[drewzero1]

Is there anything you feel people tend to miss or get wrong when telling the story of the CueCat? Or has the record already been set pretty much straight? It still comes up occasionally... heck, I found one in a cupboard at work last week! But I always wonder what gets missed about these things in hindsight.

[ggdm]

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.