Loved the boxee box. Thanks for that! Do you happen to have the radio specs for the remote? I miss it so much, I want to use it for my home cinema setup.
No, DLink made it for us, and you’re smart to want to use that remote to this day! Full QWERTY keys on the back and D pad on the front was our IP and another first for the industry. The box was running an Intel Atom CPU. Some devs and people have continued to keep that hardware going too.
Did you actually beat the TiVo Slide remote to market? I'm sure you know it, but for those who don't, look it up - backlit remote with the usual TiVo buttons on top, but the whole top slid (much like the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1) to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. Given how slow the non-graphics related hardware in TiVo's STB's was, this was much faster than trying to peck out one letter at a time on their onscreen keyboard.
I was very unhappy when my wife dropped and broke ours, but doubly so because they had been discontinued by then.
The TiVo slide remote was cool. Check WeakKnees or AVS forum for that release date. They will have anit announced or archived. Ours was topside/bottom side with no moving parts. It was flip-flop modality. The concept was “don’t look” on the Directional side and type or search on the keyboard side.
Is there anything you feel people tend to miss or get wrong when telling the story of the CueCat? Or has the record already been set pretty much straight? It still comes up occasionally... heck, I found one in a cupboard at work last week! But I always wonder what gets missed about these things in hindsight.
The Web 1.0 world was different then. Wired and Forbes (our distribution partners) licensed our engine and mailed out Cats as a way to take their “lost” content like audio interviews and photos, aka too many to print, to live online forever. Wired magazine didn’t even control their digital property at the time. We were the first team to tie all of this digital and analog together when the Internet was dialup and WiFi didn’t exist.
We had a second technology that decoded audio tones on TV that we launched with NBC to let your PC “follow along” with what was being shown. That pre-dated Shazam by a decade.
Too many things are missed in the story, but the big thing is all of the money raised was from strategic partners like Coca-Cola ($10M) Y&R ($5M if Ford didn’t like the demo, $10M if they did) and on and on to $205M.
My favorite Easter egg was we were the first Internet platform to look at the location of your scan via IP address to give more relevant data FOR you. E.G. for Coke if you scanned a can in Texas you’d get Six Flags offers vs Atlanta where you would get an offer for SeaWorld. This was a decade before Waze or even Google thought about location, through their purchase of ad networks or other companies.
How do you feel when you scan a QR code today? Vindicated in a way that the idea was a useful one, even if the company didn’t quite pan out as you hoped, or more regretful?
QR’s are an add-on for marketing or messaging vs our system which was already printed on the box! But it’s cool to see people scanning and the Cat now sits in the Computer History Museum… So it is cool to see it in the same section as my first computer - the Osborne 01. With Digital Convergence, the Cat’s parent company, we raised $205M from strategic investors and gave 300 dreamers and do’ers jobs and an amazing outlook for their future lives even when it went bust in 2001 like so many startups with “loose” revenue models did. Never have I felt regret from this, plus a lot of OG tech founders give us street cred for tying barcodes to the Internet before people thought of it. It did teach me what types of people that you DON’T want to work with.
The biggest project that my friends and I did after this was moving a Boeing 747 over 500 miles through two states from the Mojave boneyard to Burning Man. That was a true loving team who could do anything. Our business model was smiles per hour. YouTube has great videos on that project.
I remember begging my parents to take me to a Radio Shack to get one of these when I was in second grade. The idea of being able to scan various items around the house was such a wild concept to me for some reason. Once we finally tracked one down, I scanned every book on my shelf into a trial copy of Winnebago Spectrum that I had obtained. It was the software suite that my elementary school's library ran off of, and I installed it on a Windows 2000 PC that my dad had passed down to me after upgrading the office computer. God knows how many hours I spent playing library with my younger sister and aimlessly scanning ISBNs - such simple times! Surprisingly I still have that same PS/2 CueCat in my drawer, though it hasn't been plugged in for at least fifteen years.
I know many of us in this community tend to look back at the earlier days of the internet very fondly and feel the nostalgia hit strongly, and I think it's because of the innovations (or maybe gimmicks?) like these that were novel and groundbreaking in many ways. Off the top of my head right now, I can't recall anything in recent times as quirky as the CueCat that would have evoked a similar excitement and genuine intrigue to a child today like I was fortunate to have experienced twenty years ago. But then again, I'm sure back then there weren't many seven year olds hunting down library database software and messing around with it for fun - so maybe my perspective is an outlier...
