The mouse on my desktop got a companion this week – the CueCat – and it’s a fascinating gadget indeed. It’s 5 inches long and shaped like a stylized feline, ready to pounce, with a mysterious red ...

It was the peak of the Internet bubble, and a former infomercial producer named J. Jovan Philyaw had the gadget that seemed to answer the prayers of old-line businesses looking for an easy way to get ...

WE ARE, AS THE FOLKS at Digital Convergence must have expected, exactly the right kind of people to appreciate the :CueCat: We are lazy, and we like presents. OK, so the much-heralded consumer ...

The dot-com bubble was inflated by companies built to please consumers, but lacking any real plan to turn a profit. The spectacular failure of a device called the CueCat, however, proves how badly ...

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Fittingly, the CueCat is widely regarded as one of the worst gadgets ever made Fittingly, the CueCat is widely ...

HELSINGBORG, Sweden — In the media world, few products have come to symbolize digital failure more than the CueCat, the feline-shaped, barcode-scanning device that flopped at the turn of the ...

Ahead Of Their Time is a recurring feature by Rollin Bishop focusing on technology from the past that came a little too early for it to be effective, for whatever reason. But even if that all was too ...

Pinterest is aiming for the big time. As Forbes's Jeff Bercovici explains in this fascinating cover story, the site that has turned online "pinning" into a global craze now intends to make billions by ...

The adage that cats have nine lives applies to electronic cats, too. The ill-fated CueCat bar-code reader has been reincarnated as a cell-phone application that recognizes corporate logos. In 2000, ...

In October, DigitalConvergence.com president Michael Garin wrote in Advertising Age that his new "CueCat" computer device for scanning printed bar codes to access the Web was "in the midst of one of ...

A growing technology sector had finally made the big shift toward catching the interest of the greater consumer market. More people could afford the necessary devices and services to join in, and the ...