Digital Convergence Bites the Dust

An anonymous reader writes "On Friday Digital Convergence (DC) 'restructured' and got rid of just about everyone without severance pay. They are still trying to sell the 'paper' company, the problem will be to find someone stupid enough to buy it! Some interesting quotes from The Dallas Morning News: DC speak "some employees in NY were let go" English: about two remain. Radio Shack: "We have stock in the stores, and we're continuing to distribute" English: The CueCats are taking up valuable room in the warehouse, we need to get rid of them. DC: "The staff has been significantly reduced," English: You don't have to take off your shoes to count the people left. DC: "a number of employees throughout the company have decided to stay on as unpaid consultants." English: The senior people who have millions of shares are still coming in for a few days. DC: "Quite frankly, we're even going after new business" English: Are there any suckers out there who want to buy the company? " But it looks like those CueCats out there are now definitely freely hackable without threat of a cease and desist. If only the MPAA would go under.

"anything useful"

Well, here's what *I* always planned on trying to do with my CueCat:

Add a plugin to AbiWord/KWord/KSpread/Gnumeric that would put a barcode on the bottom of each printout. Then arrange that scanning that barcode with my cat would auto-launch said office application with the relevant document.

Sounded useful to me, especially if you work for a company that prints all sorts of things out without including the filename in the footer. And even with the filename in the footer it would be quicker and easier just to scan it...

Stuart.

PS You could do the same thing with a web browser to launch at a URL based on a printout of the page.

Not suprising.

The whole company brought on their own doom from the very start. Whine and threaten the technically savvy... Now that's gotta be the stupidest thing to ever do, espically when they can't legally tell me what to do with an object given to me freely.. (sorry, but I recieved one in the mail without asking for it also, US mail laws clearly state that it is MINE and only MINE... for those IP law protectors out there) Next they have a business that is based on the hopes that people are super lazy. "ohh I can scan this barcode and it will take me magically to the website" How about typing the url? anyone that is interested in looking at more information on the internet about a device they plan on purchasing will look at the manufacturers site last, and start looking for complaints or other bad things said about it first. (User reviews)

This was one of the last "boneheaded ideas"(tm) companies that are in the start of their death throws. I do have one thing to thank them for..

I was able to make over 20 keyboard port barcode scanners available free to customers of mine (mod to remove encryption and voila it works for P.O.S. (that's point of sale) software!) saving them hundreds of dollars.

Re:*shrug*

Besides, it's not like CueCat was an entirely USELESS technology... apparently you people thought it was good enough to try and hack.

I think the primary motivation behind it's hackability is the cost - since it's free, you don't feel bad if you break it. It was also a challange to find something *useful* to do with the thing. Other than my concept of "King of UPC", which I couldn't muster interest in, I don't think anybody came up with anything useful at all.

--
Evan

Re:You may not like them, but it's still a pity...

Try AirClic [airclic.com]. Nifty little laser scanners made by Symbol.

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Re:Stock up now!

eBay them in a year. Be sure to mark them as 'R4R3!' and 'L@@K". Set the 'buyitnow' for $25.

What can be done with a barcode reader?

Somewhere up there, another reader puzzled over what consumer use there would be for a barcode reader. I think the answer is obvious. But it is so pro-consumer that you'll be hard pressed to find a major company to push it. (And its real advantages only come into play with a wireless handheld web device.)

Unwired world:
Start with a mildly populated database. Consumer goes to grocery store. Scans in each item purchased. Enters name, if necessary. Enters price (and marks if it is a regular price or a sale). Repeat with various grocery stores. Finds the best store to buy all items at, or the best two stores to get certain items from in order to save money.

Wired world:
Same. But check against the entries of other users in the area. Possible alerts to bargins on things that are regularly bought (Pepsi 2 liter, 69 cents, Albertsons, on sale). Also, being able to real-time scan an item in a store to see how good of a deal it is. (Especially good on impulse buying.)

Mind you, of course, it isn't as simple as I just described, and there are the usual disclaimers. But we're not using a barcode scanner for its full potential. It could be a real win for the consumer.

consumers control in a free market.

This is the result of consumer control in a free market. A company has two choices: either make consumers happy, or go under. DC didn't manage to do the first, so to deserves the second.
-russ

*shrug*

So they passed on as a company. Big deal.

Now are *you* gonna feed their kids and pay their rent?

I mean, not that they didn't do some assinine things as a company, but I'd like to see a company like that reform, rather than bite the dust and leave even more people unemployed. Besides, it's not like CueCat was an entirely USELESS technology... apparently you people thought it was good enough to try and hack.

I'm not necessarily mourning their death, but I think it's a bit tasteless and uncouth to be dancing on their ashes, eh?

Re:Why are they still hiring?

They're not hiring, but that hasn't been updated on the website yet because they just sacked the webmaster.

