Sherotic City
Canadian journalist Nicole Blades, a contributor to Essence and The Nation, was a regular reader of women's magazines, but they never spoke to her. "I was tired of the Cosmo approach: How to get a man, how to keep a man, how to lose 10 pounds," she says.
So Blades, along with graphic designer Natasha Kong, founded SheNetworks (www.shenetworks.com), a women's portal launched this summer as a competitor to - and a cure for - the abundance of e-Lifetime channels. SheNetworks, based in San Francisco, is aiming younger and smarter with content that's closer to Salon than Oprah. Subsites like Sherotic ("What's your favorite masturbation mode?") and SheReads (home to lit "for the broad mind" and a newsstand review called Mag Hag) rub shoulders with fashion and fitness sections, with nary a diet tip or soccer mom in sight. In the works: a birth-control reminder tool that pings a user's PDA.
Starmaker
When everyone else is selling gigahertz, Satjiv Chahil, chief marketing officer at Palm, likes to sell glamour. As head of marketing at then-struggling Apple, Chahil helped give the PowerBook star power with glitzy product placements: The laptop shared the screen with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible and Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Now, as Palm labors to distinguish its devices from look-alike PDAs, Chahil's latest brainstorm is the special edition Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx. The aqua brushed-metal handheld (available at www.claudiaschiffer.com) comes loaded with software chosen by the supermodel-actor herself. (How about a calendar app - with swimsuits!) "I can't take full credit - she's an avid Palm enthusiast, and she approached us," Chahil says modestly. "I subscribe to Woody Allen's philosophy: Just show up."
Cryptolexicon
Where does the National Security Agency go to get its Web intel? To Cryptome.org, the site of New York architect John Young. Young began scanning and archiving intelligence records four years ago, after becoming interested in surveillance technology through a cypherpunks mailing list. He's built his database of more than 6,000 government docs, journal articles, and news reports by scouring .gov sites and filing Freedom of Information Act requests - and he's also received secret papers anonymously. The NSA pings Cryptome every day to see what's new. The FBI, on behalf of other governments, has asked him to remove some posts, but Young, who remains a one-man knowledge base, refuses to be cowed. "I don't have anything at stake: I don't have any operation, and I don't have a board of directors. That's why I can put up stuff that no one else will."
Serial Networkers
Former Cisco Systems CTO Judy Estrin and her husband, senior VP Bill Carrico, jumped ship in May to launch Packet Design, their fourth startup together (after Bridge Communications, Network Computing Devices, and Precept Software, all successful network technology companies). The two believe that simply slapping on more servers and switches to handle Internet traffic, while good for companies like Cisco, is bad for the future. Instead, Packet Design (www.packetdesign.com) intends to increase the performance and scalability of the Net through protocol improvements, with the help of legendary Internet architect Van Jacobson, onboard as full-time chief scientist. Despite several big stock market scores, the pair say they're less interested in exit strategies than in making a difference. "We don't want to be a big company," Estrin says of Packet Design. "We want to be an important company."
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