The same company behind the ‘cuecat’ did have some scheme where their software was going to listen for audio cues encoded in TV soundtracks and ‘deliver relevant user offers’ or something. It was pretty clunky (I’m not sure if a mic could be used, or if you needed an actual hardwired line out -> line in arrangement), and the value proposition for the victim was absolutely incomprehensible; but they did have it.
Honestly, Cuecat earned their reputation as a punchline honestly; by trying to pull their stuff off well before the tech was ready (and all their stuff was advertising crap, so it wasn’t the kind of thing that early adopters would be motivated to pay more and fight with finnicky tech to enjoy); but they were actually pretty spot-on in identifying a fair number of vile advertising concepts that have resurfaced from the ooze now that the technology is there to support them. Now that you can put a ‘computer’ on a board the size of a playing card for $30, the so-called ‘Smart TVs’ are indeed computers connected to your TV that feed you advertisements based on what is playing, as are many set-top-boxes.
I’d spit on their grave any day because they were advertising scum; but if they had been in a different area of technology, their ‘ideas prototyped ahead of their time’ numbers would actually qualify them for ‘visionary’ status by the standards of tech companies. It’s just a pity that their vision was so malignant.
Walt Mossberg largely covered personal technology for The Wall Street Journal, not enterprise technology. That is why there was more of a focus on consumer products like those from Apple, as opposed to technologies like SQL or SSL.
A friend of mine who worked at pre-IPO PayPal told me how a creative co-worker sold junk food out of their office and used a CueCat to read the bar codes from both the packaging and employee badges to perform the transactions. Not sure how much of that is true (I don’t know any other PayPal employees who were around to ask about it) but, if so, it is definitely a nice re-purposing of the technology.
I remember holding off on an mp3 player because they just didn’t hold very much and because the interface on the device and often on the computer wasn’t so good. The iPod came along, and it cost a LOT but it also offered a LOT. And iTunes was pretty nice back then. And, yes, most of the existing mp3 players were ugly, looked like something you’d get out of a vending machine by the buggy rack in front of Wal-mart. I can’t get behind Mossberg’s hype for the Newton (and don’t get me started on the cuecat), but the iPod and the PalmPilot both had significant impacts on my daily life. I also think Apple should still be remembered for the basic design of laptops as we use them today: wrist-rest, keys, screen. I’m pretty sure they were the first with that. Could be wrong, and I’m frankly surprised I care enough this topic to have been typing for several sentences now.
Wired sent me one as well. My response was meh, as I tossed it in the box with the rest of the cast off hardware. Some months, or maybe a year or two later I saw a large box of them at Weird Stuff Warehouse (or some such surplus store - Silicon Valley was rife with them at the time).
