Nouveau Niche
So, Meg, you just won the IPO lottery and eBay's market cap soared above $4 billion - are you going to Disneyland? Not quite yet, president and CEO Meg Whitman confesses. "I feel like I'm sitting in a whirlwind." Corporate wallet fattened, her first priority is to launch a marketing campaign that includes radio and print buys - and perhaps TV, if she can figure out how to use the tube to reach eBay's diverse clientele of vintage widget scavengers and eclectic watch collectors (see "My Obsession," page 102).
Thriller
Games and movies have a lot in common," according to screenwriter, movie producer, and game developer Dean Devlin. "Both are incredibly expensive, and take about a year to make." And with that, the cofounder of Centropolis Entertainment appears to dismiss the unsavory experience of penning and producing Godzilla. Of course, Devlin has also had cinematic success - he wrote and produced Independence Day - but now he's after Internet glory. Having launched the online game rendition of the lizard pic, he's completing Centropolis's second Netventure game, Amerikon. Next he's considering a joystick collaboration with horrormeister John Carpenter. Says Devlin: "I'm addicted to gaming."
MisRepresentative
US Representative Mike Oxley, 54, spent a couple of years as an FBI agent, so he knows more than the average Congress member about how to catch crooks. Unfortunately for R-rated webheads, however, the nine-term Ohio Republican recently focused his formidable skills on cracking down on the Net. When US Senator Dan Coats's bill that would force commercial Web sites to restrict access to material "harmful to minors" got bottled up (see "Girls! Girls! Links!" page 68), Oxley whipped the proposal into shape. Pacifying service providers with new exemptions, Oxley crippled the opposition and overran last-minute White House objections to get CDA II signed into law. "He was dogged in his pursuit of this bill," says Alan Davidson, counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Unfortunately, it's unconstitutional. A-plus for tactics, D for substance."
You've Got Links!
"I'd like to take credit for building the team that built the world's largest dialup network," says Michael Connors, AOL's president of technology. When Connors started at AOL in 1992, the service handled 2,000 users at a time and had a market cap of $23 million. 1998: 800,000 people log on together and the company's valued at $31 billion. So, when Connors recently called it quits, AOL put him on the board of its foundation and added "emeritus" to his title - the biz equivalent of retiring a jersey. His new goal: "a single-digit handicap."
Ain't Easy
Name the famed author who recently asked: "Are we alone in the universe? Are we an example of what is out there? The DNA code is the first half of the answer." If you guessed mystery scribe Walter Mosley, creator of the Easy Rawlins novels, you've probably read his recently released SF book, Blue Light. The extraterrestrial nature tome is a surprise to all but our president's favorite living writer. "I got paid to write mysteries," recalls Mosley, who had a devil of a time finding a publisher for his otherworldly work. "But I don't like to be put in ghettos." Next up, Mosley plans to turn the story line into a trilogy about global redemption through galactic radiation - assuming, of course, his next Blue Light gets a green one.
MUST READ
Ode to Risk
iMac Attack
Clean Slate?
Jargon Watch
The Life of the Party
Burn Rate Olympics: 1998's IPOs
Who Will Rock 1999
Home Depot Sleeps In
Boffo Box Office
Joysticking It to the Academy
Sneaking Past Windows
Hype List
Girls! Girls! Links!
Face Value
Inside the First "Internet War"
Built for Speed
People
Been There, Done That
The Bugs in Your Future
Are You on the Leper List?
Pandora's Boom Box
Tomorrow Today
Dead-Talent Agency
Future Projections
The California Spammer Hammer
Tired/Wired
Tips From an Ex-Spam King
Raw Data