After that, the people responsible for sacking the webmaster were themselves sacked.

The death of DC would end the Dotbomb era.

Although they've had it coming for some time, and I can't think of any other dotcom outfit that deserves to bite it as spectacularly as DC, I have to admit that I'm going to miss those crazy bastards.

I really thought if anyone had a shot at revolutionizing the way that advertisers and media exploit consumer data, it was DigitalConvergence.

What continues to amaze me about DigitalConvergence is the sheer enormity of it. The scale of the undertaking, the breadth and scope of it all, it dwarfs some of the larger dotbombs of record. If/when it actually completely explodes, it seems like it would signal the definitive end-of-the-dotbomb-era... .(who else at this scale has yet to bite it?) DC is the archetypical dotbomb. A privately held company valued most recently at well over $500,000,000.00, which reported revenues in 1999 of only $1,500,000 (and a loss of $4,000,000).

A company which continues to incur enormous costs in the manufacturing and distribution of their devices (what might 10,000,000+ CueCats cost to build and ship to retailers? who can imagine?) and seems to have no hope of profitability, ever...

A management team populated by players from Time Warner, AT&T, GE, Disney, Barings, etc.

A CEO (who owns 50% of the company) who seems pathologically given to making unfathomably exaggerated marketing claims, including, "We think we're the fourth evolution of computing. A cat can do everything a mouse can't!" , and "It's a torrid love affair I'm having with the power to mold not only an industry, but also the mind-set of America's consumers..." (As an aside, this man should be forced to eat his every press release and media clipping as punishment for this sort of hubris...).

In his prior career hosting a tv show called "NetTalkLive", he claimed, "Our show reaches into 802,000,000 million homes each week..." - Yes, roughly 1/6th of the world population is tuning in to watch an informercial (although conveniently, the Nielsen ratings system didn't track shows like NetTalkLive that run during the dead-zone of infomercial hours on d-grade & public television channels...)

Other gestures of indulgence include spending a ton of money in decorating the offices of DigitalConvergence to be "feng-shui" compliant [bcentral.com] ("...the building should face in a direction that is positive for the company's owner or chief executive...", plants and water are added to the environs because "....plants represent growth and water represents money..." (well I guess they've been smoking the plants and lighting the water on fire...).

I look forward to the case studies on this corporation. I suspect that we'll see lots of people conclude, "It probably doesn't make good business sense to entrust hundreds of millions of dollars to people who claim to be marketing-geniuses, and yet somehow fail to focus on that most basic of marketing fundamentals, determining the needs of the consumer."

Other interesting reading material, for those concerned....

a funny "Dallas Observer" article [dallasobserver.com] and a not quite as funny but still very interesting article from "Editor and Publisher" online [editorandpublisher.com].



"If you build it, they will laugh."

Aww...

Who are we going to tormet now? It was kind of fun peeing in their petunias on a regular basis. The RIAA and MPAA are not nearly as inept as they were and it was kind of fun to sit back and chuckle at their lame-brained attempts to defend their "IP." They served a vital role as an open source whipping boy and now that they're gone, we'll have to find another.

Actually...

No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.

You're correct that this doesn't change the legal situation proper. However, the legal position proper was never the problem. Legally the little felines are and have always been freely hackable. The problem was simply the threat of big bad company with presumably deep pockets sicking the landsharks on individual hackers that couldn't afford to defend themselves, merits (or lack thereof) of the case be damned. The troubles at DC mean that threat just lost all credibility - they obviously are not in a position to engage in such tactics.

Sure, it's possible some other big bad company with deep pockets and no ethics could come along and buy the property and turn around and start in on the same route, but it surely is very unlikely. The "property" is obviously not worth the trouble, and even stuffed shirts that didn't understand that before will now when they see how much good it did DC.

Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."

As another poster pointed out, there are already at least two such databases. Your objection that they don't include the elements of DCs intended setup that most of us found objectionable in the first place doesn't seem like any big deal to me. There's no need to buy anything from DC. Their copyright on the windows only spyware they distributed with the cuecats is not needed or even desireable, as cross platform Free Software programs that perform as desired and don't spy on the user are available.

Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?

It'll most likely be auctioned off to the highest bidder, before or after the bankruptcy declaration. They can expect to be spammed and junk mailed and telemarketed out of their minds. It sucks, but really, wtf did they expect when they happily traded off their privacy to DC in exchange for a little promised convenience?

"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."

Good Riddance

Seriously. DC was about as much fun and welcome as a neighborhood bully. Everything about the company -- from their business plan to attitude towards geeks to the way they tried to strongarm the UPC industry -- stunk. Not only did they prove the limitations of free-as-in-beer, they set over a dozen exampled of how not to run a business, how not to conduct PR, and how not to treat your userbase. DC was a closed minded facist group that didn't open its eyes and ears until it was far too late. It's hard, if not impossible, to feel sorry for them.

