As the smallest and lightest inventory system in existence, the portability and power of the Groqit makes it the ideal solution for managing your personal inventory.
A Groqit (grock'et) is pocket-dwelling device that reads and remembers barcode information. It can hold hundreds of thousands of barcodes and related information and do lookups in seconds.
You use it at home to compile and store barcode numbers from your music, video, book and other personal collections, then bring it with you when you go shopping. It can be used to read barcodes (UPC or EAN) of books, DVD's, games and so on, which it then compares to its stored lists of what you already have. It tells you whether or not the barcode you have just read is something you already own.
The Groqit is the major (and only physical) component in a patented Personal Inventory Management System.
A Groqit is a hand-held device that can read barcodes, as well as accepting information (letters and numbers) entered by hand, can store barcode and other data in user-accessible data-bases, and can display this data on a screen. Groqit uses its screen to communicate data to the user, who can look it up by using buttons to navigate the data bases, and can also communicate via a USB port with a computer.
No. It is designed to operate completely independently of a computer, PDA, cellphone or wireless access. That makes it portable and in your pocket when you need it.
It also makes the Groqit a great gift for people who don't have a computer or just don't like using one, but have large collections of books, CD's, movies, etc.
The USB port gives you access to the Groqit's flash drive, so you can transfer data from your spreadsheets, groqit.com or another collector site.
The Groqit doesn't need a full color LCD screen to do its job. We decided not to spend more of your money on a fancy screen, so all you will see there is text. This also minimizes the drain on Groqit's internal resources, so it allows for faster searches and improves the quality of our identification methods.
So no, you won't be seeing album cover art.
"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).
The Groqit has an internal USB 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!
If you store only barcodes on your Groqit, it can hold about 3.5 million of them.
You can have almost as many lists as you want on your Groqit - up to 510 categories.
The pre-programmed 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!
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.
Reading a barcode through a jewel case is difficult. The Groqit is a contact reader. Even though you can see a barcode through a jewel case, the barcode reader - because of the focal length of its lens - cannot read it. Early in the development of the first Groqit, we were faced with the decision: Build an affordable product that works with everything except jewel cases or triple our target price. The Groqit is optimized for reading barcodes on contact. This is a real problem for people who only collect CD's, because they will have to remove the sleeve from the case to read the barcode. The alternative is to enter each barcode by hand, either on the Groqit or in the Membership lookup area online. This is reasonable to do for a search, but some people will be unwilling to do this for each CD they own. Shiny book covers and plastic wrappers are not a problem.
Try the Main Support page, which has links to the Manual and a more extensive FAQ,or visit the Forum.