Pixel Pusher
"Face it, multimedia is crack - people get addicted," says Alex St. John, founder of WildTangent. But slow downloads can ruin a good trip. So, his Redmond-based company is hell-bent on creating a reliable player that lets Web sites quickly deliver 3-D games via PDA, dialup PC, and mobile phone. You may remember St. John as the Microsoft-made millionaire fired for insubordination and known for evangelizing DirectX, the set of APIs that made Windows a serious game platform. His recent work includes a play-by-email combat title based on the movie A Knight's Tale. "Our idea for 3-D is that the game model works," says St. John, whose top customer is Microsoft. "People say, 'Someday you'll be able to look at a sneaker in 3-D and spin it around.' Who the fuck wants to see a sneaker spin?"
Iconoclast
Unix never looked so good. Dressed up in Susan Kare's icons, Eazel's Nautilus desktop for Linux is a lesson in subtlety, whether or not the startup survives. The graphics forgo arrant animation and gratuitous fake shadows, and the screen space is usually devoted to thumbnail-sized peeks into various files and folders. Although her portfolio includes a host of big-name clients, from Autodesk to IBM, the San Francisco-based designer - best known for creating the Macintosh startup images - thinks she and her work should keep a low profile. "Icons shouldn't be branding devices," says Kare, whose current projects include building graphical elements to maximize the usability of phone displays. "The thing that differentiates them from one another should be the user's data."
Angel From Above
Have helicopter, will swing deals. Genghis Cohen (yes, he's named after that Genghis) is an only-in-Silicon Valley character. The New Zealand emigrant started an aviation school in San Jose two years ago and parlayed his rich 'copter connections into an angel investment outfit. The continuing dotcom decline has grounded the school, but his financial enterprise, Capital Quorum, is still aloft. Begun last year with stockbroker friend Chris Thompson, CQ comprises about 50 investors, including several of Cohen's flying students and cohorts. So far, the fledgling firm is backing two separate ventures with a total of just $1.2 million. That's tiny by John Doerr standards, but Cohen recently inked the first of what he predicts will be a flood of similar contracts - a profit-sharing partnership with Kiwi developers. "My aim is to stop New Zealand's brain drain," he says.
Exit Stage Write
Why work the registers at Taco Bell after pocketing a $165,000 book advance? Mike Daisey says he's doing follow-up research for his one-man show, 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com. After cashing out his shares two years ago, Daisey wrote and performed Dog Years, a monologue about his experiences at the etailer, from customer service rep to biz dev middle manager. His toils led him into a Harlequin-style romance: "It's about falling in love with an idea, a movement, and a person - Jeff Bezos," he says. The story ends with feelings of betrayal and the need for therapeutic (albeit comedic) relief. Daisey is taking his Seattle-based production to San Francisco this summer and to New York in the fall. Between stops, he'll be penning his Amazon memoir, due out next spring from Simon & Schuster's Free Press.
MUST READ
The RIAA's Low Watermark
Felten Talks Through the Paper
People
Jargon Watch
Bandwidth Blaster
Calculated Communiqués
Friendlier Fire
Anti-Drowning System
Wired Index
Raw Data
