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.
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.