I can say this now, since I no longer work at EQO and have no vested interest in partnering with Cingular, and have been waiting for a long time to do so:

I have never been so professionally insulted, so humbled, and so totally and completely discouraged by any interaction with a telecommunications company, as I have been by Cingular’s misguided, counterproductive, and inane FastPitch program. If you are a software, service, or application developer I would encourage you to boycott this program, and if you are considering a partnership with Cingular (now, comically, marketing itself as AT&T) my advice is: Don’t.

The FastPitch program is ostensibly supposed to provide a vetting mechanism for the hundreds of ideas which cross the paths of wireless carriers every year, and is somehow supposed to encourage developers to bring those ideas into Cingular’s service development organization. It’s an interesting idea, that has been absolutely ruined by inexperienced, arrogant personnel, and should IMHO be the laughing stock of the mobile industry.

Most carriers employ Service Development Managers, Business Deveopment Managers, and Channel Managers to entertain partnerships with 3rd party developers in order to bring new and innovative products and services to their customer base. These people actively pursue and field new ideas from all over the place, and are mandated to come up with new ideas and bring the good ones to market.

Not so with Cingular, it would appear. Instead, they’ve attempted to create a formalized process which subjects potential partners to a “Gong Show” style 3-minute panel pitch, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff of third-party applications in an efficient manner. But the effect is rather the opposite. Here’s Cingular’s boilerplate (and believe me, the whole program is boilerplate) spiel:

The FastPitch session at CTIA is an opportunity for the Cingular Developer Program and Business Development teams to gather preliminary information about ISV applications. These events are not designed to be lengthy go-to-market discussions with prospective partners.

ISVs registered for the Cingular FastPitch sessions at CTIA are asked to bring a 3 minute demonstration and pitch to present to our team. You will have 12-15 minutes total with our group, which will encompass 3 minutes for you to present your application and 9 to 12 minutes of survey about your solution.

This sounds like a compromise to the usual method of business development in Telecom: find an authorized representative, build a rapport, create an internal advocate, and work together to understand each company’s motivations and market drivers, and hopefully end up as partners bringing a new service to market.

But in practice, even the somewhat plausibly workable structure of the boilerplate was corrupted. First, when you arrived for your FastPitch appointment you were given nametags, filled in and signed a form which effectively nullified your rights to ownership of your own intellectual property, and were asked to queue in a lineup of other hapless courtiers. I stood behind one gentleman whose idea had something to do with birdhouses, and in front of a couple from a major software vendor.

When you got to the front of the line, there before you sat four Cingular employees, each in their Mid-20s (I’m guessing they weren’t VPs) who would only tell you their first name and would not, for love nor money, give you their business cards. Instead of pitching all four of these people together, who for all I know were junior sales reps from the local mall, and engaging in a quality 15-minute discussion, you instead pitched each one individually, for three minutes. Todd and I attempted to do this, but our 9-slide PowerPoint and product demo overflowed every time. During our session, just before we were to start in on the third intern, he got up and left, leaving us cooling our heels for three minutes… and we couldn’t help but chuckle at the insanity of the process. A woman surveying the whole scene held a stopwatch and literally yanked the birdhouse guy out of the way to ensure that we advanced to each successive intern in a timely fashion.

The whole process was comical. The interns asked no questions. They could not have possibly discussed our company or services with each other. Instead, they graded us on forms, wrote occasional notes (which they carefully concealed) and generally looked disinterested and weary (apparently they were subjected to these 3-minute pitches all day — accounting for lunch and time slippage, that’s 105 pitches per day for three days).

With that process and volume, I’m not sure who could pass through the filter and make it into Cingular’s developer program, but even when we did it really did little to further our objectives to work with Cingular. There were still no real points-of-contact, no internal advocates, not steps forward to advance the conversation. Instead, we were now being marketed to with the same disdain as Cingular’s victims customers.

Other carriers have indeed taken a more enlightened approach. Vodafone has a team in Walnut Creek that I’ve gotten to know quite well, and their role is to search for new ideas and applications, reaching out to partners where possible. And most ascribe to the traditional method of building personal relationships with companies who have interesting applications.

For Cingular/AT&T, though, I can think of no more appropriate fate than to be out-innovated by competitors and outsmarted by third parties who figure out a way to relegate them to the dumb-pipe providers that they are ultimately destined to become. And for the employees who represented their company so well during our FastPitch settings, I’m reminded of the myriad job postings from 2001 which were subtitled “Telecom workers need not apply.” … these may experience a renaissance during the next great Telecom purge which will inevitably arise.

-Ian.

(July 10) — It’s a new form of adult entertainment, and men are paying thousands of dollars to shoot naked women with paint ball guns. They’re coming to Las Vegas to do it. This bizarre new sport has captured the attention of people around the world, but Channel 8 Eyewitness News reporter LuAnne Sorrell is the only person who has interviewed the game’s founder.

