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AnchorDesk

John Morris and Josh Taylor
Cross' new scanner pen -- it's one you won't prize

John Morris and Josh Taylor
Contributing Editors, AnchorDesk
Tuesday, January 23, 2001
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Have trouble remembering the name of a company or its URL? Want an easy way to get more information on any product fast?

That's the promise behind the CrossConvergence Pen, a translucent-blue pen with a built-in scanner from A.T. Cross, the company that makes all those gold-plated pens. The $90 pen scans and stores any barcode and transfers that information to your PC so you can jump directly to the associated Web site.

The CrossConvergence Pen is based on Digital Convergence's scanner and software technology, which lets you scan "cues" that later take you directly to Web sites. A cue can be not only a barcode, but also codes embedded in advertising and editorial in magazines such as Forbes and Wired.

TO JUMPSTART THE TECHNOLOGY, Digital Convergence has been giving away free CueCat handheld scanners to magazine subscribers and through Radio Shack outlets, but the technology has been slow to catch on, in part because the CueCat device must be connected to a PC.

Cross hopes the pen will prove to be more popular because it is completely mobile. About the size of a typical fountain pen, it has a scanning tip on the opposite end. Click a button to activate the scanner, swipe it quickly across a barcode or other cue, and a green light flashes to let you know the data has been saved. (Cross says the pen will store up to 300 cues.) When you are back at your desk, you activate the scanner and hold the tip against a plastic disc called the OptoLink Coupler, and the data is transferred to your PC.

The excellent, Flash-based tutorial shows you exactly how to install the hardware and software, makes sure that the OptoLink is communicating with your PC via serial port and tests the device using an included card with sample barcodes. The resulting URLs pop up in an applet called CRQ, where you can double-click on them to open the corresponding sites.

So far so good, but we found a few flaws with the Cross pen. First, only about one of every two of the magazines and products we attempted to scan was successful. Second, transferring the data to your PC takes a little practice -- you have to hold the pen a fraction of an inch away from the OptoLink to get it to work right, and it's hard to tell when the transfer is complete. Finally, like most software, CRQ isn't content to show you the way to URLs you actually scanned. Instead, it clutters the applet's program window and even your desktop itself with suggested channels and Web sites -- just in case you didn't already have your own.

BUT THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM with the CrossConvergence Pen, and the Digital Convergence technology as a whole, is that it's a technological solution in search of a problem.

Most users have little trouble figuring out the homepage of a given company (hint: www.companyname.com works great in most cases) and can access it more quickly the old-fashioned way. To make its cues more attractive, Digital Convergence and its partner publishers need to give their users links to advertising and editorial content that they can't get by simply typing in a company's URL. Until then, stick with your keyboard.

Do you think personal barcode scanners will play a part in our shopping future? How could the technology be implemented to make it more useful? TalkBack to us.

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