I had a couple including one USB one that I later modified to use to scan regular bar codes.
I pulled up Wikipedia to look up who created them, and apparently he changed his name after they failed. He was also on Curse of Oak Island searching for gold and was involved in ballot shenanigans in the 2020 US presidential election where he was notable for supposedly inventing a machine to find bamboo fibers on ballots.
For those who don’t remember them:
In 2000, they had the bright idea that people would leave these connected to their computers so that advertisers in magazines could put a barcode on the page to go straight to a webpage with info about a product or a product catalog from someone like RadioShack would let you scan it to take you straight to an ordering page. Similar to how QR codes function often today.
The problem was that in 2000 almost nobody had an always on internet connection unless you were lucky, wealthy, or in school. And URLs are really easy to type.
They stopped giving them away in 2001.
The CueCat was also discontinued when it was found to store user details on a public facing portion of their webpage and the company did nothing to fix it except offer a coupon to RadioShack.
It was a horrendously run company which made a problem that solved “typing” for people who wanted to know about a product they have in hand already. CueCat was beyond stupid.
And then QR codes came along… Basically the same thing.
Japan created QR codes in the 90s. What changed was everyone carrying around an internet connected camera.