George Evanthes has never been hunting. “Originally I’m from New York. What am I going to hunt? Squirrels? Someone’s cats. Someone’s dogs? I don’t think so,” said Evanthes. Now that he’s living in Las Vegas , he’s finally getting his chance to put on his camouflage, grab a rifle and pull the trigger, but what’s in his scope may surprise you. He’s not hunting ducks or even deer. He’s hunting woman. Naked women.

“I’ve done this three times,” says Nicole, one of the three women allowing themselves to be shot at. “I’ve done this seven times,” says Skyler, another woman participating. “I’ve done it seven times,” says Gidget the third woman.

Hunting for Bambi is the brain child of Michael Burdick. Men pay anywhere from $5000 to $10,000 for the chance to come to the middle of the desert to shoot what they call “Bambi’s” with a paint ball gun. Burdick says men have come from as far away as Germany. The men get a video tape of their hunt to take home and show their friends.

Burdick says safety is a concern, but the women are not allowed to wear protective gear — only tennis shoes. Today while the Eyewitness News cameras were rolling, one woman chose to wear bikini bottoms but normally all they wear is their birthday suits.

Burdick says hunters are told not shoot the women above the chest, but admits not all hunters follow the rules. “The main goal is to be true as true to nature as possible. I don’t go deer hunting and see a deer with a football helmet on so I don’t want to see one on my girl either,” said Burdick.

The paint balls that come out of the guns travel at about 200 miles per hour. Getting hit with one stings even with clothes on, and when they hit bare flesh, they are powerful enough to draw blood.

Evanthes shot one of the women and says, “I got the one with the biggest rack.”

Gidget is the one who took the paint ball shot to the rear. She says, “It hurt. It really hurt. I didn’t think it was going to be that bad. When asked if she cried she says,”yeah, a little bit.”

So why do women agree to strip down and run around the desert dodging paint balls? Nicole says it’s good money. “I mean it’s $2500 if you don’t get hit. You try desperately not to and it’s $1000 if you do, said Nicole.

Now both the men and women say this is all good, clean fun, but in Part 2 of this story, reporter LuAnne Sorrell spoke with a psychologist who says for some men playing out this sexual aggression may lead to other more violent acts against women.

http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S56380&nav8XGqk0

-Ian.

Begin forwarded message:

> ———- Forwarded message ———-
> Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 10:44:23 -0500
> From: Dave Farber
> To: ip
> Subject: [IP] VERY INTERESTING — Some execs scored big as company
> values
> plunged
>
> http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/business/4696887.htm

