Flux
FLUX
So no sooner do we settle into our boringly plain San Francisco neighborhood of brick warehouses than it becomes the acronym de jour. Our South of Market (SOMA, after TRIBECA, SOHO, etc.) neighborhood has been dubbed "multimedia gulch" by the local newspaper in honor of all the struggling start-ups sharing our nondescript flatlands. Then the city's Board of Supervisors jumps in, voting "official support" for San Francisco's nascent multimedia industry. To spruce the place up, the Friends of the Urban Forest start planting trees everywhere, the not- yet-trendy cafes start to open,and presto! Esquire's "House Hunting" column christens a converted block of warehouses perched kitty corner from our offices the hottest buy in San Francisco. Really, we just liked the low rent...
Low rent you won't find when browsing through the multimedia bookstore, especially if the title comes from Neuromancer author William Gibson. Agrippa: A Book of the Dead is Gibson's latest effort at blurring the lines between currency - yours - and information - his. To get your own copy of the very rare metal-jacketed self-destructing autobiography, you'll have to cough up $450 to $7,500 worth of currency (it comes in various flavors). Word is that the book will soon be hacked and placed on the Net for all to browse...
Snick may not be art, but the two-hour Saturday evening programming slot produced by Nickelodeon and MTV is worth checking out, if only to find out what the post-MTV generation wants from life. Each week a lucky winner of the Slime Time Sweepstakes (don't ask) gets the chance to be publicly humiliated in his or her own living room via an AT&T videophone link-up. Nickelodeon says sweepstakes responses from eager kids come in literally by the tons...
If your Snick fan-to-be is still in the crib-and-crying stage, you can always tune into the new "Baby Channel," which offers 24-hour parenting advice. (With Telecommunications Inc. threatening to offer more than 700 digital cable channels by next year, we may soon have The Interactive Baby Channel, but it still won't change diapers.)...
From the build-a-better-mousetrap file: Symbol Technologies has come up with a new bar coding system that can cram the Gettysburg Address into a printed square the size of a Post It. Symbol's code portends a day when the bar code holds more than jut a price tag...
And they've even digitized the compass: Wayfinder, from Precision Navigation, is an LCD auto compass that remains unperturbed by minor magnetic interference or a sharp right turn...
The best thing TV ever did (after The Prisoner), M*A*S*H, has been digitally restored from 70s' film technology. All 255 episodes will be color corrected and closed-captioned, at a cost of $1.25 million...
All is not lost in the world of kidutainment: Sega is premiering a video game this March titled "Ecco - the Dolphin." One of the first 16-bit home video games that doesn't use an anthropomorphic metaphor of some furry creature as its hero/heroine, Ecco is a smart, quick-swimming sea mammal whose goal is to navigate through a maze of coral and caverns toward a passage to another world. A bit mystical in that respect, Ecco - with its rich aquamarine colors, mysterious music, and realistic swimming action - is sure to be a sensation among many who thought video games were forever trapped in slash and hacks.
A 10 in the "warm-but-not-fuzzy" category...Prickly is how some insiders are describing the legal salvos between Silicon Valley software giants Borland and Symantec. You remember: Borland VP deserts to Symantec, Borland cries foul after finding very sensitive e-mail allegedly sent by the deserter to Gordon Eubanks, Symantec CEO. Some even claim Microsoft, Big Brother of the software biz, is involved. (At a recent trade show party, Bill Gates, who is not known for his love of rival Borland, was standing around minding his own biz when a junior Borland executive ran up to him and pinned a Borland button on his lapel. Enraged, Gates threw the pin on the ground and screamed "You know that isn't funny...") This all makes for one heck of a soap opera. Look for coverage from our crack Valley reporter in a future issue...
Speaking of Silicon Valley, anyone within spittin' distance of digital maven Ted Nelson (inventor of the term "hypertext") has a chance to star in "Silicon Valley Story," his latest unfinished-work-in-progress. Nelson is never without his video camera, recording everything from casual dinners to product introductions. The film (we have a poster, so it must be real) will star Nelson as a major nerd who can't quite make relationships work and include Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse, playing Nelson's father. If you'd like to invest or see a 15-minute pre- alpha version, call Ted at Autodesk...
Film maker Brett Leonard (Lawnmower Man) is working on yet another this-is-your-future project: Sources tell us he's cutting a deal with a major network to do a TV series about "our digital future." To be set early in the next century, the series will appear this fall if everything goes as planned...
OK, so CDs are passe, the next cool thing for musicians on the digital edge is CD-ROM. Peter Gabriel is rumored to be producing a CD-ROM album, and Todd Rundgren already has. Even U2 is getting into the act with a CD-I-based image fest during its recent Zoo tour...
Quitaque, Texas, ("kit-a-quay" to you and me) has become the first "wireless city," opting to replace its wire-based telephone infrastructure with a digital spread-spectrum switch. Quitaque's 500 phone customers now chat via microwave, thanks to GTE and Interdigital. We thought it might be neat to place a wireless call, so we rang up Zeola Taylor, assistant manager at Allsup's, Quitaque's answer to the all-night convenience store (it was late, okay?) Zeola reports that while everyone knows about the new wireless switch, nothing much has really changed. "No news vans yet," she said...
The world is ready for cheap science fiction classics in electronic form at an "all you can read" price of 96 cents per week. You scarf the e- books via a Clarinet service on the Internet or other on-line services.
Playboy magazine has embarked on a new sideline: suing small electronic BBSes that allow scanned images of centerfold bunnies to be posted. And Playboy is winning - all to clear the way for Playboy to debut its own soft-porn BBS. The last BBS Playboy busted was racking in $3 million a year...
While we're on the topic of technologically savvy magazines, we think the recent ad in The New York Times for Forbes' ASAP (Forbes new technology mag) deserves another look. The fact that Forbes folded over its own cover speaks for itself...
And AT&T has developed an ATM card that can hold a digitized imprint of your voice as a security feature. We knew the pin number was a transition technology...
Speaking of codes and such, John Gilmore, our favorite anarchro-hacker, is still battling the Feds after forcing the declassification of two of four WWII cryptography texts he had discovered in a public library. Seems that in a fit of secrecy, the NSA "reclassified" the 50-year-old studies. Gilmore's basic point: anyone, not just the government, should be able to use good cryptography. Sounds fair to us. Look for coverage of the crypto story in future issues of Wired...
Up in Sonoma County, Calif., they don't get much computer crime, but a recent case involving a systems analyst is worth noting: when asked by his estranged wife to help with some computer problems, the systems analyst gave her a disk that erased all the information on her hard disk and left a bitter limerick on the screen. Yes, she is pressing charges...
