CueCat: the worst business idea of all time

Do you want to be set free from the drudgery of typing in Internet addresses? I mean, you like the Internet and all, but typing in URLs such as http://myopinionsareimportant.com is such a pain in the butt. Hell, even accessing it through your favourites is a chore, taking a whole two seconds! That’s two seconds of your life that you’ll never have back. Why do that when you can do the following:

  1. Attach the CueCat barcode scanner, which was sent to your house unsolicited, to your computer 
  2. Install the CueCat software on your computer
  3. Find that “My Opinions Are Important” magazine ad you saw recently
  4. Point your cute little CueCat barcode scanner at the cute little CueCat barcode in the ad
  5. Hey presto! “My Opinions Are Important” is up on the screen!

You can see why this idea never took off, can’t you? Except during the late ’90s, before it died its inevitable tragic painful death, the CueCat company had burned through $30 million. At one stage, they had 200 employees.

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I agree completely. In fact I wrote a Cue Cat Postmortem.

Nice postmortem. Although personally I can’t see any reason why anyone would want to own a barcode scanner. It has been six years since you wrote otherwise; do you still believe that bar code usage in homes and small business is destined to grow?