CueCat
Year First Appeared
2000
Creator
Jeffry Jovan Philyaw
The :CueCat (styled with a leading colon) is a cat-shaped handheld barcode scanner that was given away for free to millions of internet users starting in 2000 by Digital Convergence Corporation, a Dallas-based startup. The device plugged into a PC via a PS/2 or USB connection and allowed users to scan proprietary barcodes — called cues — printed in magazines, newspapers, catalogs, and product packaging, which would then automatically open a corresponding URL in the user's web browser. The idea was to create a physical-to-digital bridge: scan a barcode next to a magazine article or a Coca-Cola can and be taken directly to a relevant webpage without having to type a URL. The company also developed a system for encoding web addresses into audio tones broadcast during TV programs and commercials. The name was a portmanteau: CUE for the barcodes the device scanned, and CAT as a play on Keystroke Automation Technology — and, of course, a companion to your mouse.
Importance in Internet Culture
The CueCat is one of the most iconic failures of the dot-com era, and its importance lies almost entirely in what it got wrong and what it accidentally got right. The core idea — that physical objects should be scannable links to digital content — was genuinely prescient. QR codes, which became ubiquitous in the 2010s and exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, do essentially what the CueCat promised to do. But in 2000, the execution was fatally flawed: it required a dedicated hardware device tethered to a PC, mandatory software installation, user registration that collected personal data, and a proprietary barcode ecosystem that depended on publishers and advertisers adopting a single company's standard. The device also embedded a unique serial number that tracked individual scanning behavior, which provoked an immediate backlash from the hacker and privacy communities. Within weeks of mass distribution, hobbyists had reverse-engineered the firmware, stripped out the tracking serial number, and repurposed the CueCat as a generic barcode scanner. Digital Convergence responded with legal threats, which only deepened the backlash. A security breach exposed the personal data of approximately 140, 000 registered users. By mid-2001, the company had fired most of its 225-person workforce, and by September 2001, its largest investor — Belo Corporation — wrote off its $37.5 million stake entirely. The total amount investors lost was $185 million. The CueCat has since appeared on virtually every worst tech products ever list, including rankings by PC World, Time, and Gizmodo. It now resides in the Museum of Failure.
Interesting Fact
The CueCat's proprietary barcodes were tilted 22.5 degrees to the left — partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to sidestep the Lemelson parallel barcode patents that had been a litigation threat across the barcode industry. Forbes magazine mailed out the first 830, 000 CueCats to subscribers, and Wired sent over 500, 000 more — each publisher private-branded the hardware they distributed. Each device cost about $6.50 to manufacture. After the company collapsed, surplus CueCats were sold in bulk for as little as 30 cents each on sites like eBay, and hobbyists repurposed them as cheap barcode readers for home library cataloging software like Readerware. In 2005, a lot of two million surplus CueCats was listed on Boing Boing. The devices had a remarkably long afterlife as a hacker toy and a cheap utility scanner — arguably more useful in death than they ever were in their intended role.