CueCat

The CueCat was a barcode scanner manufactured by vendors of RadioShack Corporation in the early 2000's. The product and associated intellectual property would instantly and directly link product UPC, EAN, ISBN as well as the unique :CRQ Cue codes to their appropriate web sites. Usually these were to links buried deeply within a site which could be further targeted demographically or geographically. The unique Cue codes were placed within traditional media content and some advertisements in publications like Wired Magazine, Forbes and its specialty magazines, Parade Magazine and several daily newspapers. Product Cues were also placed in many catalogs to facilitate instant e-commerce shopping and the automation of wish lists. As you can imagine, this technology could eliminate search with "laser beam" accuracy.

The CueCat (trademarked :CueCat) is a cat-shaped handheld bar code reader developed in the late 1990s by the now-defunct Digital Convergence Corporation, which connected to computers using the PS/2 keyboard port and later USB. The CueCat enabled a user to open a link to an Internet URL by scanning a barcode — called a "cue" by Digital Convergence — appearing in an article or catalog or on some other printed matter. In this way a user could be directed to a web page containing related information without having to enter a URL. The system that supported this is no longer in operation.

The "tethered" Cue:Cat was just the beginning of the story. Portable scanners like the one manufactured by Cross as a pen, and a keychain scanner were ultimately cost-reduced and readied for deployment. This "store and forward" or "bookmark life" concept was just beginning as the dot-com crash and advertising money around it started to crumble. Today, everyone with a mobile camera phone has the potential to read barcodes, thus negating the need for a separate scanning device that DigitalConvergnce had produced to achieve the ultimate goal of linking the physical world to virtual space.

In January of 2002, the database servers which provided this machine-readable code to Internet URL linking are no longer in operation. The desktop client, which requires a registration code, is no longer supported, nor can these codes be generated for the Windows PC or Apple OS-X software.

The security watchdog website Securitywatch.com notified Digital Convergence of a security vulnerability on the Digital Convergence website that exposed private information about CueCat users. Digital Convergence immediately shut down that part of their website, and their investigation concluded that approximately 140,000 CueCat users who had registered their CueCat were exposed to a breach that revealed their name, email address, age range, gender and zip code. Digital Convergence responded to this security breach by sending an email to those affected by the incident claiming that it was correcting this problem and would be offering them a $10 gift certificate to Radio Shack.

Digital Convergence and the CueCat system are generally assumed to be defunct, the Digital Convergence website remained as a ghost site through 2004. Previously, the website contained the following statement: 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. The patents and technology created by Digital Convergence will again be available for business and consumer use.

CueCat