In the wrong place at the wrong time?
It may have been the cellphone that put a possibly quite promising gadget out
of business. The CueCat was an idea that seemed
to be in the right place at the right time. Essentially it was a barcode reader
that could scan information from a page, from a cereal box, from ... yes, from
a street corner, and upload that information - usually a URL - to a computer.
If not endless, the possibilities were at the least numerous. We might scan a
barcode that appeared at the end of a (print version) newspaper article, and be
brought to a page that continually updated that story. A barcode on the box of
a particular drug might bring us to a page that offered in depth information on
that drug, updated to include the latest research. A URL scanned on a traffic
light pole might tell us the story of an accident that took place there that drastically
changed the lives of two people.
For some reason, however, the CueCat never caught on, though I admit that, although
unaware of this particular gadget, I was convinced
of its potential. And as the lone page on the now defunct web site of the product
tells us:
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.
which means that this was an inventions whose time has come, and gone. And yet,
using a camera-equipped cellphone to perform CueCat-like functions, though simple
to do, for some reason still doesn't seem to be catching on, and I really don't
know why that is.
Go to: ... I really don't have the time to listen,
or
Go to: Taking to the streets