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The Cue Cat actually reads the barcode from a product and then accesses a database on the web to attempt to lookup that code and then redirect you to the web site for that company/product. It would work with any company's product that had made an arrangement with the Cue Cat folks to be included in their database.
For the purposes of a bar code reader installed in a PDA, that is a different application. For example, taking inventory in a warehouse. You would have a database, spreadsheet, or some other "front end" app that is designed to accept the data input from the reader. Then all the reader, as has been pointed out, is capture the data from the bar code and fill in the data entry fields in the "front end" application.
A slightly more sophisticated approach is what you see at the check out register at many stores. They scan the code on the product and that triggers a database lookup to locate the info about that product based on the code that was read in. All the info about the product (name, description, price, etc) is not stored in the bar code itself. That bar code simply contains a unique ID number that is used to then cross-reference an entry in a database that contains all the data. That retrieval from the database then supplies all the data to print on the receipt.
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