Apr 1, 1998 12:00 PM

Data Between The Lines

By Michael Grebb

| NEW MEDIA

| Data Between The Lines

Importing a Virtual Star

Business Models for Content Sites:

Amusement PARC

Big Red Book

Deja Vu All Over Again

<h4>#### dGate Communications CEOHal Krisbergh takes a down-and-dirty approach to Internet TV.</h4 Ahe cyberélite woo the cable industry with high tech gadgetry, Hal Krisbergh just shakes his head. "In a fight between a great white and a bobcat," he muses, "the bobcat's going to win if the fight is on land." Krisbergh, head of WorldGate Communications, says that such a fight is on in cable, where the PC guys are fish out of water.

WdGate is one of the few companies planning to jam data into the vertical blanking interval of television signals and let interactivity – sans the bells and whistles – take its course. Although the vertical blanking interval has been around as long as TV itself, no one has figured out what to do with it. Email and the Web, Krisbergh says, have changed that. He believes most customers will pay US$4.95 a month for email, Net access, and shopping and don't want a complicated PC-like TV apparatus.

Sar, however, Krisbergh's confidence might be premature. True, he's snagged deals with 30 cable operators for Channel HyperLinking (which inserts Web links within TV ads) and won firm deployments and trials with several other companies. But the industry is still ga-ga over the big-league cybernauts. Many are betting on TCI, the biggest UScable provider, which cut deals with Microsoft and Sun for millions of high tech converter boxes.

Kbergh remains defiant. "What does Gates know about television?" he asks. "This bobcat's going to win." Maybe if the fight stays on land.

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With ital heroine Lara Croft pushing sales of Tombder vimes past US$3 million, you'd think there'd be room for another virtual babe to pull in a big audience. So hopes HoriPro, the Japanese talent agency for the ultra-lifelike virtual star Kyoko Date. Kyoko's bubble-gum personality and songs were designed to appeal to Japanese teens. While her CDs have sold, she hasn't translated into an übersuccess. So HoriPro set her up with a day job: spokesmodel for Oz Interactive, a San Francisco firm that creates virtual worlds for PCs.

ampany with roots in dance music, plans to put a Euro-style spin on Kyoko, toughening her up for new audiences. So far, Kyoko earns her milk money as a model for Oz's 3-D streaming Web software (<a href=om/</a>). Lr term, the company hopes to develop her into an entertainment icon, perhaps featuring her in concerts or ads. This may involve computer surgery to modify her looks. Says Oz spokesperson Daddi Gudbergsson: "Should the German Kyoko Date look the same as the Japanese? Is the American version going to be a little taller, a little thinner, maybe have bigger breasts? These are the exciting opportunities of working with a virtual star."

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l it amusement park in a box. Opening this summer in Orlando, Florida, Disney-Quest is a high tech indoor entertainment center akin to GameWorks – but with a Disney spin, of course. A pinball game transforms players into human balls who control motion with their bodies, while CyberSpace Mountain lets visitors create rides on a PC and then take them for a spin on a motion simulator. The attractions in Orlando – and at the 20 to 30 sites to open worldwide – will be refreshed every year. After all, the ultimate Disney quest is to make you come back. <str

Vladimir Gusinsky:plotting to deliver Russia into the digital 21st century. –></p

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needs," pronounced Vladimir Gusinsky with characteristic immodesty recently. "My contribution to the new society is vital for its survival." An exaggerated claim, perhaps, but at 46, with a personal fortune said to be approaching US$1 billion, Gusinsky has enjoyed a meteoric rise. Barely a decade has passed since he was a struggling play director – now he's not only one of Boris Yeltsin's tennis partners, but the mogul atop Russia's first and biggest media empire. Be it news, TV, satellite, or the Internet, Gusinsky is determined to deliver Russia into the 21st century. During t

ung of glasnost in the mid-'80s, Gusinsky tried to break into big-time theater. At one low point, he drove a cab to make ends meet. When the empire's days ran out, Gusinsky merged into the capitalist vanguard. In 1989 he founded Most, one of Russia's first commercial banks. After winning government business and opening dozens of new branches, Gusinsky was flush. But, as he said recently, he "never intended to become just a banker." So in 19

eturned to his entertainment roots, launching Russia's first privately owned TV network, Nezavisimoye Televidenie, or NTV. In short order, Gusinsky's conglomerate grew tentacles. Now, he also owns a radio station, magazines, and newspapers, as well as a publishing house. Leap-frogging a crumbling telecommunications infrastructure, in November he will bring his first satellite online, delivering television and data services to the country's 10 time zones. And NTV-Plus plans to provide Net access to Russians in the coming years. For all

eomic "independence," NTV's relations with the state have at times turned incestuous. During Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign, NTV boosted the politician. The network's director even planned Yeltsin's campaign strategy. But by late1994, Gusinsky had grown too big for certain folks – an armed presidential guard stormed Most headquarters, seizing files. Gusinsky fled to London. Today he continues to live abroad, occasionally returning to his stately dacha outside Moscow with an entourage that's burly even by Russian standards. By E

