Pinterest is aiming for the big time. As Forbes's Jeff Bercovici explains in this fascinating cover story, the site that has turned online "pinning" into a global craze now intends to make billions by creating a seamless digital continuum, in which its users don't just ramble through curated photos of clothes, trinkets or adventures; they also see relevant ads and click to buy the items they like most.
If Pinterest succeeds, we should all observe a respectful moment of silence for J. Jovan Philyaw, an entrepreneur who tried to develop a similar continuum 14 years ago. You won't find him in any inventor's hall of fame. His big idea -- an electronic wand called the CueCat that could scan magazine ads and connect readers to the advertisers' websites -- evoked titters and scorn when it was launched in 2000. Even though investors backed Philyaw with $185 million, the CueCat was a bust. Eventually it was labeled by PC World as one of the 25 worst tech inventions of all time.
We can argue all day whether Philyaw was ahead of his time, or a misguided promoter who couldn't let go of a doomed idea. Either way, it's both instructive and entertaining to take a fresh look at the CueCat, and why it ended in ruins.
Philyaw's great misfortune was to pursue the reading-advertising-shopping continuum just as the public was transitioning from print (a.k.a. "dead trees") publications to new habits built around the digital ecosystem. Magazine publishers (including Forbes) wanted the best of both worlds. They wanted to stick with the print publishing that they knew best, while tapping into the emerging power of e-commerce. To them, a page-scanning wand that led from print pages to advertisers' websites made marvelous sense.
Tech reviewers and the ordinary public disagreed. The Wall Street Journal's technology columnist at the time, Walt Mossberg, headlined his review as follows: "CueCat Fails to Meet Its Promise Of Being Convenient and Useful." With that as prelude, he then got even blunter. "The CueCat fails miserably," he wrote. "Using it is just unnatural." He told readers to avoid it, even though the CueCat was being offered to them, free of charge.
Today, of course, the entire continuum can exist on a single laptop, tablet or mobile phone. People have moved nearly 100% to the digital ecosystem, where they read and shop and flip through pictures on the same device. The CueCat's awkward hardware is totally unnecessary. Invisible cookies and APIs can guide readers/shoppers along the continuum, with no need to clutch a scanning wand, and with barely a millisecond's delay.
The broader lesson: the fate of each new brainstorm depends only in part on the underlying idea's merits. What's often far more important is how well the concept can be integrated with the technology and user habits that are already in the marketplace. Ideas that integrate well can turn out to be huge winners. Ideas that integrate poorly are likely to be flops, no matter how appealing they seemed in principle.
