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Joel Spolsky speculated about the apparently large sums invested in the unsuccessful launch of the device, noting that according to the Digital Convergence website, the company claimed to have 200 employees as of 2000. Spolsky estimated that the postage costs alone of mailing CueCats to every subscriber of Wired, as was apparently done, must have been $1 million.[1] This cost was taken on by the partner publications, not by the corporation itself, who funded the cost of the devices.
Several companies now sell the CueCat with their software database products, as an accessory to ease input of barcodes within the application. The bar code scanner itself is still being sold on secondary marketplace sites like Amazon and eBay. The booklover social networking site LibraryThing sells USB CueCats to aid with scanning ISBN barcodes for entering books into the site.
In late 2000, advertisements containing CueCat barcodes briefly appeared in some high-circulation U.S. mass-market periodicals, notably Parade magazine, Forbes magazine and TIME magazine. For a time, RadioShack published catalogs containing these barcodes, and even distributed CueCat devices at no charge. CueCats were also bulk mailed (unsolicited) to certain mailing lists, such as subscribers of technology magazines, notably Wired magazine. For roughly a year, starting in October 2000, The Dallas Morning News and other Belo-owned newspapers added the barcodes next to major articles (Belo had invested in Digital Convergence).
Joel Spolsky speculated about the apparently large sums invested in the unsuccessful launch of the device, noting that according to the Digital Convergence website, the company claimed to have 200 employees as of 2000. Spolsky estimated that the N"postage costs aloner" of mailing CueCats to every subscriber of Wired, as was apparently done, must have been $1 million.
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