pet

I'm writing this article with a large rescue cat draped across my keyboard (yes, it's hard to type). Not every feline is as fortunate to have a home.

Animal shelters have tried out kitty Webcams to boost adoption rates. AprioriControl is raising the bar with iPet Companion, interactive online kitten playrooms that put viewers in control of feathery, flighty, and fluffy cat toys.

The kitty playrooms are currently up and running at shelters in Idaho, Iowa, and Oregon. I stopped off at the site for the Clinton Humane Society in Iowa where kittens named Dori, Nemo, Marlin, and Bruce rolled, tumbled, and attacked the remote-control toys.

Each shelter determines certain play hours. You may end up in a short queue when you drop by to play with the furry critters. The toys are attached to motors. Push the button on your browser to make them dance and whirl.

When it's your turn, you also control the direction of the Webcam. A live chat box lets you join in all the ooing and cooing from other users. You'll see gems like: "they r sooo cute lookit the kittys look it look it." It's easy to turn into a pile of text-speak mush when you're watching kittens play.… Read more

The Cat Scan requires no explanation--the blurry scans of smooshed feline paws speak for themselves, but the Webmasters need fan contributions to continue updating the site--that may be the only thing The Cat Scan has in common with Wikipedia.

They also advise you to cat-scan at your own risk as any damage caused by little Chairman Meow will likely void your warranty, but feel free to submit scans anyway!

More of our favorite cat scans after the break.

Is it a sign of a bad bubble that we're re-hashing ideas from the first dot-com boom? Or are some ideas right, just too early? The team at Quidsi, which runs Diapers.com and Soap.com and which was bought by Amazon for $540 million this year, believes the latter, and they're launching Wag.com today to prove it.

Wag.com is a bubble 2.0 stab at Pets.com. For those of you too young to remember, Pets.com was a high-flying Internet retailer in 1999 and 2000. It sold pet food and other pet supplies online. Even in the frothy 1999 tech bubble, though, it was a puzzler that a company could make money selling dog food cheaply online and then paying for shipping on top of it.

In fact, Pets.com lost money selling and shipping low-margin pet consumables. So much that the company burned through its funding and folded less than two years after it launched.

Lesson learned, right? Apparently not. Quidsi believes that if they "start with the customer, and work our way back," as Quidsi's Marketing Director Earl Gordon says, they can make an online dog food business work. Because, clearly, nobody else has thought of this before.

The real secret is simply better logistics. There are three Wag.com warehouses, each with the entire inventory selection in them, to reduce shipping distances. Quidsi also uses proven Kiva robots to move items throughout its warehouses and help shop floor workers pack and pick shipments. "We've been doing this for a while," Gordon says. "We can efficiently deliver a a 40-pound bag of dog food."

The other trick to Wag.com, in addition to its ability to leverage Amazon's own marketing muscle, is that, "It's not all about dog food and cat litter." Josh Himwich, who runs commerce solution for Quidsi, says that the company would barely squeak by if it focused on selling commodities, as the Diapers.com brand already appears to do with its eponymous products. "Diapers are loss leaders at every single [retail] store. Not quite for us, but approaching it. If all you do is sell dogfood, you won't stay in business." … Read more

The Global Pet Expo just wrapped up in Orlando, Fla., and some 800 pet product makers were on hand showing off more than 3,000 new gadgets for our furry friends.

CBS News correspondent and "Early Show" resident veterinarian Dr. Debbye Turner Bell scoured the entire floor of the expo, seeking the coolest pet products coming out on the market, and brought many to the show yesterday.

Among them: a high-tech pooper scooper, a doggie treadmill, a finger-painting paint set for pooches, spill-proof bowls, and a microwavable cat cake!

This story originally appeared on CBSNews.com. … Read more

There is no shortage of health-related apps. Some 1,500 cater to professional caregivers and laypersons alike for a range of purposes, from counting calories to learning anatomy or pulling up drug dosage recommendations.

But Mobile MIM is the first mobile app to be cleared (just last week) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that allows physicians to make medical diagnoses using images transmitted to their iPhones or iPads.

The app transmits several image types, including those from computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and nuclear medicine technology such as positron emission tomography (PET). Using software developed by Cleveland-based MIM Software, Mobile MIM allows for not just viewing of medical images, but also displaying measurement lines, annotations, and areas of interest.

While the app is indicated for use only in the absence of a workstation, it's pretty clear that the ability to view radiology images on the go could result in, shall we say, dusty workstations.… Read more

This is TankBot from DeskPets, a fairly inexpensive (sub-$20, they say), treaded, remote-controlled toy robot that you can control with an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or even an iPad.

While using iDevices as a remote is nothing new--indeed, Apple has an app simply called "Remote" for controlling the Apple TV--the TankBot is unique in that it doesn't use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi as an interface but rather a dongle that plugs into the headphone port of the iWhatever.

Once attached, an app is downloaded. The device then uses its built-in accelerometer as a steering mechanism, allowing … Read more

While holiday shopping, we ran across these hilarious fake gift boxes, purporting to contain an outrageous assortment of high-tech gadgets (and we promptly ordered a two-pack from ThinkGeek for our own holiday pranking).

These are simple rectangular cardboard boxes, each printed with art and copy purporting to tout a fantastic gift-ready gadget. Of course, none of these devices actually exists; these are just dummy boxes for you to use to disguise your own gifts. After getting the iArm tablet forearm mount and the automated PetPetter, we checked out the manufacturer's Web site at prankpack.com and found several other winners, which we present here in handy slideshow format. … Read more

In case a name and phone number on Fido's dog tag aren't enough to bring him home from his wanderings, a new tag from online pet community PetHub includes a Fido-centric URL that is scannable by smartphone.

One side of the laser-etched tag displays a human-readable Web link to information on your pet. The other shows a two-dimensional QR bar code that can be scanned by any iPhone or Android phone with the free code-scanning software NeoReader installed.

When scanned, the code automatically navigates a browser to PetHub to display an animal's information.

By default, PetHub shows … Read more

If you love freaking out your friends, especially a girlfriend who hates bugs, here's a toy you might dig--Skitterbot is a six-legged robotic insect that can burn rubber at the rate of one foot per second.

Maker Desk Pets claims Skitterbot is the fastest commercially available legged micro-robot. It's controlled and recharged via USB, requiring a 30-minute juicing for 15 minutes of play.

The critter has flashing evil eyes and comes in three colors, as well as transparent. Each has a separate frequency, so multiple players can race and fight each other. They're now on sale at … Read more