Re:*shrug*

Besides, it's not like CueCat was an entirely USELESS technology... apparently you people thought it was good enough to try and hack.

I'll pass over the social attitudes implied by the term "you people". I'll just point out that wanting to hack a product has nothing to do with the product's quality. DC's "product" was a harebrained scheme to have people track their own spending habits. The scanner itself was not at all innovative. But it was free! Which was why people hacked the scanner. But nobody tried to hack — or showed much interest in — the CueCat product as such.

__

Like this was a surprize...

I would really like to know what kind of surveys they did before they released that Cat. Did they think anybody liked to bring various products to the computer to scan them in?

I actually brainstormed for a while trying to come up with something I could do with one that would make it entertaining to use... Nothing.

-- Book inventory? Why? Was I running a library?

-- A quick way to enter commands: I had it hooked up to a shell and printed out bar codes so I could scan in longer commands. Problem is, the longer the command, the less often you use it. Therefore, useless.

-- Fun for a child with some kind of game? Once again, annoying since you have to rescan things slowly occasionally.

So in short, the original reason of having it was stupid, and I couldn't come up with any useful alternate ways of using it.

But on a different note, have they already had there IPO? ;)

dammit

how often do I have to tell people.

You NEVER give out your real name and address, unless you WANT to receive something (as if you ordered something)

By giving out your name and address, you're essentially asking for the name to get distributed around in mailing groups.

For example, I signed up once with BMG with a fake name at my house. Only a few weeks later, that imaginary person supposedly won $10 million dollars from Publisher's Clearing House.

And this was BEFORE the internet became popular.

Re:dammit

It get's better than that. First, keep track of the variations in your name, for examle, use an alphabetic code as your middle name, storing information on which code corresponds to which company signup. Then include (when dealing with snailmail) a form letter requiring the company not to disclose your contact information to 3rd parties, then, sit back and wait for the junkmail, then start sending collection letters to the companies that failed to comply with the disclosure you included with each signup. This technique and others are detailed on a really nifty website JunkBusters.com [junkbusters.com]. Particularly amisung is their Anti-Telemarketing Script [junkbusters.com].

Thankfully, I have more important things to do with my time than pursue these endevours, but There are people who do these sorts of things (for a living maybe...).

--CTH


---

Re:About the leftover CueCats . . .

Well, there were some desperate attempts to get rid of them before, look where that got them :/

I'm guessing it would cost too much in shipping to get rid of them like before, they may just go to landfill, it happens with companies quite often apparently, Palm were contemplating the same thing a few weeks ago with their excess inventories, they can't reduce prices and floor the market for their new models and take the company down the drain with it. So they just do the easiest thing, write the inventory off and destroy it, thereby preserving the current market for their goods.

I'm guessing archaeologists in a few hundred years time will find hundreds of these odd plastic 'probe' type things (right next to the pets.com puppets) and try and workout what the hell they were for.

It seems that promotion on NBC and the international distribution was the last "big push" for DC, if that didn't work, nothing will type of thing.

I received a USB cat last week here in the UK, it was quite slow and it was killing the i/o on my notebook, I presume it was something to do with power constraints, but they don't seem to be high quality.

I'm planning to print some barcodes out and do an inventory of my CD's, and maybe other stuff in the house "when I get round to it" (tm).

Thanks for the free scanner... sorry about the company (well?), it's a shame for the people who have lost their jobs, however you really need a reality check if you think joining a company will make you an IPO millionaire within months, it couldn't last indefinitely, and it couldn't be for everyone.

Just goes to show you really could smoke dope and construct business models in 1999, I guess it didn't look so preposterous back then either since everybody was wearing rose tinted glasses, it's surprising to see the high profile companies who invested in DC, it seems they were giving money out hand over fist to get a piece of the IPO pie.

Stock up now!

Just for the hell of it, I went to 3 Radio Shacks today and picked up as many CueCats and CueTVs as I could. Only ended up with 17 of each. I'm gonna do the same thing every few days until all of the places I go to are out. Why? Who knows, maybe they will be worth something some day. I'll pass them on to my grandkids perhaps and have them sell them on ebay as historic relics to an age of stupidity.

Re:Why are they still hiring?

They're not hiring, but that hasn't been updated on the website yet because they just sacked the webmaster.

Not "freely hackable"

No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.

Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."

Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?

Re:Free UPC database for use with Cuecats...

As the guy who runs the Internet UPC database, I'd like to say that we've gotten a lot of questions as to why we don't merge with the other database on the net. The reason is simple, as one user put it, because we are totally open. You are free to connect up, and do whatever you wish to the database (query wise). If you want the database, take it. Yes, there are only 30,000 entries, but each and every one of those 30,000 entries have been entered by end-users. By all means, if anyone wants to contribute, don't let me stop you. :-) Robert