The CueCat — A Free Cat-Shaped Scanner for a Problem No One Had

The CueCat was a small, cat-shaped barcode scanner, given away free starting in 2000 by a Dallas company called Digital Convergence, and within roughly a year it had become one of the most thoroughly mocked gadgets in the short history of consumer technology. The premise: instead of typing a web address, a reader would drag the cat across a special barcode — a “cue” — printed in a magazine, catalog, or newspaper, and their browser would open the corresponding page. It solved the strenuous problem of typing a URL by replacing it with the simpler act of locating a wired plastic cat, plugging it into your computer, installing its software, and dragging it across a code. The company burned through roughly $185 million before folding in 2001.

The CueCat arrived at the absolute peak of dot-com confidence, when the prevailing theory held that anything connecting the physical world to the web was inevitably valuable, and that the business model could be figured out later. Digital Convergence raised enormous sums from blue-chip backers — Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young & Rubicam, and Coca-Cola among them — and struck distribution deals that mailed the scanners out by the hundreds of thousands. Forbes sent the first 830,000 to its subscribers; Wired sent over 500,000; RadioShack stocked them on shelves. Millions of cats went out into the world, free, to do a job almost nobody wanted done.

Two things finished it. The first was that the value proposition never made sense — the company, critics noted, never managed to explain why scanning a barcode was easier than typing the link it pointed to. The second was privacy. Each CueCat carried a unique serial number, and the software phoned home; the device tracked what users scanned and tied it to their registration, and in September 2000 the situation curdled into a genuine breach when a misconfigured server exposed the names, email addresses, age ranges, genders, and zip codes of roughly 140,000 registered users. A free gadget that surveilled you while solving nothing was a hard sell even when the price was zero.

By May 2001 Digital Convergence had fired most of its 225-person workforce, and by that September Belo had written off its entire $37.5 million investment. The CueCat has since become a fixture on lists of the worst products ever made — ranked twentieth among PC World’s worst tech products in 2006, and included in Time’s “50 Worst Inventions” in 2010 — a permanent monument to the dot-com conviction that a clever bridge between print and web was worth building whether or not anyone needed to cross it.

The Nokia N-Gage — The Taco Phone You Held Sideways and Nobody Bought

The Nokia N-Gage was a $299 attempt to fuse a mobile phone and a handheld game console into one device, and within two years of its October 2003 launch Nokia itself declared it a failure. The pitch was logical enough on paper: Nokia owned the phone, Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance owned portable gaming, and the N-Gage would take both by carrying games and a SIM card in a single pocketable unit. What shipped instead was a device so awkward to use as a phone, so cumbersome to load with games, and so far from the Game Boy on price and library that it became a punchline before it became a product.

The N-Gage’s problems were physical and immediate. To take a call you held the thin edge of the device against your cheek, a posture instantly mocked as “sidetalking” and likened to talking into a taco — which is how it earned its lasting nickname, the taco phone. To change games you had to remove the back cover and pull out the battery to reach the memory-card slot, turning a five-second swap on a Game Boy into a small disassembly project. It cost $299 against a Game Boy Advance that sold for a fraction of that and had a vastly deeper catalog.

The sales reflected all of it. In its first weeks in the United States the N-Gage was reportedly outsold by the Game Boy Advance roughly 100 to 1, with independent tracking suggesting around 5,000 units sold in the opening fortnight against Nokia’s far larger claims. A 2004 revision, the N-Gage QD, fixed the worst ergonomic offenses but could not fix the proposition. In November 2005 Nokia’s own multimedia chief admitted the device had sold about a third of its target — roughly two to three million units against a goal of six million.

Nokia discontinued the hardware in Western markets in early 2006 and let the brand fade. It tried once more in 2008, relaunching N-Gage as a games-download platform for its Symbian smartphones rather than a dedicated device; that effort closed in 2009 without ever finding an audience. The N-Gage is now remembered as a product that was, in a sense, right about the future — phones really would become the world’s dominant game machines — and almost comically wrong about how to get there.