From: "Jani PATOKALLIO" <jpatokal@iki.fi>
> Michael Turner wrote:
> > From: "Jani PATOKALLIO" <jpatokal@iki.fi>
> > > > Yes, I understood this much, but *how are you going to get this to
> > work*?
> >
>
> So you're proposing integrating the CueCat into a mobile?
>
> http://www.cuecat.com/
No. Ick. Why is it that whenever I propose an idea, someone
says it must be *just like* some other idea that it only vaguely
resembles?
> How do you propose to avoid the problems outlined in Salon...
>
> http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/09/15/cuecat/index.html
See below. None of the problems mentioned would be
problems for what I've proposed.
> You're essentially attempting to retrofit hyperlinks into
> the physical world. It's a cute idea, but I think it's heading in
> exactly the wrong direction: in the future, I want to be able to
> read magazines on my mobile....
You've got to be kidding - magazines on a tiny screen? Would you
read that Salon article you pointed us to if it were on your mobile
phone? All of it?
> ....and click on its electronic links, not
> wade through dead trees and jab at them with my mobile.
I can also make any idea sound repulsive with enough loaded
terminology. Just a few hours ago, I was sitting upstairs
reading The Economist as it was meant to be read - in a
reclining chair, under soft incandescent light, with no
raster jaggies or screen flicker or monitor buzz. My mobile
was in its recharger right next to me. Taking it out of
the recharger cradle to scan in a URL would have been
the height of convenience, a nice augmentation of a
nice medium (print), and not, in my mind, "wading through
dead trees and jabbing at them."
> ....And the
> times I've stared at a can of Spam and thought "Gee, I really wish
> I could access some information about Hormel's line of other
> nutritious luncheon meat products, but I'm too lazy to type
> www.spam.com into a browser" have been few and far between
Maybe, but I happen to have an O'Reilly book open in front of me,
flipped to the back pages , where they list other titles of possible
interest, and it would be kind of nice to browse (in the old paper
sense) this minicatalog, then just swipe to record, and push a
button to buy. Without getting out of my reclining chair. Without
having to boot up my PC. Without having to dial my ISP.
Without having to go to the O'Reilly page (or the Amazon
page) and enter the title in the search box.
Among the (non)problems mentioned in the Salon article on CueCat:
Implicitly (and late, explicitly): difficulty of installation on a PC
"Even if the CueCat were a cinch to install and worked with
rock-solid reliability...."
Barcode readers on keitais would be built in - no installation.
PC as ball-and-chain:
"....why would we want a device to chain us to our computers while
we flip pages?"
A mobile phone is not a desktop PC. If anything, *it* is chained to *you*.
Another objection: that barcode would solve a non-problem:
"How huge is the problem CueCat addresses, anyway? Is it that hard to find a
company's home page on the Web? "
Many barcodes are UPCs - universal *product* codes. A barcode
scanner could take you to more than the vendor's web page - it could
go to a specific product page. Assuming that's the barcode service
you wanted. Yet other services could take you to price-compariso
pages. I could have used that for the copy of the Economist I was
talking about earlier - available for an outrageous 1600 yen at
Books Horindo in Takadanobaba, when, if I had waited for my
next trip to Kinokuniya, I could have gotten it for half that.
The author says there are "a million things" wrong with this idea.
He lists maybe three, and beats them to death. CueCat is probably
a bad idea - it doesn't turn me on, anyway. But this wasn't what
I was talking about.
Aside from the PC-centric perspective of the whole article (inapplicable
to a mobile-centric application for barcode), there is definite snobbery:
"Can Wired's CueCat giveaway turn us into a nation of bar-code-reading
clerks?"
and again, toward the end:
"...we'd have to become a nation of scanner-crazed checkout clerks to
make it work"
The subtext (if it's even as far down as "sub"): you're gonna have to
drop a rung or two on the class ladder to use this device.
Hey, they used to say that about computers, you know?
In my original post on this, I alluded to this problem, humorously -
barcode has these associations with lines of work that the digerati
might look upon rather condescendingly. Yeah, well, tell it to the guy
who works in Amazon inventory, scanning stuff all day for at most
twice the minimum wage. When he gets off his shift and settles in
at Spinelli's for a good read of the stuff he gets from Amazon
on employee discount, is he suddenly going to be *above* barcode?
Millions of Americans work at jobs like these - and millions of them
are going to have mobile phones soon, if they don't already. Sneering,
as that Salon editor does, that nobody's going to use this technology
because it's only fit for the masses....well, it puts me in mind of that
old Yogi Berra malapropism: "Nobody goes to that restaurant
anymore - it's too crowded."
Of such ignominious unpopularity, fortunes are made.
-m
leap@gol.com
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Received on Tue Nov 21 17:28:26 2000