Detailed Q & A
What does "Groqit" mean?
"Groqit is a made-up word, Like Kleenex or 7-Up, that we use as a trademark
for a patented Personal Inventory management System, so you don't
have to say "Personal Inventory Management System" a lot in conversation. Like
other brand names, it is a Trademark that belongs to the company
(Groqit LLC) and not a generic name for a Personal Inventory
Management System. (besides, grok.com was taken. See author Robert
Heinlein).
How much memory does the Groqit have?
The Groqit has an internal Flash drive memory of 128 MB. This
is more than sufficient to store data about all the items you are likely
to be able to squeeze into even a very large house, and then some!
How many barcodes can the Groqit hold?
If you store only barcodes on your Groqit, it can hold about 3.5 million
of them.
How many items can the Groqit store data on, if I use the translation data
bases?
About a quarter of a million items, because it takes about 400
bytes per item to store the complete records including its barcode,
title, author, and other important information.
How many items per category can there be?
(For instance,
how many "Books" can I store in the "Books" list?)
This is, in practical terms, nearly unlimited.
You can have about as many items as you could possibly store in your
house. The
Groqit can hold information on more books than the average municipal library. We
have not limited the ability of any one category to use Groqit's
memory capacity.
Adds and searches will start getting slow when you have more than 10,000
items in one Category. If you have a very large collection,
we recommend creating more than one Category for them.
What Categories are on the Groqit?
Your Groqit comes preset with 8 top-level Categories and 2 Menu items
we call Functions; you can add more Categories using the CONFIGURE Function.
The full list of pre-set Categories is: BOOKS, EXAMPLE1, EXAMPLE 2, GAMES,
HOUSEH~1, MUSIC, VIDEO and WISHLIST. (HOUSEH~1 is expanded to HOUSEHOLD
on the website or your computer.
How many categories can I put in the Groqit?
You can have almost as many lists as you want on your Groqit - up to
510 categories.
The categories, like "Books," "Videos" "Games" "Music" and "Wishlist" are
just suggestions and starting points. You can sub-divide these into
more specialized lists if that works better for you. For instance,
you could have separate lists of your science fiction books, your history
books, your cookbooks, and your art books. You might even have
separate wish lists for each of these categories, so you would know which
cook books you want.
Your "wish lists" might be divided in other ways: which games you
want, which movies you want, and so forth. You might keep list of
your best friends' games, in case you run across one they don't have that
they might want. That's in addition to the want lists your friends
have shared with you!
Each list is on the main menu, so there are no actual sub-categories, no
folders-within-folders, just a lot of lists.
How much data can I store about each individual item?
Your Groqit comes equipped to scan and store barcodes, and
to look up barcodes, and to compare newly scanned barcodes to ones already
in its data storage.
If you use Groqit's web site, you can get translation data about these
bar codes into "human-readable" data, like title and author. We decided
to offer three or four "data fields" about each item - that should be
sufficient for most purposes, to avoid purchasing duplicate copies of
a book or movie, for instance.
Books can be looked up by Title, Author, Barcode, or ISBN. Movies
can be looked up by Title, Genre, Release Date, or barcode.
Can I store album cover art and music files on my Groqit?
No. You can't. Your Groqit should not be used to store
documents of any kind, just the data it receives from its own buttons
and barcode reader, and from the Groqit web site, if you connect it to
your computer.
The Groqit can not play MP3 files or display images. It can only
display text for you to see from its specialized Groqit-structured files.
Groqit's files are very efficient, so it can store a lot of data about
the collections you have, but only the data is is intended to store.
Image files and song files are so big by comparison that it could take
just a few of them - if you managed to store them on yor Groqit - to take
up all the room and leave it useless for its primary tasks.
What translation data do you offer for each Category?
Books: Author | Title | ISBN | UPC | Publisher
Pop Music: Album title | Artist name | UPC | Composer
Classical Music: Album title | Performer names | Work titles | Composers
| UPC
Movies: Titles | Genre | Release date | UPC
Games: Game title | Platform | Accessory title | UPC
Where does the barcode translation data come from?
Groqit.com leases data from commercial sources, collects data from the
public domain and Groqit owners.
Music, DVDs, games and such are assembled from a range of internet sources. We store the data in our local databses to speed searches.
The seed for our book database was www.isbndb.com. This free site
provides a broad range of reference material and was one of the first data
providers for Google Co-op network. We have augmented this data
via the Z39.50 network of servers, including the Library of Congress and
over 180 other sources.
One of the biggest problems with books is they get published and re-published
in different formats, by different companies and even different
countries. The
Christian Bible has over 5000 listed versions. We use the OCLC
Online Computer Library Center, Inc. WorldCat
Web service: xISBN to maximize the chance of finding your books.
Finally, our users: Any time you
add an item manually, the basic data on that item becomes available
to all other Groqit owners. We do not reveal the sources of that
data.
How does our data compare with what's
available online for free?
There are caches of information available online, some of them quite
large, that you can access in various ways. Most of them are not
designed to help you translate from barcode files to human-readable
information, and one of the largest and most popular was simply never
designed to include barcodes.
One of the popular ways of retrieving additional information about items
you own is to take the data you do have (a barcode number, or
perhaps Title and Author) and see what matches up on Amazon.com. Many
software companies do one-at-a-time lookups that rely heavily
on Amazon.com's database, which is not actually geared to that
purpose.
We have cross-checked our data to make sure it is as reliable as possible.
How about translations that are faster and more
accurate, and all with one click?
Our data is already residing on our server, organized, and ready to translate
what you upload from your Groqit.
You could upload pieces of information for searches of Amazon and other
online data bases, wait, and hope you eventually get accurate data.
Our data is captive " in house " and can return results for a whole batch of
data much faster those wandering searches.
