Carnivorous furniture is a niche product at best

This is from 2011, and for reasons I can only describe as "buggeringly obvious", appears not to have been a success.

Let's begin with their digital wall clock, which doesn't need a battery or a plug because it gets its energy from eating flies. This carnivorous clock ("8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days," says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish, of Bristol Robotics) is just a prototype.

"What we have here is a belt. The white thing is a belt that's covered in honey. So it operates just like standard flypaper. Flies would be attracted to that honey. They'd land on the belt, get stuck, as you can see it is moving down very, very slowly, and right underneath here there's a blade and the blade scrapes off any insects that have become stuck to the honey. They fall into the microbial fuel cell underneath. And this is the device that turns that organic matter into electrical energy."

...and, more ominously, a coffee table littered with cheese bits that attracts mice who are ushered up a table leg and then guillotined by rotating blade-looking hole on top.


http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/02/15/133432897/meat-eating-furniture