CueCat, WIRED MAGAZINE Collectors Edition

ID: 30984

You are bidding on ONE WIRED Magazine branded CueCat. This device was sent out with a Wired Magazine monthly issue and was used as described below. This version of the CueCat has the WIRED logo on it.

In late 2000, advertisements containing CueCat barcodes briefly appeared in some high-circulation U.S. mass-market periodicals, notably Parade magazine, Forbes magazine and Wired magazine. For a time, RadioShack published catalogs containing these barcodes, and even distributed CueCat devices at no charge. CueCats were also bulk mailed (unsolicited) to certain mailing lists, such as subscribers of technology magazines, notably Wired magazine. For roughly a year, starting in October 2000, The Dallas Morning News and other Belo-owned newspapers added the barcodes next to major articles (Belo had invested in Digital Convergence).

Joel Spolsky speculated about the apparently large sums invested in the unsuccessful launch of the device, noting that according to the Digital Convergence website, the company claimed to have 200 employees as of 2000. Spolsky estimated that the "postage costs alone" of mailing CueCats to every subscriber of Wired, as was apparently done, must have been $1 million.

The data format was proprietary, being scrambled so as not to be usable as plain text. However, the barcode itself is closely related to Code 128, and the scanner was also capable of reading EAN/UPC and other symbologies. Because of the weak obfuscation of the data, the software for decoding the CueCat's output quickly appeared on the Internet, followed by a plethora of unofficial applications.

:CRQ (a play on "see our cue") is software developed by Digital:Convergence intended to convert "cues" from television signals and the :Cuecat bar code reader into URLs. The television technology was launched on NBC during its "Must See TV" programming and used a computer sound card to decode an audible barcode and collect or launch a web site.

Click on any of the images to the left to see an enlargement.

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