> Some execs scored big as company values plunged
> By Chris O’Brien and Jack Davis
> Mercury News
>
> Running companies that became almost worthless didn’t stop dozens of
> Silicon
> Valley insiders from pocketing billions of dollars by selling their
> stock
> during the tech boom and bust.
>
> The Mercury News examined the stock sales record of insiders at 40
> companies
> in Silicon Valley that have lost virtually all their value since the
> stock
> market peaked in March 2000. The executives, board members and venture
> capitalists at these companies walked off with $3.41 billion, while
> their
> companies’ total market value plunged 99.8 percent to a mere $229.5
> million
> at the end of September.
>
> It represented a remarkable transfer of wealth from the pockets of
> thousands
> of anonymous investors — from day traders to pension funds — into the
> wallets of executives and directors who turned out to be winners even
> when
> their companies became some of Silicon Valley’s biggest losers.
>
> Coming at a time of public discontent with corporate ethics, the
> disconnect
> between the performance of these companies and the executives’
> fantastic
> rewards is symptomatic of the problems that have ignited calls to
> reform
> executive compensation and corporate governance.
>
> “The people who bought the stock they sold are the victims here,”
> said
> Charles Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the
> University of Delaware. “This money was taken from investors who
> didn’t
> have the same information as these insiders and lost their money.”
>
> The Mercury News compiled a list of local companies whose stock price
> dropped at least 99.5 percent from March 2000, when the Nasdaq peaked,
> to
> Sept. 30, 2002. Those companies were then ranked by the amount of
> stock sold
> by insiders — roughly 300 — since the beginning of 1997.
>
> This means the list leaves off some spectacular flameouts where
> executives
> weren’t shy about selling stock. For instance, JDS Uniphase missed the
> cut,
> with a 97.1 percent drop, even though executives sold $1.17 billion in
> stock
> between May 1997 and November 2002, even as the optical components
> company
> was firing two-thirds of its employees. Also absent is software company
> Ariba, whose stock dropped 98.7 percent and where insiders sold $1.26
> billion between October 1999 and November 2002.
>
> The survey also excludes some of the valley’s household names. Not
> included
> are John Chambers, who between August 1997 and February 2000 sold
> $296.2
> million in Cisco stock; Larry Ellison, who in January 2001 sold $894.8
> million in Oracle stock; and Scott McNealy, who from May 1997 to July
> 2002
> sold $107.9 million in Sun Microsystems stock. These corporate giants
> generally are older and remain strong competitors even as their stock
> prices
> have tanked.
>
> Supposed good bets
>
> The 40 companies on the Mercury News list are primarily software,
> hardware
> and telecommunications companies — the infrastructure providers that
> were
> supposed to be good bets rather than flighty dot-coms.
>
> These companies are a seriously wounded bunch. While not true of every
> company, as a group, they have a variety of problems. Most had major
> restructurings that led to mass firings. Fifteen went bankrupt.
> Several more
> are running out of cash.
>
> Almost half the companies face lawsuits from angry shareholders. Five
> of the
> Top 15 companies had to restate earnings, some from periods when
> insiders
> were selling stock. And a handful of the companies have been cited in
> investigations by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission
> into
> investment banks accused of manipulating IPOs.
>
> Though option grants usually get the most attention, much of the stock
> sold
> by insiders at these companies were shares they gained from being
> founders
> or early-stage venture investors prior to IPOs. Once their standard
> 180-day
> lock-up periods ended, many of these insiders began selling their
> stock like
> there was no tomorrow.
>
> For some of their companies, there isn’t much of a tomorrow:
>
> € John Little, founder and CEO of Portal Software, sold $127.5 million
> of
> stock in Portal, which is on the verge of being delisted by Nasdaq.
> Portal,
> which sells billing software, topped the Mercury News list with
> insiders
> selling $704 million in stock — more than its total revenue since the
> May
> 1999 IPO.
>
> € David Peterschmidt, CEO of Inktomi, sold $90.5 million of stock at
> the No.
> 2 company on the list. Inktomi, once a promising Internet search engine
> company, in November sold off a major division to raise cash it needs
> to
> survive.
>
> € K.B. Chandrasekhar, founder and former CEO of the former Exodus
> Communications, cashed out $135.1 million in stock at the Web hosting
> company before it went bankrupt. Chandrasekhar is now founder and CEO
> of
> Jamcracker. Exodus was bought out of bankruptcy by Cable & Wireless,
> which
> recently announced more layoffs at the hosting division.
>
> € Dennis Barsema, former CEO of Redback Networks, sold $138.4 million
> in
> stock before he left in July 2000 after 2 1/2 years at the helm.
> Barsema
> later became CEO at Onetta, another networking start-up. He donated $20
> million in stock to his alma mater, Northern Illinois University.
> Meanwhile,
> Redback announced another round of layoffs Nov. 14 and says it may
> have to
> raise more financing to stay afloat.
>
> € Jerry Shaw-Yau Chang, former CEO of Clarent, sold a measly $16.5
> million,
> though insiders at his telecom company dumped $355.8 million. Mired in
> accounting irregularities, the company has restated financial
> statements for
> 2000 and part of 2001, and been unable to report earnings for most of
> 2002.
>
> € Thomas Jermoluk, former CEO of At Home, sold $50.3 million before the
> cable broadband giant filed for bankruptcy. The company, known as
> Excite@Home, once boasted a market value of $13 billion before
> vaporizing
> following squabbles with its main shareholder and partner, AT&T.
> Jermoluk is
> now a venture partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
>
> Executives at every company contacted either did not return phone
> calls or
> declined to comment, in many cases citing pending litigation. The one
> exception was Frederick D. Lawrence, former CEO of Adaptive Broadband,
> who
> agreed — after speaking with his lawyer — to discuss executive
> compensation though not the specifics of his company.
>
> He pointed out that executive pay plans are publicly available and
> that most
> investors never bother to read them. And when insiders sell stock,
> they must
> also publicly disclose the sales in filings to the SEC.
>
> “People really work hard in these industries,” Lawrence said. “They
> spend
> hours away from friends and family. Although that’s not an excuse for
> any
> poor behavior.”
>
> No surprise
>
> However, Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, a research
> center that
> focuses on corporate governance, said the heavy insider stock sales
> are no
> surprise. Minow is a leading critic of allowing insiders to sell their
> stock
> because it creates the temptation to push the envelope on things like
> accounting.
>
> “They sell the stock and then they restate the earnings,” Minow said.
> “That brings it one step closer to being a Ponzi scheme.”
>
> The increasing use of stock and options to compensate executives over
> the
> past decade grew out of a broader shareholder value movement. The idea
> was
> to align the interests of executives with the stockholders who, in
> theory,
> are more important than employees or managers.
>
> But the practice has come under fire from critics who say stock grants
> have
> forced executives to become too focused on short-term results and doing
> whatever it takes to boost the stock price. That in turn can lead to
> everything from laying off employees after a bad quarter to feeling
> pressure
> to bend or break accounting rules to make the numbers.
>
> “Their decisions are distorted,” said Neelam Jain, assistant
> professor at
> Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University. “What the
> managers
> are trying to do is maximize their own profits and not the firm’s
> profits.”
>
> Graef Crystal, a leading compensation expert in Las Vegas, believes the
> problem has been overblown. He points out that while many executives
> sold
> their stock, many of them could have sold far more, which they elected
> to
> keep and which eventually became worthless.
>
> Did they know?
>
> “The fact that they left huge amounts of money on the table does not
> suggest they knew something was coming,” Crystal said.
>
> But the criticism of these insider stock sales continues to grow. That
> backlash increased in November, when the Conference Board released an
> annual
> survey of 2,841 companies in 14 industries that showed executive pay
> and
> perks continued to rise in 2001 even as the stock market and economy
> slumped.
>
> At the same time executive compensation has exploded, bankruptcies have
> soared and publicly traded companies are facing record numbers of
> shareholder lawsuits. According to the Securities Class Action
> Clearinghouse
> at Stanford Law School, the number of shareholder suits rose from 213
> in
> 2000 to 488 in 2001 — despite a law passed in 1996 by Congress to
> discourage such litigation.
>
> While many companies dismiss such litigation as a nuisance, observers
> say
> many corporate insiders still underestimate the anger of investors who
> lost
> big sums during the boom and bust and are still feeling burned.
>
> “This is not a victimless crime,” said Charlie Cray, director of
> Citizen
> Works’ Campaign for Corporate Reform. “The argument is that they’re
> taking
> risks. But they’re taking risks with other people’s money.
>
> “This is really a question of fairness.”

Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool By Paul Boutin 02:00 AM Dec. 06, 2002 PT

SANTA CLARA, California — Attention, Wi-Fi users: The Department of Homeland Security sees wireless networking technology as a terrorist threat.

That was the message from experts who participated in working groups under federal cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke and shared what they learned at this week’s 802.11 Planet conference. Wi-Fi manufacturers, as well as home and office users, face a clear choice, they said: Secure yourselves or be regulated.

“Homeland Security is putting people in place who will be in a position to say, ‘If you’re going to get broken into … we’re going to start regulating,'” said Cable and Wireless security architect Shannon Myers in a panel dubbed “Homeland Security vs. Wi-Fi.”

Myers was one of several consultants for President Bush’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, which is finalizing its National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.

Since being named special advisor to the president for cyberspace security last year, Clarke has stressed wireless access points as a national security threat.

“Companies throughout the country have networks that are wide open because of wireless LANs…. Millions of houses are getting connected, which means that more and more are getting vulnerable,” Clarke told attendees at the Black Hat Security Briefings in Las Vegas earlier this year.

“We know that (an attack) could bring down the network of this country very quickly. Once you’re on the network, it doesn’t matter where you got in,” said Daniel Devasirvatham, who headed the Homeland Security task force for the Wireless Communications Association International trade association.

Devasirvatham said the telecom industry was represented at security planning talks with federal agencies, but the wireless sector itself was not.

“Do you consider yourself part of the telecom industry?” he asked the 802.11 Planet audience. “If you’re a Nethead instead of a Bellhead, you probably don’t. I think there’s a major disconnect here.”

But Myers acknowledged that regulators were frustrated in their search for a quick fix to plug Wi-Fi holes.

“There’s just not a lot of technology out there right now that can be used to secure the technology in place,” she said. “They’re not at a point where they can say, ‘This will solve the problem,’ and mandate it.”

Rather, the most recent draft of the National Strategy document lists stopgap steps that home and office Wi-Fi users should take to make their networks harder to crack. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Wireless Network Security document contains more detailed guidelines.

Speakers called on corporate Wi-Fi customers to participate in creating security enhancements and best practices, lest regulators do it for them. “Expert advice needs to be obtained from more than just the industry that makes the equipment,” Devasirvatham said.

Conference attendees were split on the potential of wireless nodes as terrorist access points.

Boingo CEO Sky Dayton suggested turnkey security standards under development would improve the technology’s reputation. “It’s possible to secure a wireless network today,” he said. “But it needs to get easier.”

—

———–

– It’s more secure – It works on existing gear (if vendors hurry up and update) – It’s non-proprietary

-Ian.

—– http://www.hometoys.com/releases/oct02/wi-fi_02.htm

Wi-Fi Alliance Announces Standards-Based Security Solution to Replace WEP

Wi-Fi Protected Access Provides Strong, Standards-Based Security and Works With Existing Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wireless LAN Products

Mountain View, CA, October 31, 2002 — The Wi-Fi Alliance announced today a security solution based on an IEEE standards effort called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to replace the existing WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). This solution is designed to work in the products on the market today and is expected to first appear in Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products during the first quarter of 2003. Most vendors are expected to offer firmware and software updates for Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products currently in use.

