I remember this from… oh… 2000? 2001?
I don’t even remember what it did, exactly…
This is what it looked like (from the photoshop phriday).
It was a barcode reader that could scan a barcode in a magazine article and take you to a related URL - it was significantly flawed in several ways, including having spyware built into it.
I was just thinking about the :CueCat a few days ago! (Yes, the colon was officially part of the brand name. Cute. :rolleyes: ) Most of the hardware hacking sites are still up, including this gem. Digital Convergence, the company behind the Cat, is long gone. Apparently, paying to make and give away hundreds of thousands of the things without giving anyone a reason to use them is not a viable business model. (Who knew?) You can still buy the Cats, but aside from nostalgia value I’m sure there are cheaper ways to get a barcode reader. Anyway, search Google for CueCat (with or without the colon) and you’ll find plenty. The antics of Digital Convergence certainly made the news at the time. (Not just Slashdot: The Guardian ran a story on the sordid affair.)
Mangetout: The most significant flaw was being a product nobody asked for and nobody wanted which didn’t give you any advantages over doing things by hand. Going through the hassle of installing both hardware and software simply to save a few keystrokes to get to a bland corporate website you don’t want to go to anyway? ‘Stupid’ is not the word.
I agree with most of your points, except the ‘nobody asked for’ bit - that isn’t necessarily the mark of a flawed concept, it can just as easily be an attribute of one of those brilliant innovations that seems obvious only once it’s been invented.
Of course, the CueCat isn’t that, but I can kind of see the reasoning behind it - during the dot com boom, I remember there being quite a murmur of concern that all the short, memorable domain names were fast disappearing and that it would be hard for people to promote their site meaningfully in non-online media - that turned out to be pretty much an empty fear, but it kinda made sense to have a device that you could just point at an ad and it would take you to the relevant web page - it just didn’t turn out to be what people wanted, and anyway, search engines started getting good, and more stuff was promoted online anyway, permitting navigable links.
You’re right in that we got along without every single one of the world-changing inventions without even knowing the world needed to be changed.
On the other hand, the :CueCat was trying to keep the world from changing by tying the Internet back to advertising in mainstream print media. The world-changers were college kids trying to impress their friends with cool websites.
And despite all of that, nobody visits the kind of websites the Cat would have taken you to anyway.
Most damning, of course, is the fact YouTube and Digg and Slashdot and Wikipedia built huge followings without any of the traditional advertising blitzes and often, in fact, without really meaning to. (I’m pretty sure Google didn’t buy any traditional ads until long after they got big, too.) They mostly fell into the kind of success companies with well-budgeted and perfectly-pitched ad campaigns usually never achieve. The people behind the Cat were trying damned hard to not see that vision of the future. The Cat is apparently one of the things that happens when ad men see visions of their own irrelevance.
Actually, I use one as a really cheap barcode reader for my home library. It’s cheaper than the alternatives, once you “hack” it, and works fine.