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ber em#### d from the woods a madman, but he also has become a mad prophet. By Jon Katz</h4> The Unabomb ed from the heartland woods like a prophet from hell, reminding us once more that technology is not just a word – it invokes a moral drama we can't afford to avoid. There lingers in Kaczynski's confrontation with the justice system an unsettling feeling: the most deranged player in the Unadrama is the one who sees the real issues. More than a

oication of evil, the Unabomber is the inevitable by-product of an era in which technological change has occurred so rapidly that it's generated enormous fear, confusion, and misinformation. The Luddites, whose ideology has infected so much of journalism, politics, and academe, who've railed about the dangers of new information technologies, have plenty of soul-searching to do when some nightmare creature like the Unabomber emerges. Even still,

eincreasingly swept up by the digital age, many wonder: Is so much change good or bad? Are we putting ourselves at risk? Is our privacy being invaded, our culture demeaned? Are our children in danger? Is technology autonomous and out of control? As political

est Langdon Winner wrote in his brilliant 1977 book Autonomous Techny: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, what's odd aboe situation we now face is that one observer after another "discovers" technology and then announces it as something new. In our society, these announcements are often made by self-anointed moral and intellectual guardians who invariably find anything new alarming. But Winner r

ds that there is nothing new about this process or the anxiety it provokes. Unthinking journalists, academics, and politicians who obsess about digital pornography, social isolation, and violence echo themes that date back to medieval times. In the digit

gwe face countless questions about the implications of scientific breakthroughs, new findings, new machinery, information systems, and technology in our lives. But where can we go for intelligent, balanced, useful, and open discussions about technological advances and their consequences? Almost nowhere in modern media or politics. Is it really

anishing, then, that eventually a twisted man would kill or maim to stop the very technologies that – we are constantly warned – spread violence and degradation, stupefy our chil-dren, and destroy learning and culture? "Many people

eand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable," the Unabomber wrote in his manifesto. "But we don't think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped." With such arguments, this demented yet lucid individual confounded judges, prosecutors, psychiatrists, lawyers, journalists, and the US Justice Department, battling them to a near standstill from his cabin and, later, his jail cell. Winner poses

euestions central to any discussion of technology and modern life: How thoroughly do people know their own technology? To what extent do human beings control technology? Is technology a neutral tool to human ends? During the U

athese questions have not been seriously or thoughtfully addressed by major newspapers, newsmagazines, or television networks in any sustained way. The Unabombe

ievery one of Winner's questions – in the lethal actions he took, in the manifesto he manipulated two major American newspapers into publishing, and even in the way he exerted his will over the trial. Despite the

ethe Unabomber's court case, our problems with technology – the apparent inspiration for this trail of death and pain – are left unresolved. When it comes to responding to technology, it is We the Media who seem paranoid and delusional. By Kaitl

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ess ador at Palo Alto, California's Interval Research Corporation, Louise Velázquez is planting the seeds of a technological convergence in Hollywood's music industry. The former president of Quincy Jones Productions says she's "infiltrating The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences with musicians and technologists" to sway the future of sound distribution – while introducing tune-playing pals like Herbie Hancock to wireless modems and other electrogadgets. In May 1996 she took up residence at Interval, the blue-sky research lab started six years ago with a US$100 million investment from Paul Allen. Her job is to draw talent to the enclave of 100 artists, musicians, physicists, journalists, and computer scientists and turn the stuff they dream up into profitable businesses. Headliners like

inderson and Thomas Dolby Robertson collaborate with Interval on projects Velázquez says most companies wouldn't touch. Until the groovy new technologies are ready to leave the labs, Velázquez is sworn to secrecy on them. Having learned from Xerox PARC not to give away valuable research, Interval draws talent partly because it guards its intellectual property so well – either keeping know-how in house, spinning off a new venture, or selling its technology. Laurie Anderson'

eonic Theater Company is the latest Interval-funded, Velázquez-counseled venture to move into the limelight. In mid-1998, the company opens Life, a live-viinstaon, in Krems, Austria, and at the Whitney Museum in New York. Later in 1999, it will début a Moby Dick operaouise suc creative people," says ETC manager Larry Larson. "She fosters both business and experimentation. Velázquez is phi

pal about Interval-style businesses. "Sometimes it's like a collision where two atoms fuse," she says. "But convergence isn't as clean as it sounds." By Amy Johns

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visionfounder of German furniture company Vitra and an icon of 20th-century design, has made a career of taking risks on bold artistic talent. So it's little wonder his biography, Chairman, is a remarkable endeavor as well. In 592 pages, 650 photos, and very few words, design luminary Tibor Kalman crafts a witty, cinematic homage to Fehlbaum. This is the Big Red Book chair lovers and design-minded types will want to carry – or maybe, given its heft, sit on. By Mike Romano</

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d CTO han Myhrvold predicted in Slate that Web readers wouldn't pay online subscriptions until they became both addicted to the medium and bored by their free options. "Imagine trying to sell subscriptions to HBO back in the 1950s," he wrote. "People clustered around their primitive sets to watch the damnedest things (Milton Berle for instance)." Slate has, at various times, heeded and ignored this warning. This spring, Microsoft's epub tries subscriptions a second time. It's not alone: nearly a

eajor Web publications, including Salon, MSNBC, Money.com, and BusinessWeekOnline, have announced plans to charge subscriptions. Although ad sales on the

up significantly – to US$597 million last year according to Cowles/Simba Information – most dollars go to high-traffic sites like search engines, as online publications struggle to meet payroll. The Wall Street Journal

rive Edition is considered a model. WSJ.com boasts 100,000 readers paying $49 a year. But subscriptions are ha

anacea. In fact, the Journal lost a third of its online readers when it began charging in 1996. So, ezines hope to furth

otheir botttom lines with pay-per-view transactions and the sale of reader information. As Berle once said, "If

rity doesn't knock, build a door."