8 Oct
2004
8 Oct
'04
4:46 a.m.
At 05:45 AM 10/7/2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
Wow, history repeats itself so soon. It's good
that the CueCat engineers
managed to find work after the dot.bomb. Because, you know, that was such
a good idea that it screams for reincarnation! :)
I still think it's a good idea. It'll show up in a thumb-drive-size
device someday, maybe talking to your PC with USB or Bluetooth,
or perhaps it all gets integrated into our next phones.
We all need a quick way to exchange small bits of info: URLs,
phone numbers, vCards. Scanning barcodes is an easy way to "remember"
something you saw in print.
I think an audio-based "barcode" is needed, too - imagine if your gizmo
would automatically record the small bits of digital info it heard while it
was with you - jingles from the radio and TV, something someone
beamed to you over the phone, etc.
What an interesting engineering problem: design an audio encoding suitable
for a few dozen bytes that was pleasant-sounding to the ear, yet had a
chance to work over AM radio or telephone. It could even just be the
standardized start and end tones to bracket a snippet of audio that the
device would record and decode later.
Bring your gizmo to your PC or handheld or phone and share those bits
of data, present them in a scrolling list... Very handy!
- John