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by jjkaczor 34 days ago
Am so "teh old", that honestly - I can't say whether or not that product was worse than the "CueCat":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

(Naw - the CueCat was better, at least it was a generic barcode scanner)

2 comments

I love that Belo was so involved in this epic failure. They are one of those large media companies I love to hate on. It probably helps to be a Dallas native to have that sentiment though
CueCat was just ahead of its time. These days scanning graphics to load links is quite common. I see QR codes and similar all the time.
Part of the success of QR codes is the ubiquity of the device to scan those codes. CueCat needed a wired device which is not something as easy to use as a wireless mobile device.

So yeah, ahead of its time to be sure

Fully agreed.

Plus, CueCat used some dumb proprietary encrypted tag format that needed to go to their servers to look up the code as they thought the marketers would want to pay for their codes.

Too early. Too proprietary. Too greedy.