CueCat
Encyclopedia
Barcode reader
A barcode reader is an electronic device for reading printed barcodes. Like a flatbed scanner, it consists of a light source, a lens and a light sensor translating optical impulses into electrical ones...
that was developed in early 1990s and released in 1999 by the now defunct Digital Convergence Corporation, which connected to computers using the PS/2 keyboard port
PS/2 connector
The PS/2 connector is a 6-pin Mini-DIN connector used for connecting some keyboards and mice to a PC compatible computer system. Its name comes from the IBM Personal System/2 series of personal computers, with which it was introduced in 1987...
and USB. The CueCat enabled a user to open a link to an Internet URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
by scanning a barcode
Barcode
A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...
— 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
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
. The company asserted that the ability of the device to direct users to a specific URL, rather than a domain name, was valuable. In addition, TV broadcasters could use an audio tone in programs and/or commercials that, when attached to a computer (via an audio cable), acted as a web address shortcut. The system is no longer in operation, although more than 117 scan commerce and scan to connect patents developed by the company during its inception have been licensed to 103 consumer and commercial equipment manufacturers, services and enterprises.
The CueCat communicated to desktop "CRQ" software running on Windows 32-bit and Mac OS 9 operating systems. Users of this software were required to register with their ZIP code
ZIP Code
ZIP codes are a system of postal codes used by the United States Postal Service since 1963. The term ZIP, an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan, is properly written in capital letters and was chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly, when senders use the...
, gender, and email address. This registration process enabled the device to deliver relevant content to a single or multiple users in a household. The systems using this registration process are no longer available on the Internet, and codes cannot be generated for the device. However, third-party software can decode the lightweight encryption in the device.
Introduction
The CueCat was invented by J. Jovan Philyaw, who changed his name to J. Hutton Pulitzer. Belo Corporation, then parent company of the Dallas Morning News and owner of many TV stations, invested US$United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
37.5 million in Digital Convergence
Digital convergence
Digital convergence refers to the convergence of four industries into one conglomerate, ITTCE .This provides new, innovative solutions to consumers and business users...
, Radio Shack
Radio shack
Radio shack is a slang term for a room or structure for housing radio equipment.-History:In the early days of radio, equipment was experimental and home-built. The first radio transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves and were often housed in a garage or shed. When radio was first...
$30 million, Young & Rubicam
Young & Rubicam
Y&R is a marketing and communications company specializing in advertising, digital and social media, sales promotion, direct marketing and brand identity consulting.-History:...
$28 million and Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...
$10 million. The total amount invested was $185 million.
In late 2000, advertisements, special web editions and editorial content containing CueCat barcodes appeared for more than a year in many U.S. periodicals, including Parade magazine
Parade (magazine)
Parade is an American nationwide Sunday newspaper magazine, distributed in more than 500 newspapers in the United States. It was founded in 1941 and is owned by Advance Publications. The most widely read magazine in the U.S., Parade has a circulation of 32.2 million and a readership of nearly 70...
, Forbes magazine and Wired magazine. Commercial publications such as AdWeek, BrandWeek and MediaWeek also employed the technology. The CueCat bar codes also appeared in select Verizon Yellow Pages, providing advertisers a link to additional information. For a time, RadioShack published their product catalogs containing these barcodes and distributed CueCat devices through their retail chain to customers at no charge. CueCats were also bulk mail
Direct marketing
Direct marketing is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses and nonprofits to communicate straight to the customer, with advertising techniques such as mobile messaging, email, interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional...
ed (unsolicited) to certain mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
s, such as subscribers of technology magazines Forbes and Wired. For roughly a year starting in October 2000, The Dallas Morning News and other Belo-owned newspapers added the barcodes next to major articles and regular features like stocks and weather.
In the Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg
Walter Mossberg
Walter S. Mossberg is an American journalist who is the principal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal.-Early life:...
criticized CueCat: "In order to scan in codes from magazines and newspapers, you have to be reading them in front of your PC. That's unnatural and ridiculous." Mossberg wrote that the device "fails miserably. Using it is just unnatural." He concluded that the CueCat "isn't worth installing and using, even though it's available free of charge". Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky
Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog...
, a computer technology reviewer, also criticized the device as "not solving a problem" and characterized the venture as a "feeble business idea".
The data format was proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
, being scrambled so as not to be usable as plain text
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....
. However, the barcode itself is closely related to Code 128
Code 128
Code 128 is a very high-density barcode symbology. It is used for alphanumeric or numeric-only barcodes. It can encode all 128 characters of ASCII and, by use of an extension character , the Latin-1 characters defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1...
, and the scanner was also capable of reading EAN
European Article Number
An EAN-13 barcode is a 13 digit barcoding standard which is a superset of the original 12-digit Universal Product Code system developed in the United States...
/UPC
Universal Product Code
The Universal Product Code is a barcode symbology , that is widely used in North America, and in countries including the UK, Australia, and New Zealand for tracking trade items in stores. Its most common form, the UPC-A, consists of 12 numerical digits, which are uniquely assigned to each trade item...
and other symbologies. Because of the weak obfuscation of the data, meant only to protect the company under DMCA guidelines (like the DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
protection Content Scramble System
Content Scramble System
Content Scramble System is a Digital Rights Management and encryption system employed on almost all commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm...
), the software for decoding the CueCat's output quickly appeared on the Internet, followed by a plethora of unofficial applications.
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
s. The television technology was launched in 1996 on the television series Net Talk Live! and made its network debut on NBC during its "Must See TV" programming and used a computer sound card to decode a tone and launch a web site.
