ESSAY Failing Forward hen it comes to consumer kid gets a prize” world, the notion of failure doesn’t technologies, I like to employ get the respect that it rightly deserves. Most times, it a simple litmus test: If it works seems, we learn more from our mistakes than from for my four-year-old son and my our triumphs. 64-year-old mother, it’ll probably That’s clearly the case when it comes to many workW for everyone. Take the Flip video camera, for marketing technologies. First isn’t always best, but instance: Turn it on, point it at something (hopefully it often lays the groundwork for future innovations interesting), press the big red button and suddenly that are even more useful (and successful) than their you’re the next Martin Scorsese. Or the iPad: Press predecessors. Being second (or third or fourth) and the “On” button, swipe your finger, and suddenly learning from the prior mistakes of antecedents can you’re … well, doing whatever grandmothers and be advantageous — transformational even. preschoolers do on their iPads — playing games, In 2000, when I was working as the interactive fiddling with apps, consuming media. editor at a national advertising trade publication, I experienced my first major brush with failure. Mind you, this wasn’t your everyday, garden-variety failure, Even the most but the kind of cringe-inducing, colossal failure that keeps you up at night. For 10 years. catastrophic debacle can My personal hair shirt was the :CueCat. Remember those things? Developed in the late 1990s by the now- lead to next-generation defunct, Dallas-based tech company Digital:Convergence, the :CueCat was created to bridge the gap between innovation. print media and the web by employing a cat-shaped hand-held scanner (the eponymous :CueCat) that read What these mom- and kid-tested and approved unique bar codes on the printed page. Tethered to your gadgets have in common is that they weren’t necessarily computer keyboard like a mouse (yes, we groaned at the first to market. Pure Digital Technologies, makers the pun, too), the :CueCat directed print readers to of the Flip, initially introduced a rudimentary one- supplemental web content, presumably stuff that time-use camcorder sold at CVS stores and designed couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fit on the printed page. for direct conversion to DVD media. Meanwhile, the The magazine group where I worked was one iPad can legitimately trace its roots back to Apple’s of the first (if not the first) print publications to sign seminal but ill-fated Newton tablet. Save for a limited on as a charter user of :CueCat’s technology, and the but cult following, neither device managed to gain interactive news section that I edited was the guinea much consumer interest and each was quickly pig. Packaging the :CueCat-enabled news section dispatched to the dustbins of first-mover tech missteps. involved embedding bar codes within all editorial and Today, the Flip and the iPad are heralded as advertising pages; linking the Cues, as the bar codes category innovators, but these seemingly ubiquitous were called, to web content — typically homepages; tech tools likely wouldn’t have seen the light of day and then testing each bar code to ensure that readers if not for the failure of their precursors. In our “every landed on the correct websites.

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were made by me — during testing. The rest … well, let’s just say there were a handful of reporters on my From the Ashes staff who were also assigned to test Cues. Despite fairly wide distribution of :CueCat The :CueCat may be the most infamous scanners (which publishers mailed to subscribers for technology flop to spawn current successes, free and Radio Shack gave away by the litter), and but a handful of other first-movers that flamed repeated promises by Digital:Convergence about the out during the dot-com bust may have given rise to a new generation of innovators. development of a mobile scanner that would be built into a Cross pen (which never materialized), :CueCat Group Buying and Reverse Auction Sites technology failed to spark much interest. In the harshest Then: Mercata, Mobshop terms, one critic at the time said the :CueCat “failed to Now: Groupon, SocialLiving, DealRadar solve a problem which never existed.” Double ouch. Fashion Commerce The thing is, like lots of revolutionary Then: Boo.com developments, it’s sometimes hard to recognize Now: Vivre.com, Netaporter massive change when you’re in the middle of it. Yes, the :CueCat — like many early innovations — may Push Technologies have suffered from clumsy execution, poor timing Then: PointCast or mismanaged introductions. And yes, the problem Now: Every location-based app that the :CueCat was designed to solve (i.e., linking the analogue world with the digital world) may not e-Readers Then: Rocket eBooks have existed as acutely 10 years ago as it does today. Now: Kindle, iPad, Nook (Remember, this was back in the days when the iPhone was still just a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye.) But in many respects, the failure of the :CueCat deftly paved the way for some of today’s most innovative Design considerations aside (the Cues were marketing technologies such as JagTag and ScanBuy, chunky and unattractive), the usability problems as well as mobile barcode scanner applications like were immediately clear. How many readers actually RedLaser and StickyBits. And let’s not even get started read our magazine — any magazine — while they on the thanks that QR codes owe to the ’Cat. were sitting at their computers? Wasn’t the entire Ours is a culture that likes nothing more than to point of reading a magazine based on its portability? celebrate our wins — loudly and proudly — while we Why didn’t the :CueCat “read” the bar codes with shuffle our less than successful attempts at glory into one swipe and why did you need to swipe several the dark corners of history, praying that no one will times before it would work? How were you supposed notice and hoping everyone will eventually forget. to plug this thing into your computer keyboard if The nice thing about perspective, though, is that you didn’t have a PS/2 connection? And was it really we can — and should — learn to acknowledge and such a big pay off — after you finally got to the Cue’d even embrace our failures so that we can move on to webpage — to see … the homepage of the publisher or something bigger and better. advertiser with no context or reason for being there? A decade doesn’t seem like much time to pass, The :CueCat definitely wouldn’t pass the mom or but in tech terms, it’s a lifetime. So in honor of the kid litmus test. In fact, it didn’t pass any test for :CueCat, one of the worst technologies ever, thanks publishers or consumers and the :CueCat was quickly for failing so bad, in order that the next generation of deemed a major flop — and the magazine where I marketing technologies could thrive. n worked had a serious case of egg-on-face. Subsequently, PCWorld Magazine named the :CueCat as one of “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,” while readers of KIPP CHENG is group director, tech blog Gizmodo voted the :CueCat as the No. 1 corporate communications, at G2 Worldwide. Previously he served as an worst invention of the first decade of the 2000s. Ouch. editor and reporter, covering consumer In the end, we featured Cue’d content in the pages technology at Entertainment Weekly and of our magazine for three, maybe four, issues. In the marketing technology at Adweek. He usage reports I received from Digital:Convergence, I may be reached at [email protected]. could see that three-quarters of the scanned bar codes

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