Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

I look at this and I get an itchy feeling in my fingers that the next tech bubble bust is now less than 12 months away.

It's deja vu all over again ... Anyone else remember the CueCat, back in the heady days of 1999?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html

(I think people with wireless internet connections at home and an iOS/Android device to select stories on are going to read the news on their tablet or smartphone, not some hunk of dead tree. And the stink of flawed business models with high startup costs that nevertheless manage to get enough funding to start shipping hardware is familiar from the last time round on this merry-go-round ...)

View on HN

That's like saying Chumby is going to be a failure because PointCast was a bomb.

Aggregating all this social data into new and interesting forms is going to be a big deal, in my opinion. Look at Flipboard. That's an amazing program. Would some people like to have their Flipboard printed and handed to them over morning coffee? I would. Is it practical, considering the iPad can also sit next to you at breakfast? Not really.

This is just a little novelty item that will probably sell just fine. Like Chumby.

It's a razor model. The handle is free, but you pay for the blades. In this case, the blades are the (non-standard width, thermal) paper.

Meanwhile it doesn't give the user anything useful that they can't already read on their smartphone, does it? So what is it for? It's not a substitute for the existing multifunction printer. It's an inferior substitute to the existing RSS reader or equivalent. There's no value proposition I can see for the consumer, so they must be looking at some other source of income, which means there must be some value proposition for the information suppliers. But what is it?

Non-standard? You can buy the paper in any Staples. It's standard width.

They're selling physical products for more money than it costs them to make. That's the business model.

Where did you see a price (or lack thereof) on the site? I can't find anything.

I could see companies giving these away to employees for free, just so we can get closer to the Corbin Dallas universe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjLO_CrZRmM

Considering BERG is a design consultancy, I'd say this is more of an ad for their services first. It looks cute, and I'm sure there are people who would buy it for the novelty factor.

I'm not sure how you can compare that to CueCat? Which was a full fledged company.

QR codes are the new CueCat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com