm. This is the same thing the CompareEverywhere app for Android (G1) does.
http://compare-everywhere.com/
Is the patent broad enough to ace these guys out?
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
I remember being the first to publish the basic decoder for the CueCat... got a nice little writeup in Wired, which led to a nice little writeup from a Kenyon & Kenyon lawyer in the form of a C&D.
Highlight of my sophomore year in HS: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7222&cid=835493
Their patent claim is interesting -- launch a web browser when an item is scanned. Sounds like it shouldn't meet the non-trivial requirement to me, but I'm not in IP law anymore...
If you look at the "Related Applications" section, I see something like a score of issued patents in this family, give or take a few. So this is not anything like the "real" :CueCat patent. This is a continuation-in-part, meaning they are adding new matter to the original application (some incremental improvement, usually). Apparently, these guys are intent on patenting every little incremental improvement they can think of for their famous failure. Why? Are they stacking their portfolio with an eye to future litigation? If true, that's the real story.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Oh no! Are you saying that the book that I read "Writing Dummy Books for Dummies" was inaccurate on how much money I can make?
This news prompted me to drag out my two :Cats and decrypt the output on them, so I can finally use them as raw scanners. I dug out the copper trace to pin 10 of the Hyundai IC on both of them and, voila, it outputs raw numeric ASCII data whenever it spies a barcode. I've had archived details on how to do this for years, but never got a round tuit (those tuits are pretty scarce and hard to find in their own right). Turns out I Googled the part number on the PCBs and found several pages detailing the process for that specific PCB.
I remember those, when they first came out, they seemed stupid. It solved a problem for an advertiser, but never solved anything for the end user. Doomed to failure.
Plus, in the install instructions, it gave instructions on how to reset your BIOS settings if it wasn't recognized. You expect someone to reset BIOS settings to use something not really useful? Whatever.
we used one at my last place, a 'declawed' one was a useful cheap barcode scanner for books.
You should have looked at the book next to it on the shelf, "Reading about Writing Dummy Books for Dummies". It explained in great detail that it's usually a bad idea.
The Internet is generally stupid
Why do I get the feeling that the :CueCat could find new life as a support peripheral to some stupid new Facebook "application"? "Here are the barcodes from everything in my room! L0lz!!1!!"
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
It takes effort and attorney's fees to keep a patent idling for ten years. This is a classic tactic of ne'er do well patent attorneys used to keep 'before their time' ideas in the patent process until they can be used to make money. This has become a patent after 10 years for one of two reasons: 1) They think there is a big fish to extort/sue now 2) They are tired of paying attorneys
You can use a Cue Cat for zapping books into LibraryThing, the social book-cataloging site. It's a lot faster than adding everything manually, and it works even if encryption hasn't been disabled.
I bought a USB model for a whopping 10 USD. Then I declawed it by severing the fifth leg from the left on the bottom of the microchip, using a pair of fingernail trimmers (full declawing instructions (pdf), scroll down to page 5). It works nicely in Windows and Linux, no drivers, and I can zap pretty much any barcode and get the actual text read out. It's surprising how often you can zap a barcode into Google and get highly relevant search results.
So, basically, the company's business model may have been crap, but as a cheap barcode scanner their hardware ain't bad. Aside from the dumb encryption part, and the cat shape is silly.