A maybe forgotten fact about the whole CueCat saga was that the hardware was given away for free, mainly at Radio Shack in the USA, with the expectation that the company would be able to recoup the costs by...um...I guess collecting user data and charging publishers to generate bar codes.
Of course, people quickly reverse engineered the data format, as it was just a PS/2 format keyboard device, which caused the company to threaten to sue[0] anyone who distributed the software. Much fun was had for a few months skirting this until nearly everyone, other than a few people like book collectors, realized that having a UPC scanner wasn't that useful and the CueCats got stuffed into the junk drawers.
Now everyone has a barcode scanner on their phone and it is no big deal, but at the time, it was a fun toy.