Key insight here is right at the middle: "People will not adopt a technical solution that serves to replace a manual task, if that solution is less efficient than the manual task it replaces. How could we think that QR codes for marketing would work any better than CueCat? Did we not learn the first time?"
No matter how great technically, no matter what the reward is at the end, if you can't get people to use the product it's not useful.