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August 2, 2007

CueCat resurrects to connect Web 2.0 bookworms

I missed this in May: Just who in our colleagues isn’t using Web 2.0? And how do we move them along?.

Englishman Michael Clarke:

One of the biggest problem I have with evangelising the Live Web or Web 2.0 or Biz 3.0 or whatever it is this week is finding the sweet spot of user focus that will actually turn my colleagues from nervous observers to participants. This has its difficulties....

Technorati’s numbers would suggest that most of the planet is blogging but the fact that the management team where I work (demographic largely 35 to 50) have collectively never so much as accidentally stumbled upon a blog suggests otherwise, however anecdotally...

He cycles through their disinterest in Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Netvibes, Pageflakes? Del.icio.us, Flickr... Nope.

But hang on, there’s good news. Two cracks in the dam have appeared lately. The first is the marvellous Library Thing which has seized the imaginations of every librarian in the division. We’ve bought them CueCats and they’ve gone crazy for it.

CueCats are handheld scanners, not so Web 2.0. They're Web 2000. But they enable LibraryThing, since the alternative is typing in ISBN numbers:

LibraryThing helps you create a library-quality catalog of your books. You can do all of them or just what you're reading now.

And because everyone catalogs online, they also catalog together. LibraryThing connects people based on the books they share.

What's your barcode? Are we compatible, ISBN-wise?

LibraryThing does CueCats! (we're even selling them). LibraryThing is selling USB CueCats for $15 each. The original, free cat-shaped scanner sits next to my computer at work, a souvenir of the year that Radio Shack and Wired tried to give 10 million of them away.

Belo-owned newspapers and some magazines (Parade, Forbes, Time) printed barcodes next to ads and at the end of stories. The idea was that the reader would scan printed barcodes (the "cue," above) with these devices (the "cats,") and be magically whisked to more advertising or to a story's slideshow or ancillary links, all without having to type messy URLS.

The need to read the paper next to your computer was just one obstacle to taking CueCat seriously. The device and the need to load its software baffled new Web users; it worked spottily. A security vulnerability drove the final nail. Wikipedia: "...approximately 140,000 CueCat users who had registered their CueCat were exposed to a breach that revealed their name, email address, age range, gender and zip code."

In comments at that LibraryThing CueCat page,

fleuree said... Will CueCat scan without being connected to a computer? I mean, can it store the information for uploading later on?...

My computer is in a different room than my library, so I'm not sure I could use it. I hope it works without being connected because it would save so much time in cataloging my books at LT...

For $89.99 back then you could buy the A.T. Cross Convergence pen, above, with a wireless scanner built into the tip. (review) Of course, there's one on eBay for $59.95 plus $5.60 shipping, and you can still buy refills for them at Cross.

To use LibraryThing, in 2007 you presumably bring your laptop to your library. Or carry piles of books to your computer.

(Yes, you can buy USB Cuecats on eBay for a little less -- one guy sells them for a starting, and usually final, price of $7.89 with $5.25 shipping, but most members want to support LibraryThing, so...)

A few more comments:

"As You Know" Bob said...

Tim: " What's funny is, I thought everyone knew about CueCats."

Of course, everyone knew about them...
heck, everybody on the internets got one in the mail...
but mine got smashed by kids within weeks of its arrival.

It never really crossed my mind that such an Edsel was still being repurposed as a Force for Good. I mean, you hear mention of the mythical warehouse full of CueCats, but, seeing as how they were once both ubiquitous and free, it never crossed my mind to buy one to play with.

Benjamin said...

You know, I keep running across mine now and again during various purges of my basement. Never, but never, have I given thought that this thing might be unuseful some day. There was going to be a reason...
And, I still have it in the original Wired box that it came in. Weirdest thing I ever got in the mail, I think. Well, not counting the hedgehog...
Can't wait to try this.
OOOOOOhh. Geeky book fun for packrating booksters!

Backstory:
-- Sept. 15, 2000: Scott Rosenberg at Salon, A scanner darkly: Can Wired's CueCat giveaway turn us into a nation of bar-code-reading clerks?

-- June 28, 2001: Eric Celeste, Dallas Observer, Goodbye Kitty: CueCat was a little like a mule with a spinning wheel--so says Dallas' own Lyle Lanley

-- March 2004: Fast Company: Where They Are Now

J. Jovan Philyaw

Then: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Digital:Convergence Corp. (inventor of the CueCat)

Now: What do you do once you've bilked companies such as the Belo Corp., Radio Shack, Young & Rubicam, and Coca-Cola of investments between $10 million and $37.5 million for a product that flops? You change your name. Philyaw, the masterful pitchman between the CueCat, a cutely named handheld barcode scanner that was supposed to bridge print media and the Web, apparently now does business under the name J. Hutton Pulitzer -- or the one-word moniker "Jovan." Operating J. Hutton Pulitzer and Co. out of Dallas, the inventor of what has been decried as "one of the most ridiculed products of the Internet era," now specializes in the "development of unique intellectual property." Such as? Bottled rainwater. Crystals. And a forthcoming book entitled Generational Curses. Will Jovan be foiled again? Only time will tell.

-- J. Hutton Pulitzer's site ("Prize-Winning, Global Media, Entertainment, Feature Film and Publishing") makes no mention of CueCat by name, but it leads his patents. (CueCat was invented by Dave Mathews, co-founder of Digital Convergence, which holds the patent. Specs) He blogged there for awhile, but nothing since April.

Second place: In case you're still dangling, Michael Clarke does name the second "crack in the dam" at his workplace:

Another breakthrough was deploying the free usage level of Campfire which is arguably nothing more than an amazingly businesslike and user-friendly chat room but is as Web 2.0 as they come in terms of usability and immediacy. My boss has started using it for remote meetings with the members of her team scattered eight offices and is absolutely enthralled.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:08 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Michael Clarke on August 2, 2007 11:44 AM

Posted by: hubber on August 3, 2007 4:23 AM