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 ...

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 ...

Have you ever wanted to scan barcodes in your favorite magazines so that you can get access to an advertiser's special website? This was the premise of the CueCat, a feline-shaped handheld barcode ...

Digital Convergence Corporation is hardly a household name, and there’s a good reason for that. However, it raised about $185 million in investments around the year 2000 from companies such as ...

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 ...

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 ...

Creative juices oozed from every orifice during the dot com interweb boom. The “new economy” hype gave rise to some glorious products and unprecedented failures. Investors, not wanting to miss out on ...

HERE’S MY BIGGEST GRIPE about technology: Unnecessary devices that greedy corporations try and pass off on the public as cutting edge convenience. So it is with a silly little thing called Cue Cat, a ...

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 ...

The great thing about software is that it's pure thought-stuff. Anyone can create it: all you need is a computer and some programming tools, many of which are freely available on the Net. After that, ...

The Tampa Bay Times e-Newspaper is a digital replica of the printed paper seven days a week that is available to read on desktop, mobile, and our app for subscribers only. To enjoy the e-Newspaper ...

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, ...