A maybe forgotten fact about the whole CueCat saga was that the hardware was given away for free, mainly at Radio Shack in the USA, with the expectation that the company would be able to recoup the costs by...um...I guess collecting user data and charging publishers to generate bar codes.
Of course, people quickly reverse engineered the data format, as it was just a PS/2 format keyboard device, which caused the company to threaten to sue[0] anyone who distributed the software. Much fun was had for a few months skirting this until nearly everyone, other than a few people like book collectors, realized that having a UPC scanner wasn't that useful and the CueCats got stuffed into the junk drawers.
Now everyone has a barcode scanner on their phone and it is no big deal, but at the time, it was a fun toy.
Ironically now that smartphones are a thing this kind of thing I would have thought would be more prevelant, but instead of barcodes I am imagining QR Codes
I used it for quite a while to scan physical invoices before e-invoices became more common. Finland has a standard for encoding the required fields (account number, amount, reference code & due date) as a barcode and companies almost always included it.
I've been writing a collection inventorying system for myself, in anticipation of the coming streampocalpyse (which could take several forms), and I've been frustrated and dismayed by the state of UPC Data sources, especially free ones.
OpenLibrary is the one good source I've found. Any others?
I had one of these and thought it was pretty cool to scan the ISBN barcodes on the back of my books and make a catalog of my books. That didn’t take very long and then I wondered what I would use it for and was very confused as a 13 year old what in the world the business model could be to keep them afloat, because it made no sense to me to give them away or charge so little for the device. I was similarly confused by the various toolbars you could install that would pay you to browse the web (which I hooked up to some mouse jiggling script to keep it working while I slept). I did get at least one check for $15 from that which seemed magical at the time.
It was the razor blade model. It cost us under $10 per unit to make and we charged licenses for content creators to make their physical world items tie into digital content to interact with the brand new web world of 2000. One may also call this a chicken or the egg problem. Y2K was amazing.
One of the big purchasers of leftover CueCat inventory was Librarything. They still sell them (for $5 at the moment) on their store, and have built features to use them for cataloging and searching your books.
Given that they were originally given away for free, this is essentially an ∞% return on investment, thus making CueCat the most successful startup in history…
CuëCats were amazing. We had so much fun playing with them and scanning barcodes even though we didn’t do much useful with it.
I remember a home library program for the Mac that was probably inspired by the cuecat. It would add books to your library after doing an internet lookup for he information.
You're probably thinking of Delicious Library (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2004/11/delicious-library/) - that was such a cool piece of Mac software. I think it worked with the CueCat, but you could also use your Mac's iSight camera as a barcode reader. Even had the satisfying "beep" when you scanned a barcode. Scanning a QR code with a smartphone camera is super commonplace now, but back in 2004 it felt so futuristic.
Amongst all the random detritus from 70 years of local industry, there’s basically always still a seller with a bunch of CueCats at every Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market (https://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/).
I had a PS/2 CueCat which IIRC required some hardware modification to use unlocked, at least early on. I stuck in it a drawer and never bothered with it again. The default functionality was useless.
The thing I miss however is things like that old Amazon web service that. Icould look up book information for free. For a few years there were some really interesting free XML-RPC and SOAP web services that were relatively easy to plug into and access interesting services. I really miss those services and composability for mash-ups.
I don’t think it required a hack, I don’t remember that. However they did have a serial number built-in that the software would send to the retailer when you scanned things for tracking purposes.
I think the hack was to disable that, it might’ve been as simple as cutting a single trace.
The CueCat just outputted keyboard data via the PS/2 interface, which was the most common keyboard connection at the time, and with the correct 3rd party software it could be used to decode any UPC barcode without having to install the official spyware software.
That is likely what I am thinking of, it's been a long time and I was not super interested in it at the time. I got mine free from Radio Shack with that year's catalog (which was filled with CueCat barcodes).
These were great. Our college IDs had a barcode on them for cafeteria charge swipes.! I set up a cuecat outside my dorm door where one could swipe their ID for access, the IDs swipes would be compared against an access list and a match triggered a mechanical door opener from a locked door. Lulz all round.
This was before everyone was walking around with a cellphone camera where these barcodes were marginally more secure in 2000 but the campus switched from barcodes a few years later.
What a sweet idea. I could see a lot of my (essentially) e-waste becoming ornaments, though not many devices are as conventionally "beautiful" as the CueCat.