HomeTech Solutions “Enterprises, small businesses and home users need a stronger standards-based security solution than WEP and they need it now,” said Wi-Fi Alliance chairman Dennis Eaton. “The Wi-Fi Alliance worked with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 Standards Working Group for Wireless Local Area Networks to deliver a robust wireless LAN security solution meeting the immediate needs of the marketplace. This approach allows the industry to bring a strong, standards-based security solution to the market today while giving the IEEE 802.11 Task Group I the time to complete and finalize the full 802.11i Robust Security Network amendment to the existing wireless LAN standard. Security is, and will continue to be, the highest priority for the Wi-Fi Alliance and for the industry,” continued Eaton.

“The bar for security is always rising and the development of robust security solutions take time,” commented Stuart J. Kerry, Chairman of the IEEE 802.11Standards Working Group for Wireless Local Area Networks. “WPA will meet the needs of both manufacturers and customers for the foreseeable future and the IEEE will also continue its work on the full 802.11i amendment which is expected to be completed mid next year. This will be the next step in the evolution of standards-based solutions for IEEE 802.11 networks,” continued Kerry.

See Wi-Fi at COMDEX Wi-Fi wireless LANs will be on display at COMDEX (Booth 3160), November 18-22 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

About the Wi-Fi Alliance The Wi-Fi Alliance is a nonprofit organization formed in 1999 to certify interoperability of IEEE 802.11 products and to promote them as the global, wireless LAN standard across all market segments. The Wi-Fi Alliance has instituted a test suite that defines how member products are tested to certify that they are interoperable with other Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products. These tests are conducted at an independent laboratory. Membership in the Wi-Fi Alliance is open to all companies that support the 802.11 family of standards. Wi-Fi Alliance now comprises over 170 members that offer over 450 Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products from the world’s leading companies. For more information, please visit www.wi-fi.org .

———–

POOR Q. In one James Bond film after another, the top secret service engineer has provided whiz-bang gizmos for the cars that Agent 007 drives. The Aston Martin Vanquish in the latest, 20th, movie, “Die Another Day,” has machine guns under the hood and rockets behind the grille — nothing new in the Bond world. The film’s really novel effects are not Q’s inventions, but marketing gimmicks. Lasers and atomic ray guns are passé; brand synergy is what drives Bond these days. Advertisement Alt Text

The Bond films, of course, are the ultimate product placement for automakers. This time, Ford is the “supplier of choice,” thanks to its ownership of Aston Martin, the small British automaker that supplied the most notable of all Bond cars, the DB5 grand tourer made famous in “Goldfinger.” (A replica of that car is displayed in the International Spy Museum in Washington.)

In “Die Another Day,” which opens on Nov. 22, Pierce Brosnan drives the Vanquish, Halle Berry has a Thunderbird and there’s a Jaguar XKR for the villain, Zao (Rick Yune). Advertisements for all three cars are tied to the film, and there are cameos by other cars from the Ford Motor Company’s stable: a Range Rover, a Volvo S60 and an S80, the Ford StreetKa from Europe, a vintage Fairlane and a GT40 racecar.

Such a wealth of on-screen placements from one company hasn’t been seen since the short-lived “Viper” television series, in which the Dodge sports car was chased by cops in Chryslers, leaving scattered Jeeps and Voyager minivans in its wake.

Ford’s bonds have been downgraded on Wall Street, but Bond’s Fords are a blue-chip product placement. Estimates of the value of the deal among Ford; Eon Productions, which owns the rights to James Bond; and MGM, the studio distributing the film, have ranged from $40 million (in Variety) to $140 million (in The Daily Mail in London).

But Ford isn’t talking. “We did not pay to have the cars in the films,” said Paige Johnson, a Ford spokeswoman. “The deal is about mutually beneficial marketing.” That red-blooded males are drawn to the cars that 007 drives is a proposition road-tested by four decades of the Bond oeuvre. But Ford is going further. “We are putting a special focus on the Bond-girl persona for this film,” said Jan Valentic, vice president for global marketing at Ford.

A Ford news release asks, “What woman hasn’t dreamed of being a Bond girl?” The company needs only 700 dreamers; that’s all the limited-edition T-Bird’s it plans to sell. (The number is 007 backwards.)

The T-Bird in the film has no armament. “The only bombshell in the Thunderbird is Halle Berry,” Ms. Johnson said. The car’s coral paint, she noted, matches the coral two-piece bathing suit that Ms. Berry wears in the film. Those who buy the car can get matching Revlon cosmetics — the Limited Edition 007 Color Collection — or go for contrast with From Russia With Love Red.

Those with less active fantasy lives or more limited means can settle for one-eighteenth-scale models of the cars, which join a vast fleet of Bond toy cars offered by Corgi (http://www.corgi.co.uk/us/bond_main.ihtml) and other model makers that serve as a reminder of how many 007 cars there have been over 40 years (and 5 actors playing Bond). Here are some of them:

DR. NO (1962) Sean Connery drives an unassuming blue Sunbeam Alpine.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963) As in most of the original Ian Fleming novels, 007 shows up in a black Bentley.

