Geek Speak
As executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tara Lemmey might be expected to have a serious wonk streak. Nope - she's pure geek. "I'm not a policy person," says the Net's new voice inside the Beltway, who comes to political advocacy after a 10-year career in the Internet trenches and having founded ad-tech company Narrowline. "The architecture is policy," she declares. "The products that create issues aren't made in Washington." Take the data-gathering side of one-to-one marketing. "Privacy,"she says, "is going to be white hot."
Unabooker
For Beau Friedlander, head of Context Books, publishing success means embracing the contradictions of the information age. Competing with the bigname houses, he says, demands technologies like "on-demand publishing and ebooks." Content-wise, it takes a juicy, controversial title - say, Ted Kaczynski's Truth v. Lies. "I'm interested in subjects that create a moral debate," the Context publisher says. The Unabook, to be released this summer, is sure to do just that. Says Friedlander: "It treads the line between a memoir and a defense."
New Principal
How did Sylvan Learning Systems become a Street darling? Ask Susan Harman. As a managing partner of Robertson Stephens, Harman handled IPOs for ed-tech outfits like Sylvan, CBT Group, and Computer Learning Centers. Her new holding company, Core Learning Group, has secured $45 million to turn firms that make K-12 content and vocational training into the next blue chips. IPOs aside, she's also trying to build ventures with staying power. "Most investors want quick returns, but education requires more patience," she says. "We're willing to wait."
Reel Learning
After selling his online video store, Reel.com, for $100 million, Stuart Skorman went to swim with wild dolphins at an atoll near Tahiti. Six months later he's done with luxuriating. "I'm not into Rolls-Royces," he says. "Now I'm champing at the bit." So he's back with Reel's original team, building a Web-based college called the Knowledge Project, due to open this fall. With tech execs as professors, the curriculum will unsurprisingly focus on Internet business skills. "I put up with schools that didn't fit my mind," Skorman says. "The child inside me wants to heal that."
Star Walker
Top-flight f/x may translate into box-office gold, but until recently it has been virtually impossible for filmmaking's technical elite to get a toehold on Hollywood Boulevard's gilded Walk of Fame. On June 3, Dennis Muren becomes the first effectsmeister to make his imprint on the venerated walkway. The Industrial Light & Magic guru, who was part of the original Star Wars team and worked on The Lost World and The Phantom Menace, has won eight Oscars for his f/x work. Yet the new kudo still comes as a surprise. "I've walked on those stars a million times," he says. "Never did I dream that someday people would be walking on me."
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