It’s comforting to know that new technologies have precedents and that they don’t just spring from nowhere. One of the ancestors of visual tagging, well obviously there are barcodes but I mean a halfway house between that and something like semacode, is the CueCat system developed in the late 90’s.

CueCat rose rapidly in 2000 but by 2004 the server supporting it’s functionality was no longer in use. CueCat seemed to have encountered many problems and not really embraced the new emerging web 2.0 / open source / format / cross-compatible / hardware independent / gizmo (thanks Bruce for this supurb new phrase) world that we are moving into. It’s code specification was proprietery yet easy hacked and soon on the web for everyone to see. The scanner devices seemed to have individual serial numbers and so raised serious concerns about tracking users scanning of codes and what could be gleaned from this and well lets be honest it looks like a cross between a gimmick toy for kids or those hand scanners from yesteryear.

Today it seems to have missed it’s opportunity with cameras combined with computers (mobile phones being the best example of this) replacing the need for the device. The best source for imformation concerning CueCat seems to be wikipedia at present (image above from wikipedia) but there is also some information on the former website here and at the Digital Convergence website here (the company that invented CueCat).

Source to this post here at nearfield.org.