Hucksters, Suckers, and the Cue:Cat

Someone in the Know writes: "Now that it's almost completely over for Digital:Convergence, D Magazine (Dallas) unveiled the investments and the suckers surrounding the Cue:Cat and its creator J. Jovan Philyaw. I especially liked the Coca-Cola executive's observation: "... said listening to Philyaw made him feel like his hair was on fire". This was passed around ex-employees and we all got a kick out of it. The company is still alive, apparently, but not doing much anymore."

It's not THAT bad...

[SamMichaels]

The CueCat isn't THAT bad...Using CatNip [goldsteinsoftware.com], my business now has free barcode scanners. Thanks Digital Convergence :)

Re:symbols

[Skuld-Chan]

not to mention it was hard to scan cue cat upcs. I got one and I played around with it - it was nifty, but eventually it ended up on the floor behind my computer (with all the other devices I never use) because I never really could actually use it for anything useful. 90% of the time you'd scan a can of pop right? And all it would do is take you to their website - think about it. I had to go to the fridge, get the pop, scan it just to view a website - where I could have just sat there on my ass and type in www.pepsi.com.

CueCat is brilliant compared to their other ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

People always talk about how dumb the CueCat was. Did you guys notice these idiots' other thing, CUETV?!?!?

Here's their proposition:

You pick up this free cable and software from Radio Shack. (yes, they didn't learn from the cuecat debacle)

You bring your computer out of your study and set it up next to your TV (or TV next to your computer) and plug the audio out of your TV to the audio in of your computer using said cable.

Install crazy software on your PC.

Dial up your PC to the internet.

Tune your TV to NBC, and wait....

When a "CueTV Enhanced" commercial plays, at the end of the ad ther is a jarring burst of static. WHOA! My PC just went to the webpage for that ad! THIS IS SO WORTH ALL THE TROUBLE! GOD BLESS DIGITAL CONVERGENCE, THOSE MORONS!

Yes, NBC actually fell for this, for about a month or so this summer (I think June or July) they were broadcasting ads and other stuff with these annoying bursts of static that the CueTV software would pick up and decode and cause your browser to go to certain URLs. That was just about the same time D:C laid off all employees and folded up. It took NBC a few weeks to clean their programming up to get rid of the CueTV pollution after that.

Here's the URL that proves that as ridiculous as this sounds, I'm not making this up.

[crq.com]
CueTV! Yay!

Re:It's not THAT bad...

[Roblimo]

The threats were silly. OSDN got some cease and desists from Digital Convergence about posting Cue:Cat hacking instructions on Slashdot and some of the bar code reader programs hosted on SourceForge.

Our lawyers and I looked at the whole thing (one lawyer got a Cue:Cat because of a Forbes subscription, no less), we talked about it, and in the end we farted it off.

In essence, these people were sending unsolicited out by mail, then trying to control how recipients used them. Try taking *that* one to court!

Hell, we figured 80% of the things were probably thrown away, and the comparatively few Slashdot and/or SourceForge readers who did something *useful* with theirs wouldn't make a noticeable dent in the world's Cue:Cat (over)supply, but might save a little landfill space.

- Robin

Re:Top five symbols.

[djrogers]

Voice-over-IP

Hate to burst your bubble, but VoIP is alive and well. Thousands of corps are saving millions of $$ by running their voice and data traffic side by side. It's not the clunky PC interface software you're probably thinking of though, I'm talking IP hardphones, digital and analog to IP gateways, and PBXs that trunk over IP. Heck, in all likelyhood, on or two of your recent phone calls went over IP and you didn't even know it...

Re:Who's to complain about free hardware?

[Ranger]

Thanks to Mr. Philyaw, I now own a bar code scanner to catalog my music with.

Ditto. I cut the trace on my CueCat [i-hacked.com], thus disabling the serial number, and, wala, I too have a free barcode scanner. Since it's inline with the keyboard, the input from the barcode will be dumped into any window opened for editing. So you can dump raw barcode into, say, Notepad. Most of the barcodes I tried worked.

Re:Interesting uses?

[Talsan]

I work in the housing department at a university in Chicago, and I created move in cards with barcodes instead of student IDs. This way we were able to scan the barcodes to confirm when students arrived rather than counting the cards by hand. --It made things much easier.

The radio station is also setting up a database and wants to use some to help maintain their inventory.

Even failures can be useful!

Re:I cannot find a better way to catalogue

[plover]

I use this URL
http://www.deBarcode.com/deBarcode/cgi-bin/deBarco de.cgi?barcode=%s&type=U.P.C.%%20A
(where you replace the %s with the UPC-A) to translate my UPC-A barcodes to product info.

However, if you're trying to get "book" information, you don't want to use the UPC at all. You want to use the ISBN, which is encoded in the "Bookland EAN" found on most books. (It's the other barcode, not the UPC barcode.)

Amazon.com makes a very effective ISBN to book catalog database. This URL
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/
does a great job for me.

(Note, that the Bookland EAN is not the ISBN number straight up: you need to decode it. Strip the leading "978" from the EAN, then the last digit of the EAN (the check digit.) You're left with nine digits. Compute the ISBN check digit, and append it to these nine digits, and you're good to go.)

John