Good data for good version control
The data we make available is geared toward version control. We look
for different releases of the same book or recording, collecting data
on these variants so we can offer it as a compliment to the translation
itself.
Augmented by the version information, your Groqit can tell you about
items similar or identical to the ones you've got in your inventory
files. That means if you're shopping and scan a DVD to see if
you already have it, you might find out that you don't have
that barcode ,
but you do have the same movie, on videotape or in the widescreen
version.
How can I name lists so I know what they are?
(And why are there only 8
characters allowed per list name?)
Groqit's ability to store a huge amount of information depends on an
underlying file structure (FAT16) that allows the data storage to be divided
into very small chunks. The file names are short as a consequence
of this.
We suggest naming conventions that you can easily decipher, such as starting
a wish list with w, so you might have a "WBOOKS" list and a "WJOHN" list
for, respectively your list of books you want and John's wish list. If
you have a lot of lists, you can use "B" for books lists, "M" for music
lists, "V" for video lists, "G" for games. You might then see a list
called "WBSCIFI" and know it is your Wish-list of Books of Science-Fiction,
and "WJBSCIFI" and know it means the Wish list of John for Books of Science
Fiction.
If you create list names on the Groqit web site, be warned that the longer
list names will be appear to be truncated when they are downloaded
to your Groqit. If you look on your Groqit, you will see a Category of
HOUSEH~1. It is actually HOUSEHOLD and will display properly on your computer
or your account.
Adding Categories using the Groqit itself cannot use more than 8 characters
and we have built that limit into Configure new Category.
Be aware that once you have created a Category on
the Groqit, you can not delete it unless you go online and use the tools
at Groqit.com. (This
is a safety feature to prevent accidental deletion of whole
Categories!)
How do I look up items I have stored on my Groqit?
You use the CHECK function. If you have barcode information only, it's simply a choice of two
ways. If you're in a store, wondering whether you have something
already, you scan the item and it will tell you whether it has that
exact same barcode in inventory or not.
If you want to look for a particular barcode manually, you can use
the buttons to scroll up and down through list of numbers
If you have stored translations, you can look up information by scrolling
to a list you want to search, then pressing "Enter" and deciding whether
to search by Title, Author, or Barcode (for instance). Then
you use the soft keypad to enter a search string.
Why isn't there a "space/blank" character available. . .?
This is due to a limitation in the soft keypad we use.
Similarly, the Groqit only uses A-Z & 0-9, without lowercase or punctuation.
How long will the battery last?
An alkaline battery should last for approximately 500 scans. The
Groqit uses one AAA battery and the type doesn't matter. You
can even use a rechargeable AAA. Removal or running down of the
battery will not cause your Groqit to lose data.
Can I use rechargeable batteries?
Your Groqit will work using a rechargeable AAA battery.
What if I forget and leave the Groqit on?
Your Groqit shuts itself off after 2 minutes of inactivity. When
it is plugged into a computer, the internal battery is off.
What if I get a Groqit and decide I don't
like it?
We want you to be happy with your Groqit. We think it's pretty
marvelous, especially considering the alternatives out there. We
know it has limitations, and we have spelled them out in the Limitations
section of the general FAQ. Still, we expect a few people to be disappointed
and want to return their Groqit. We give you 30 days to decide whether
you'll keep it, and deduct a modest re-stocking fee if you do decide to
send it back. Here is
our Guarantee.
What is the Warranty?
(link to Warranty page)
Can I reformat my Groqit?
Please do not reformat your Groqit.
Formatting at worst, turns your Groqit into an expensive flash drive.
If you reformat your Groqit, you won't have a Groqit any more. It
will look like one, but it won't be set up to do Groqit's functions
any more . Formatting your Groqit may be reversible, but it
is not covered under Warranty. The Groqit must be mailed, with
payment, to our headquarters in Oregon and "resurrected." For
details, click here.
What is not guaranteed?
We do not guarantee that the information we supply in the translations
from barcode to "human readable" data will be 100% accurate. There
will always be errors.
We do not guarantee that the Groqit will be able to read all barcodes. It
is programmed to read UPC and EAN codes, only. Some of those
codes will be unreadable due to the materials used for printing. A
UPC printed directly on glass is difficult to read.
Some items are not barcoded correctly, such that even typing or keying
the barcode information in by hand will not work, because only 10 or
11 of the digits will be printed in human-readable form. (More about
this here.)
We can not guarantee that using the Groqit will actually PREVENT
duplicate purchases. Using the Groqit alone will tell
you if you have the same barcode in inventory, but it can not
guarantee that you will not get a different edition of a book
you already own (See the
"All About Books and Barcodes" page for details). Movies
come out in many versions, and each has its own barcode. Music
CDs are sometimes re-issued, so that identical content
aquires a new barcode. Some times a price
change alone triggers a new barcode for a product.
The success rate on Groqit helping you avoid duplicate purchases
should go way up if you choose to take advantage of the Membership
Services, because looking up your collections by Title, Author
and so on lets you see what you actually have much more intelligibly. Still,
even then errors can creep in (see
the problems section for
the kinds of things can go wrong), so we can't promise perfection.
The Groqit uses a contact barcode reader, and this means
it can not read the barcodes inside CD jewel cases.
What is Groqit's Privacy
Policy?
We do not share your personal information with anyone, without your explicit
authorization.
We protect your personal data as we would want our own to be protected. We
guard against exploitation of the information you provide to
us, by providing a secure site and as many safeguards as we can.
We hate spam as much as you do. We will not sell, rent, lease
or trade your name and other sensitive information to anyone else, because
we want you to be happy with us, and one of the minimum requirements
for a good relationship is trust.
We do collect information about books and movies to expand and correct
our data bases.
We do make use of cookies.
For more details see the long version here.
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