• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 2, 2010

Sony has developed a cat collar that tweets. The company's Computer Science Lab recently demonstrated a prototype of Cat@Log, equipped with a still camera, GPS, accelerometer, and Bluetooth, capable of reporting minute-by-minute activities on Twitter.

About 11 preprogrammed phrases are triggered on Twitter based on the cat's actions. For example, when the cat eats, the system tweets "this tastes good." Some of the activities that trigger tweets include eating, facial gestures, jumping, running, and sleeping.

Marketers could be missing an opportunity to get cozy with consumers who have an affinity to their brand. A simple tweak to the application would allow consumers to pick from a list of brands inserted into the preprogrammed tweets. For example, when the cat eats the tweet could add the name of the feline's food.

This device, however, is a prototype in collaboration with the University of Tokyo. The lifelog data is first transmitted to a PC via Bluetooth, and, then, comments are posted on Twitter. A video explains that the university worked with Sony to develop the application to give humans a better understanding of their pets.

Sony is not the first to use location-based technologies to track and tweet. Although it's not clear what technology Sony relies on that allows the cat to trigger tweets, people have been experimenting with RFID and Twitter for more than a year.

Collaborating with dairy farmer Chris Vandenberg, members of the Critical Media Lab designed established a twitter-based application designed for the cows of Buttermine Farms in Brant, Ontario, Canada. Each cow on the farm wears a RFID tag used to coordinate their activities with a central computer. As a cow approaches the robotic milking pen, the computer reads the tag and determines whether or not the cow is scheduled to be milked, based on her stage of lactation and average daily output. Those signals now trigger Tweets on Twitter.

Interactive digital ad agency R/GA's Richard Ting began experimenting with radio frequency identification technology on Twitter more than a year ago. He used a platform called touchatag from Alcatel-Lucent that allowed his daughter, who was 20 months old at the time, to trigger tweets by swiping tags affixed to books and toys near a reader that resembles a bar code scanner.

The touchatag application has evolved into a mobile wallet service application, according to an Alcatel-Lucent spokesperson.