On Wednesday, 27 May 2020 4:20:14 PM AEST Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
Remember that free barcode scanner that was sent out to millions of Americans? I can't remember the name and Google doesn't help (I think
CueCat (styled as ':CueCat'). I have one, from what was practically the only time I ever visited a Radio Shack store (go get the freebie handout). ;->
Ahh that's why I couldn't find it. I misremembered it as being shaped like a mouse, so wrong animal meant no hits. As an aside, Radio Shack in Australia seemed pretty good when I was young. It had some electronic kits (not as good as Dick Smith but better than nothing) and a reasonable array of parts, although anything you could buy somewhere else would probably be cheaper somewhere else. Maybe the biggest advantage of Radio Shack was that they had a store within walking distance of my home which was by a stop for my school bus.
ad and then be whisked away to … a website. That is all CueCat did: take the consumer from an ad to, basically, another ad. (And this was after the consumer installed the software on his or her computer and registered with his or her ZIP code, gender, and email address.)
How many adverts have you seen with QR codes? That seems like an obvious use of the technology if you aren't marketing to people who don't have smart phones (elderly or poor).
Belo Corp., RadioShack, Y&R and Coca-Cola were among the companies that invested a total of [US] $185 million into this.
Maybe instead of spending my life incrementally improving relatively solid products and hacking in-house systems so they sorta worked I should have invented something totally crazy and asked for a lot of money. Then I could have retired when I was 30, lived off interest, and spent the rest of my life incrementally improving free software. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/