GOLDFINGER (1964) Aston Martin makes its Bond-movie debut. The “silver birch” DB5 has an ejection seat (“Don’t touch that button!”) as well as devices that create smokescreens and oil slicks. Goldfinger prefers a Rolls-Royce Phantom III, and his sidekick, Odd Job, shows up in a Ford Ranchero.

THUNDERBALL (1965) The Aston Martin DB5.

CASINO ROYALE (1967) A vintage Bentley, black and supercharged.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) Bond gets a rare Toyota 2000GT, a limited-edition supercar converted to a convertible for this film.

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969) George Lazenby and Diana Rigg leave their wedding in an Aston Martin DBS. They also traverse Swiss ski slopes in a Mercury Cougar. (The Cougar was an offbeat choice, as was Mr. Lazenby; neither made an encore.)

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971) Bond’s DB5 is in the repair shop, so he rents a Mustang Mach I to screech through Las Vegas.

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973) Roger Moore’s debut. He drives a London double-decker bus.

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974) To chase villains in an American Motors Matador — which turns into an airplane — Bond grabs an A.M.C. Hornet. It makes a 360-degree corkscrew leap across a ruined bridge.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) A Lotus Esprit got the role after an executive pointedly parked one in front of the producer, Albert Broccoli. The car also becomes a submarine.

MOONRAKER (1979) A moon buggy.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981) Lotus Esprit Turbo. In one sequence, Bond drives a Citroën 2CV that takes a lot of abuse but keeps on ticking.

OCTOPUSSY (1983) Bond is chased in a stolen Alfa Romeo GTV by police on the Avus speedway in Berlin. He also shows up in a VW Beetle.

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983) Sean Connery makes his curtain call with a black Bentley and a Yamaha XJ 650 Turbo motorcycle.

A VIEW TO A KILL (1985) Roger Moore again, this time in a Renault 11 taxi.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987) Timothy Dalton, in the first of two Bond appearances, drives an Aston Martin V-8 Vantage and a V-8 Volante. The latter car has rockets and a stash of spikes that puncture pursuers’ tires.

LICENCE TO KILL (1989) Bond is mostly chauffeured in a blue Rolls, but ends up driving a Kenworth tractor-trailer full of gasoline and drugs.

GOLDENEYE (1995) The BMW Z3 roadster makes a brief appearance, upstaged by Bond (now Pierce Brosnan) in the Aston Martin DB5 revived from earlier films. It races a Ferrari 355 GTS down the Corniche highway above Monte Carlo.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) The BMW 750iL can be driven remotely by an Ericsson cellphone.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999) Bond’s BMW Z8 is sawed in half.

———–

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncidX2&e=6&cidX2&u=/nm/ 20021021/wr_nm/media_advertising_bmw_dc BMW Gives New Roadster the Hollywood Treatment Mon Oct 21, 5:39 PM ET

By Adam Pasick

NEW YORK (Reuters) – BMW Films, the online movie company that blurred the line between entertainment and advertising when it debuted in 2001 with a series of short action films featuring BMW’s cars, is taking another lap around the Web.

Actor Clive Owen returns as the nameless chauffeur who escapes from tricky situations with deft driving and an iron will. But the trio of films, directed by action-adventure luminaries like John Woo (“Broken Arrow) and Tony Scott (“True Romance”), have one true star: the upcoming BMW Z4 roadster.

Is there any conceivable way that a 10-minute movie on the Internet about a drag race through the streets of Las Vegas between James Brown (played by the Godfather of Soul himself) and the Devil (played by Gary Oldman) will put any additional rear ends in BMW’s sporty leather seats?

The German automaker, along with other advertisers, can’t afford not to find out.

Tides are shifting in the advertising world, and marketers are desperate for new, more effective ways to reach their customers. For BMW, which found through market research that its prospective customers are typically tech-savvy and have fast Internet connections, that means the Web.

“It’s quite difficult finding network TV that attracts a significant cluster of our prospects, so (we’ll take) any way we can get closer to those people,” said Jim McDowell, vice president of marketing for BMW North America.

ADS OR ‘ADVERTAINMENT’?

A television viewing audience fragmented across hundreds of channels and technological advances such the TiVo (news – web sites), the ad-zapping personal video recorder, pose a sizable threat to the dominance of the 30-second commercial, said Hank Kim, a senior editor at Advertising Age who covers the convergence of advertising and entertainment.

The growing shift has forced marketers like BMW, and its advertising agency, Publicis’ Fallon, to experiment.

“Instead of some programming guy telling you when you can watch what, you have a lot more choice,” said Kim. “Devices with commercial skipping or forwarding capabilities strike fear into the heart of the established advertising industry and everyone who’s involved in it.”

