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Comment by wehadfun | Hacker News Reader

For some reason this made me thing of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

A minor difference between Dash and Cuecat: when the CueCat launched, approximately none percent of magazine ads had CueCat codes. When Dash launched approximately 98% of household consumable items had bar codes.

Yes, if you throw away your box for your granola bars, you might not have the bar code handy, but it was at least there when you bought it in the store.

Indeed, if the CueCat had had specific ties to online grocers' shopping carts, there would be nothing new about Dash.

This totally reminded me of CueCat. Despite CueCat being free, it was commonly sold on ebay because it made the cheapest barcode scanner on market. Amazon dash will end up being similarly awesome for hobbiest to hack on.

it's free (with a $299/yr amazon fresh account). that's very much not the same thing as free.

If it 'breaks', will Amazon send you another one?

Seattle does not require Prime Fresh, it's free (but delivery fees apply below certain thresholds).

For what it's worth, I'm currently midway through the 30 day free trial of Fresh, and I got an email offering me one for free.

The CueCat has a wire.

Possibly a case of doing one thing wrong that ruined the entire product. We'll see.

At the time, though, Bluetooth was neither common nor very easy to work with on home PCs.

CueCat also required proprietary software to be installed on a PC or Mac. It was not a standalone device.

And the industrial design! It was a chintzy elongated white plastic cat, with an IR window across the mouth. And it was finicky as hell to use, compared to a real barcode scanner.

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