Three Tech Products that Tanked but Inspired Today’s Digital Marketing Tools

I first met my friend Mark in high school. I was in Grade 11 and he was in Grade 9. We bonded over cassingles (audio cassettes meant to replace vinyl 45s) and his dad bummed me cigarettes. I was best (wo)man at his wedding in New Jersey many years later. He’d met his wife in a chatroom online in 1993, long enough ago that it was still considered embarrassing to meet someone online.

Mark was always hustling. Back in ’93, he always had some kind of idea to make money. One of his gigs was a rudimentary business buying and selling computer parts. Today, he’s pretty sure he was one of the first people in Canada to have his hands on the Apple Newton MessagePad, the first personal digital assistant ever developed.

The Newton was launched 25 years ago this month in a simpler time. The Apple logo on the front still had rainbow colours. The word email still had a hyphen. Movie tickets were $4.

Compared to today’s tablets and phones, the Newton has good comedic value (“Under one pound!”). But for its time, it was a revolution that cost $100 million to develop over six years. You could scribble on it with the stylus, jot down your thoughts, write and format letters, send a fax, synchronize information with your computer, and share business cards.

Apple wanted the look of it to be reminiscent of Batman (It’s black! And a little bit curvy!) and it was designed to fit in one hand with no fear of dropping it. Whether or not they achieved the adjective “hand-held” is arguable — one early reviewer compared it to the size of a VHS tape, which is an enormous sideshow freak compared to today’s phones. Look away, kids!

Some thought the Newton’s price tag was madness at $700, particularly when compared to a $5 paper notebook that could do many of the same things. Yet it was a much-anticipated first attempt at an almost pocket-sized computer. Many well-respected reviewers loved it. But not everyone was impressed.

Unfortunately, the Newton’s programming had some iffy results, particularly with its handwriting recognition abilities. Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury lampooned the gadget in an infamous strip that translated the handwritten words “Catching on?” into “Egg freckles”. Trudeau acknowledges that he had never even held a Newton when he created the strip — he just knew of its poor reputation for handwriting interpretation.

Even though Apple relaunched the Newton with much better handwriting recognition software later on (seven models showed up over six years), Steve Jobs axed the device when he returned to Apple in 1997, allegedly partly because it wasn’t his baby, and partly because it wasn’t doing very well.

That said, it’s pretty obvious that the Newton influenced the Palm Pilot which got a much better adoption rate. Echoes of the Pilot can be found on today’s phones and tablets. So I can personally thank the Newton for much of my addiction to my phone and iPad.

A bar code scanner in your own home

A less endearing (to me, anyway) but still an undeniable precursor to a piece of today’s popular digital marketing tech is the “:CueCat” (I feel forced to use quotes because it starts with a colon).

First of all, I personally despise this product based on the pompousness of its name. It tries to impress me before I’ve even read its first Roman character. It’s like it already thinks it’s the answer to all my problems. It’s not.

My second beef is still with the name. It doesn’t even give you a vague hint as to what it does. Let’s move on to Tara’s personal beef number three: physical design. Even if you spotted it on a countertop, it would be mystifying. It looks like a little cat statue. So unless you’re someone who, you know, is crazy about cats and not embarrassed by cat paraphernalia, it’s a bit weird. But this isn’t about me reviewing these products, so let’s move on.

What did the :CueCat do? It read bar codes.

For at least one reason, it should have been more successful than it was: it was free. Radio Shack gave it away. It got sent, unasked, to different mailing lists, such as subscribers to Forbes and Wired magazines. Millions of dollars were behind it (almost $200 — even Coke dumped a few million into the kitty litter), and before long, the full scheme was ready for rollout. This meant putting barcodes in selected newspapers, magazines, and catalogues with the “:C” symbol beside it. All you needed was the cat-shaped scanner to read the bar code, which would then bring you to the relevant web site

This is the part of the :CueCat story where you can hear the brakes getting hit, hard. The kitty-shaped scanner needed to be plugged into a computer in order for the relevant web site to appear on your computer screen. And we all know that everyone who reads the real, paper version of magazines or newspapers loves to read them in front of an open computer. (This is the part in the movie where they pull the people from the burning car and start running.)

It’s unnatural and doomed to fail, but we still know what gadget this reminds us of — the QR scanning feature that many have installed on their phones (except me — I could care less about exposing my brain to extra advertising. Oh, and except for the woman sitting beside me in the coffee shop who has never scanned a QR code either…. And the man parked at the other end of the banquette we’re sitting on. Should I ask the whole room? Hmmm….)

Social networking’s first success

The last stop on the tour around this funeral home is Friendster. Type it into Google, and at the top, you see “Friendster — Living the Game”. Except it’s not living anything — it brings you to a placeholder “We died, but we may be back” page that was posted in 2014.

I’m happy to acknowledge that a dog could figure out from the name alone what Friendster did and what wildly popular site it was a precursor to (got that, “:CueCat”?). Friendster launched in 2002 as a social networking site and was pretty successful as the first of its kind to get more than a million users. Even late-night TV cared enough to get the Canadian founder to come in for an interview. It was a success. But it almost hurts my fingers to type this next sentence: In 2003, Google offered to buy Friendster for $30 million. What did Friendster say? “Nah, I’m good.”

Cue the end credits. MySpace came to town in 2003 and then Facebook one year later. In 2004, MySpace became more popular in terms of page view numbers and by 2009, most of Friendster’s American users had left (about the same time I joined Facebook). All this led to a Friendster rebrand in 2011 as a social gaming platform, which eventually crapped out too.

It may not have flourished in the long run, but Friendster demonstrated that social networking online was a force that would only grow.

It’s like your mama told you

It’s pretty clear that these three inventions were ahead of their time. One could get all weepy over it (especially that $30 million that Friendster turned down, a move commonly recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever gaffes) but they still have historical and inspirational value. All that to say your parents were right: failures are often a terrific learning opportunity.