ggdm

I’m at the Wired 30th anniversary event as I type this and they didn’t have one at their Gadget Lab installation. I didn’t have one with me, sadly.

The TiVo slide remote was cool. Check WeakKnees or AVS forum for that release date. They will have anit announced or archived. Ours was topside/bottom side with no moving parts. It was flip-flop modality. The concept was “don’t look” on the Directional side and type or search on the keyboard side.

We were a sign of the future of the web and where we sit today with smartphones and what is capable today. It’s a time capsule.

Considering Windows 95 didn’t have drivers sorted yet, especially true! Mainly we did it for Macintosh support.

Same thing they always do. Write letters. Crappy ones.

You’re my people. Well done! We created Make Magazine and Maker Faire to celebrate this good behavior!

The Web 1.0 world was different then. Wired and Forbes (our distribution partners) licensed our engine and mailed out Cats as a way to take their “lost” content like audio interviews and photos, aka too many to print, to live online forever. Wired magazine didn’t even control their digital property at the time. We were the first team to tie all of this digital and analog together when the Internet was dialup and WiFi didn’t exist.

We had a second technology that decoded audio tones on TV that we launched with NBC to let your PC “follow along” with what was being shown. That pre-dated Shazam by a decade.

Too many things are missed in the story, but the big thing is all of the money raised was from strategic partners like Coca-Cola ($10M) Y&R ($5M if Ford didn’t like the demo, $10M if they did) and on and on to $205M.

My favorite Easter egg was we were the first Internet platform to look at the location of your scan via IP address to give more relevant data FOR you. E.G. for Coke if you scanned a can in Texas you’d get Six Flags offers vs Atlanta where you would get an offer for SeaWorld. This was a decade before Waze or even Google thought about location, through their purchase of ad networks or other companies.

No, DLink made it for us, and you’re smart to want to use that remote to this day! Full QWERTY keys on the back and D pad on the front was our IP and another first for the industry. The box was running an Intel Atom CPU. Some devs and people have continued to keep that hardware going too.

QR’s are an add-on for marketing or messaging vs our system which was already printed on the box! But it’s cool to see people scanning and the Cat now sits in the Computer History Museum… So it is cool to see it in the same section as my first computer - the Osborne 01. With Digital Convergence, the Cat’s parent company, we raised $205M from strategic investors and gave 300 dreamers and do’ers jobs and an amazing outlook for their future lives even when it went bust in 2001 like so many startups with “loose” revenue models did. Never have I felt regret from this, plus a lot of OG tech founders give us street cred for tying barcodes to the Internet before people thought of it. It did teach me what types of people that you DON’T want to work with.

The biggest project that my friends and I did after this was moving a Boeing 747 over 500 miles through two states from the Mojave boneyard to Burning Man. That was a true loving team who could do anything. Our business model was smiles per hour. YouTube has great videos on that project.

It was the razor blade model. It cost us under $10 per unit to make and we charged licenses for content creators to make their physical world items tie into digital content to interact with the brand new web world of 2000. One may also call this a chicken or the egg problem. Y2K was amazing.

The business model was to literally give them away. Whether humans wanted them or not, that’s another story. Thank you for your input.

It was a ROT encoder. Google that. So software “decode” vs hardware “hack.”

My mom is proud of you. She hangs them on her Christmas tree. #inventor’smoms

Bought wasn’t correct in that context as they were always free to the community and consumer. I agree with hare brained whole heartedly.

80% PS2. Rest were USB. A brand new technology.

One founder was a little off to say the least.

No. Screwed up by legal. Founders were super cool. Mostly.

That’s funny. Cue this.

Correct. That would remove our DMCA lightweight encryption. Well done hacker.

Yes. Boxes of them. I hacked it because I previously wrote for 2600, Google that. Later I helped write for Make Magazine… makezine.com

Cost reduction. We needed to make these for under $10 so we could give them away as part of our razor blade model. Google that-if you know, you know.

Co-founder. As typed above.

Co-Founder of the project here here. AMA @ggdm

>Cuecats were cool. The people who made them were assholes.

Thanks @doctorow

Look, we created it because barcodes had URLs below them on packaged goods that were generic. Google had a fresh “links in” algorithm that they were figuring out. We had the first concept of location or demographic based results for media and products.

Your :CC ID was used to see who the best distribution channels were. The software ID held your profile and zip code so someone swiping a Coke can in Dallas would see a Six Flags promotion, someone in Atlanta would get SeaWorld + Coke offers.

The light DMCA approved ROT 64 output scrambling was to prevent OS or browsers from natively decoding the scans, as we wanted to run the ONS (object naming service) and provide truly valuable links. How many QR codes go to 404 links today? Our magic from 1997 was dynamic in multiple ways.

Alas, the USB and portable devices shipped as the dot-bomb era encroached and our open plug-in framework gets forgotten by the researchers.

I’m proud of what the 300+ team built over those handful of formative commercial Internet years, and happy to see our creation in the Computer History Museum. Under oddity input devices.

Isn't this for you to answer? NewAer builds "showcase apps" but the SDK is for all to build on. Our favorite is a menu on a tablet that knows what you ordered last time you visited the restaurant and suggests something new the 2nd visit. All with your phone in your purse or pocket. No check ins, QR codes, tapping NFC or logging in. That's the vision of the SDK.

Agreed. I've seen several demos of Gimbal and I fail to see how GPS and Google Goggles differs from this. GigaOm has a video demo: http://gigaom.com/2013/01/11/video-qualcomms-project-gimbal-...

Love the idea of the silent sound. Alas, that and the IP backgrounding is a bit clumsy. We pass through Apple's store guidelines without powering up the GPS.

Significant location change is clumsy to say the least. If you ask Siri to "remind you to get milk when you leave the house" you can see she sends messages at all different ranges of your leaving. Our engine monitors BTLE for disconnected, or WiFi zones for connected on iOS. Plus we provide background operation in iOS. Let us know what you think of the SDK in your application.

This is the concept for the engine, we are glad you "got it." Although you can add it into Tasker too. The bigger picture is that you do not need to be connected to the WiFi or BT radio to enable this.