Failure
The CueCat has been widely described as a commercial failure. It was listed one of "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" by PC WorldPC World (magazine)
PC World is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal-technology products and services...
magazine. The CueCat's critics said the device was ultimately of little use: wrote Jeff Salkowski of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
, "You have to wonder about a business plan based on the notion that people want to interact with a soda can," while Debbie Barham
Debbie Barham
Deborah Ann "Debbie" Barham was an English comedy writer who died at the age of 26 of heart failure caused by a long struggle with anorexia....
of the Evening Standard
Evening Standard
The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...
quipped that the CueCat "fails to solve a problem which never existed." In December 2009, the popular gadget blog Gizmodo
Gizmodo
Gizmodo is a technology weblog about consumer electronics. It is part of the Gawker Media network run by Nick Denton and is known for its up-to-date coverage of the technology industry, along with topics as broad as design; architecture; space and science....
voted the CueCat the #1 worst invention of the "2000s" decade.
The CueCat device was controversial, initially because of privacy concerns of its collecting of aggregate user data. Each CueCat has a unique serial number
Serial number
A serial number is a unique number assigned for identification which varies from its successor or predecessor by a fixed discrete integer value...
, and users suspected that Digital Convergence could compile a database of all barcodes scanned by a given user and connect it to the user's name and address. For this reason, and because the demographic market targeted by Digital Convergence was unusually tech-savvy, numerous web sites arose detailing instructions for "declawing" the CueCat — blocking or encrypting the data it sent to Digital Convergence. The site digitaldemographics.com was also registered through Digital Convergence, which also gave credence to privacy concerns about the use of data. The database utilized the unique serial number within each device to determine the viability of deployment through retail, magazine and other distribution partners. Any data collected was aggregated anonymously much like other serialized and identifiable devices such as TiVo
TiVo
TiVo is a digital video recorder developed and marketed by TiVo, Inc. and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose features include "Season Pass" schedules which record every new episode of a series, and "WishList"...
have been employing since 1999.
The company's response to these hacks was to assert that users did not own the devices and had no right to modify or reverse engineer
Reverse engineering
Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation...
them. Threats of legal action against the hackers swiftly brought on more controversy and criticism. The company's licensing agreement was changed several times, adding explicit restrictions, apparently in response to hacker activity. Hackers argued that the changes did not apply retroactively to devices that had been purchased under older versions of the license, and that the thousands of users who received unsolicited CueCats in the mail had neither agreed to nor were legally bound by the license. No lawsuit was ever brought against "hackers," as this tactic was not employed to go after specific users or the hacker community specifically, but to show "reasonable assertion" that would prevent a corporation from developing integrated software within an operating system or browser which could take over the device and circumvent the CRQ watchdog software and therefore revenue model that Digital Convergence employed.
Investors in CueCat lost their $185 million. Technology journalist Scott Rosenberg
Scott Rosenberg (journalist)
- External links :**...
called the CueCat a "Rube Goldberg contraption", a "massive flop" and a "fiasco".
Security breach
In September 2000, 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. This was not a breach of the main user database itself, but a flat text file used only for reporting purposes that was generated by ColdFusionColdFusion
In computing, ColdFusion is the name of a commercial rapid application development platform invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire in 1995. ColdFusion was originally designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database, by version 2 it had...
code that was saved on a publicly available portion of the Digital Convergence web server.
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
Radio shack
Radio shack is a slang term for a room or structure for housing radio equipment.-History:In the early days of radio, equipment was experimental and home-built. The first radio transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves and were often housed in a garage or shed. When radio was first...
, an investor in Digital Convergence.
Awards
In 2001, ComputerworldComputerworld
Computerworld is an IT magazine that provides information for senior IT leaders. It is published in many countries around the world under the same or similar names. Its publisher is International Data Group. Computerworld serves the needs of IT management via print and online...
named CueCat as a Laureate in the Media Arts & Entertainment category.
The Software and Information Industry Association
Software and Information Industry Association
The Software & Information Industry Association is a United States based software trade association. The organization lobbies United States policy makers as well as conducting surveys and research and many conferences and webcasts....
gave Digital Convergence Corporation a 2001 Codie award for Best Reference Tool for the CRQ Technology software that controlled the CueCat device.
Availability
In June 2005, a liquidatorLiquidator (law)
In law, a liquidator is the officer appointed when a company goes into winding-up or liquidation who has responsibility for collecting in all of the assets of the company and settling all claims against the company before putting the company into dissolution....
offered two million CueCats for sale at $0.30 each (in quantities of 500,000 or more).
The bar code scanner itself is still being sold on secondary marketplace sites like Amazon and eBay. The booklover social networking site LibraryThing
LibraryThing
LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by individuals, authors, libraries and publishers....
sells USB CueCats to aid with scanning ISBN barcodes for entering books into the site.
Website
Although 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 "bump in the road" was the bankruptcy of the company.
Legacy
Technologies popularized in the years after CueCat provide some of the same features for consumer bar code scanning and web-connected interaction. The QR codeQR code
A QR code is a type of matrix barcode first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white...
and the Microsoft Tag, have been discussed as "similar projects" to CueCat.
External links
- CueCat Web site
- "Declawing" the CueCat
- Scan to Connect Patent Portfolio
- Dissecting the CueCat
- :CRQ and :CueCat, from Digital:Convergence's official (archived) web site.
- CueCat post mortem
- Scancommerce
- Collectorz.com page on current use of CueCat
- MIT Media Lab project using the CueCat to control music via a turntable-like device