This was in my desk cabinet at work when I first started. I forgot all about it until Friday, when I finally cleaned the cabinet out and found this under piles of forgotten supply catalogs and old computer program manuals.
It's a :Cue Cat.
I first read about these in Wired magazine in the 1990's.
The idea was that you would connect :Cue Cat to your computer, and use it to scan special barcodes on magazine ads, cans of soup, shampoo bottles and the like. It would then direct your Internet browser to a website that would tell you more about the product.
I wanted one really badly.
Essentially, it was really just a way to get consumers to actively go view more advertising, and people saw right through it. It was a huge flop, even though Wired Magazine (where its inventor worked) spent over a million dollars mailing :Cue Cats out for free to Wired subscribers. As you can see from the WIRED logo on the side, this was apparently one of those sent out for free.
To make matters worse, the :Cue Cat kept track of what people were scanning. You can see below that each "cat" has its own ID, and it was a sneaky way to spy on people. You would think that Wired would have more regard for the intelligence of its tech-savvy readers, but no.
When people began "declawing" and "neutering" their Cats to disable the spy technology, :Cue Cat makers Digital Convergence, Inc. sued them again and again. They even claimed that although Wired had sent these unasked for objects at no cost, Wired readers didn't actually own the Cats, and therefore were forbidden from altering them. Idiotic!
Today, the technology supporting :Cue Cat is defunct. But the archived Digital Convergence, Inc. website implores you to hang onto them:
"The dream was to connect items in the physical world to the Internet, automatically. In January that dream hit a bump in the road and the servers were taken offline. They will scan again..."
There are several other things you can do with them.
You can turn it into a regular barcode scanner, and catalog your personal collection of books, CDs, DVDs and videos.
You can download a program to make the :Cue Cat search for negative news on the products you scan.
You can turn it into a flashlight.
Or you can keep it on your desk to remind you not be sneaky, greedy, and dumb. (Although it does look a bit like a risque massage device.)
Found 9/7/06, my office
[Click on photos for full view]