As a result, advertisers have joined forces with Hollywood to get their message out in more flashy and hard-to-avoid ways. These range from product placements and sponsorships, like Ford’s underwriting of the commercial-free premiere of Fox’s popular show “24,” to the hybrids known — depending on who you ask for a definition — as “branded content” or “advertainment.”

“We will defend to the end that we’re not advertainment,” said McDowell. “We’re entertainment that just happens to have a BMW in the script.”

The use of the online films to launch the Z4 roadster may indicate BMW has run out of patience with traditional product placements. The company launched the predecessor Z3 roadster with a hackneyed, high-profile placement in the James Bond film “GoldenEye.”

DRIVING CUSTOMERS TO THE WEB

The money that BMW lays out for Hollywood-style short films swamps the budget for a 30-second commercial. But because the movies are streamed over the Internet, there are also cost savings to be had.

“Maybe you spend maybe $10 million on the films but only $1 million distributing (them),” McDowell said, as opposed to a television commercial that costs far more to run than to produce. “We thought it could be about as cost effective as network TV advertising.”

The first round of films, directed by Guy Ritchie, Ang Lee and John Frankenheimer, were seen by more than 14 million people.

“It’s taking a brand and creating an entertainment vehicle around it,” said Kim. “It’s gotten a lot of attention, and as a branding exercise it’s been very successful, but the jury is still out as to how many cars it actually moved.”

BMW is even promoting the second film series with a television advertising campaign, in some of the most high-profile commercials designed to drive traffic to a Web site since the dot-com crash.

And in an effort to squeeze every ounce of promotional power from their investment, the BMW films have been shown in movie theaters and were distributed directly to TiVo customers.

Just because BMW’s online movies make sense from a financial and advertising standpoint shouldn’t detract from the quality of the films, McDowell said. Think of it as corporate sponsorship of the action-adventure arts.

“Years from now when there’s a retrospective on Frankenheimer or Ang Lee, we would hope our films would be part of that,” he said.

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http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020502S0011

  E-Mail is moving to a broader business purpose By Tony Kontzer

  Eric Rohy didn’t want to be disrespectful, but he can only be away from his E-mail for so long. The meeting had entered its third hour, well past Rohy’s self-imposed 60-minute abstinence rule.

“Anything longer than that and you run the risk of missing an opportunity,” says Rohy, product manager for a San Diego software company. Armed with a Kyocera mobile phone running the Palm OS and linked to a service called Symmetry Pro from Infowave Software Inc., Rohy used his phone to quietly access his Microsoft Outlook in-box without leaving the room.

He saw an urgent message about a first-come, first-served offer for the last spot in a partner’s advertorial. He responded in time to grab the slot. “It makes my job and my life so much easier,” Rohy says of his newfound wireless E-mail connectivity.

Rohy thrives in a business world addicted to E-mail, an addiction almost no one bothers to fight anymore. Like most people, he’s concerned about using E-mail better rather than less often. This pervasive acceptance presents business-technology managers with a choice of two paths for helping companies make the best use of E-mail. The first route, the one the biggest vendors are taking, is to focus on making E-mail easier to use by offering better in-box management and message filtering. The second, more ambitious route is to use E-mail as a gateway for broader collaboration and instant messaging, to boost the productivity of tapped-out desktop applications, and even to link to back-end systems.

E-mail has come a long way since the first text message was sent in 1971 by academic researchers building the Defense Department’s Arpanet, the precursor to today’s Internet. But maturity has brought complexity. In-boxes are increasingly unmanageable, multimedia-packed messages tax company networks, remote access is becoming a bigger priority, and viruses and spam continually outwit efforts to thwart them.

All of which keeps major E-mail vendors busy developing smarter in-boxes that will self-sort incoming messages, creating tools to support wireless devices, working on compression techniques for more efficient storage and bandwidth use, and providing more stringent security capabilities. Meanwhile, a number of smaller vendors are working to transform E-mail from a tool for sending and receiving messages into the cornerstone of collaborative business.

Groove Networks Inc. is at the center of that revolution. The brainchild of Lotus Notes architect Ray Ozzie, Groove last month released the latest version of its peer-to-peer collaborative software, which lets Microsoft Outlook users bring E-mail interactions into Groove’s real-time workspace. (Microsoft is an investor in Groove, as is Intel.) That means project-team members who share an online workspace can work simultaneously in the same file or access archived E-mail related to the collaborative effort without leaving the Groove application.

Groove uses a process similar to replication to create a workspace that can be used independently of the Web, so team members can work offline. If a project participant working offline makes changes in one of the team’s Word documents, the changes are automatically uploaded to a relay server when the user reconnects. The relay server then updates other project-team members whenever they check the online work space.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young is experimenting with such a communications hub. So far, the consulting firm’s Groove implementation has fewer than 100 users, who’ve begun replacing AOL Instant Messenger with Groove as the instant-messaging tool of choice, says John Parkinson, VP and chief technologist. But Parkinson is looking for much more than a new IM provider. He wants to expand Groove’s use fivefold and let Cap Gemini’s Lotus Notes platform share instant messages and E-mail, as well as link to Notes databases in which the company stores critical content.

