ggdm (u/ggdm) - Readit News

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

phrop · 2 years ago

Wired Magazine gave away CueCats at one point, I still have an unopened on in the box. Along with 100 lbs or so of magazines

ggdm · 2 years ago

I’m at the Wired 30th anniversary event as I type this and they didn’t have one at their Gadget Lab installation. I didn’t have one with me, sadly.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

devilbunny · 2 years ago

Did you actually beat the TiVo Slide remote to market? I'm sure you know it, but for those who don't, look it up - backlit remote with the usual TiVo buttons on top, but the whole top slid (much like the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1) to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. Given how slow the non-graphics related hardware in TiVo's STB's was, this was much faster than trying to peck out one letter at a time on their onscreen keyboard.

I was very unhappy when my wife dropped and broke ours, but doubly so because they had been discontinued by then.

ggdm · 2 years ago

The TiVo slide remote was cool. Check WeakKnees or AVS forum for that release date. They will have anit announced or archived. Ours was topside/bottom side with no moving parts. It was flip-flop modality. The concept was “don’t look” on the Directional side and type or search on the keyboard side.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

Traubenfuchs · 2 years ago

Why do I keep reading about the CueCat multiple times per year?

What makes this primitive gadget so enticing?

ggdm · 2 years ago

We were a sign of the future of the web and where we sit today with smartphones and what is capable today. It’s a time capsule.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

drewzero1 · 2 years ago

Pretty impressive to fit USB onto such a necessarily low-cost product at the time.

ggdm · 2 years ago

Considering Windows 95 didn’t have drivers sorted yet, especially true! Mainly we did it for Macintosh support.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

dale_glass · 2 years ago

What did legal do?

ggdm · 2 years ago

Same thing they always do. Write letters. Crappy ones.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

drlava · 2 years ago

These were great. Our college IDs had a barcode on them for cafeteria charge swipes.! I set up a cuecat outside my dorm door where one could swipe their ID for access, the IDs swipes would be compared against an access list and a match triggered a mechanical door opener from a locked door. Lulz all round. This was before everyone was walking around with a cellphone camera where these barcodes were marginally more secure in 2000 but the campus switched from barcodes a few years later.

ggdm · 2 years ago

You’re my people. Well done! We created Make Magazine and Maker Faire to celebrate this good behavior!

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

drewzero1 · 2 years ago

Is there anything you feel people tend to miss or get wrong when telling the story of the CueCat? Or has the record already been set pretty much straight? It still comes up occasionally... heck, I found one in a cupboard at work last week! But I always wonder what gets missed about these things in hindsight.

ggdm · 2 years ago

The Web 1.0 world was different then. Wired and Forbes (our distribution partners) licensed our engine and mailed out Cats as a way to take their “lost” content like audio interviews and photos, aka too many to print, to live online forever. Wired magazine didn’t even control their digital property at the time. We were the first team to tie all of this digital and analog together when the Internet was dialup and WiFi didn’t exist.

We had a second technology that decoded audio tones on TV that we launched with NBC to let your PC “follow along” with what was being shown. That pre-dated Shazam by a decade.

Too many things are missed in the story, but the big thing is all of the money raised was from strategic partners like Coca-Cola ($10M) Y&R ($5M if Ford didn’t like the demo, $10M if they did) and on and on to $205M.

My favorite Easter egg was we were the first Internet platform to look at the location of your scan via IP address to give more relevant data FOR you. E.G. for Coke if you scanned a can in Texas you’d get Six Flags offers vs Atlanta where you would get an offer for SeaWorld. This was a decade before Waze or even Google thought about location, through their purchase of ad networks or other companies.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

mickeyp · 2 years ago

Loved the boxee box. Thanks for that! Do you happen to have the radio specs for the remote? I miss it so much, I want to use it for my home cinema setup.

ggdm · 2 years ago

No, DLink made it for us, and you’re smart to want to use that remote to this day! Full QWERTY keys on the back and D pad on the front was our IP and another first for the industry. The box was running an Intel Atom CPU. Some devs and people have continued to keep that hardware going too.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

tnecniv · 2 years ago

How do you feel when you scan a QR code today? Vindicated in a way that the idea was a useful one, even if the company didn’t quite pan out as you hoped, or more regretful?

ggdm · 2 years ago

QR’s are an add-on for marketing or messaging vs our system which was already printed on the box! But it’s cool to see people scanning and the Cat now sits in the Computer History Museum… So it is cool to see it in the same section as my first computer - the Osborne 01. With Digital Convergence, the Cat’s parent company, we raised $205M from strategic investors and gave 300 dreamers and do’ers jobs and an amazing outlook for their future lives even when it went bust in 2001 like so many startups with “loose” revenue models did. Never have I felt regret from this, plus a lot of OG tech founders give us street cred for tying barcodes to the Internet before people thought of it. It did teach me what types of people that you DON’T want to work with.

The biggest project that my friends and I did after this was moving a Boeing 747 over 500 miles through two states from the Mojave boneyard to Burning Man. That was a true loving team who could do anything. Our business model was smiles per hour. YouTube has great videos on that project.

ggdm commented on Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard – Using the CueCat with .NET (2006) hanselman.com/blog/coding... · Posted by u/TaurenHunter

eigenvalue · 2 years ago

I had one of these and thought it was pretty cool to scan the ISBN barcodes on the back of my books and make a catalog of my books. That didn’t take very long and then I wondered what I would use it for and was very confused as a 13 year old what in the world the business model could be to keep them afloat, because it made no sense to me to give them away or charge so little for the device. I was similarly confused by the various toolbars you could install that would pay you to browse the web (which I hooked up to some mouse jiggling script to keep it working while I slept). I did get at least one check for $15 from that which seemed magical at the time.

ggdm · 2 years ago

It was the razor blade model. It cost us under $10 per unit to make and we charged licenses for content creators to make their physical world items tie into digital content to interact with the brand new web world of 2000. One may also call this a chicken or the egg problem. Y2K was amazing.