Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Big Media Invests In Physical World Connection

Was big media the first to adopt physical world connection?

I find it interesting that a major media holding company invested in probably the first physical world connection company.. They had the right idea, but the wrong device.

Do the major media companies see the billions of "CueCats" already on the market?

In a story that focuses on how the news is slanted by powerful interests, we see how Belo Corporation and their WFAA TV station tried to introduce PWC.

High-tech gizmos often have a special place on local TV news. Even more so when the TV station's parent company is behind the new invention.

The
Belo Corporation invested $40 million in a company called Digital Convergence that manufactures a bar code-scanning device called CueCat. Those using CueCat on their personal computers can scan the bar codes on advertisements, calling up more information about that product.

According the Dallas Observer (9/21/00,) Dallas station WFAA-Channel 8 ran segments about CueCat three nights in a row in September on their news broadcast. WFAA is owned by Belo
.

People can mock and criticize the CueCat, but the concept was way ahead of it's time and people couldn't imagine connecting the physical world to the Internet yet. Now some "visionaries" are calling it a killer app.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're an idiot.
That was the WORST invention in history.
Nobody wants to scan stuff from paper while sitting at a computer.
NOBODY!
PB