But there are complications. As a Notes shop, Cap Gemini is unable to take advantage of the tight integration Groove has built with Outlook. To make it work, Parkinson says, “We’ll have to do a bit of custom programming.”

Still, Groove’s philosophy foreshadows what many expect will be the future of E-mail: a launching pad to a universe of productivity and collaboration tools. “You can provide people with all the tools in the world,” says Groove systems engineer Nicholas Yerkes, “but they’re going to use what’s easy, and they’re used to E-mail.” Gartner analyst Rob Batchelder says the company’s technology “is two years ahead of the world” and believes it could represent the desktop platform of the future.

IT services firm EDS even wants to link its Outlook E-mail system to the company’s SAP financial and Siebel Systems Inc. customer-relationship management applications. The goal: To make it possible for managers to receive E-mail alerts when a project needs their attention, then use embedded links to go directly to the relevant application, says James Cook, senior director of client EDS, which manages EDS’s use of its own technologies and services. Cook expects to have those capabilities in the next year or two.

But not everyone believes the collaborative, integrated future is close at hand, including the dominant E-mail vendors, Microsoft and IBM’s Lotus Development Corp. These companies say they’re interested in providing better integration with back-end and collaborative applications, but both are more immediately concerned with improving wireless access, enhancing in-box-management tools, and delivering better integration with their own products.

Lotus refers to these more basic functions as “dial-tone features,” and its emphasis on them stems from its adherence to the 80/20 rule: Since 80% of Lotus’ customers use only 20% of the system’s features, the vendor believes it’s best to focus on refining those aspects of the system, rather than on the more advanced capabilities few users want today. “You have to stop yourself when you’re trying to rock the world and focus on solving user problems,” says Beverly DeWitt, Lotus’ senior manager for new business initiatives.

Overflowing in-boxes have overhead costs soaring at Creative Artists agency, CIO Keithley says. The biggest problem for E-mail users is in-box management. The flow of messages has become overwhelming, and people are crying out for help. At Creative Artists Agency, a Beverly Hills, Calif., firm that represents Hollywood stars such as Tom Cruise and Gwenyth Paltrow, in-box overflow has become a burden for CIO Michael Keithley and his IT staff. Overhead costs are going through the roof as the staff spends more time helping agents wade through the flood of vital messages and spam, Keithley says.

Keithley himself unwittingly compounded the problem by giving the agents Cisco Systems’ Unity unified-messaging service, which lets them access E-mail, fax, and voice messages from their PCs or telephones. He didn’t count on agents saving everything, with some holding as many as 100,000 unified messages in their Microsoft Outlook in-box. “We had to implement a storage area network to keep up with the demand,” he says.

While the storage problem is solved for now, in-box management remains an issue. Keithley longs for the day when E-mail vendors will provide more tools for combating the problem. The categorization capabilities for organizing in-boxes are insufficient, filing systems are clunky, and the tools for IT staffs to help–such as the ability to establish standardized categories that automatically group E-mails as they arrive–aren’t there, he says.

Lotus and Microsoft agree that fighting in-box overload is a top priority, and they’re working on tools to deliver relief. Future releases of Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook are slated to include improved message-sorting tools that will categorize E-mails as they arrive, routing them to folders or simply organizing them in the in-box by category; expanded search capabilities that take advantage of all types of data stored in messages; and ways to more seamlessly blend E-mail and instant messaging so that messages needing brief, immediate responses can be turned into real-time dialogs.

But users may be expecting too much from E-mail technology, says Kaitlin Duck Sherwood, author of Overcome Email Overload With Microsoft Outlook 2000 And Outlook 2002 (World Wide Webfoot Press, 2001). The simple fact is that effective in-box organization takes work (see story, p. 54). “They want it to prioritize and organize without them doing anything,” she says. “People have learned helplessness.”

Our brains aren’t the only things being overwhelmed by the volume of messages. Networks are also suffering from a bandwidth crunch due to the growing size of E-mail files, which include more embedded graphics, HTML pages, and bulky attachments. At EDS, E-mail volume increased 107% in the past two years. In an effort to control costs, EDS asks employees to save messages in their local Outlook in-boxes rather than on an Exchange server, and it requires any file larger than 2 Mbytes to be zipped. EDS’s bandwidth challenges promise to get more complex as employees access and manage their in-boxes from remote locations and link to back-end applications directly from their in-boxes, director Cook says.

Niche vendors such as Stampede Technologies Inc. are trying to address the problem. Stampede’s TurboGold software accelerates the replication process between Notes and the Domino Server by applying algorithms and streaming optimization technology to compress data to as little as one-twelfth its original size. TurboGold also can be used to compress applications and databases running on Notes/ Domino.

Hydrite Chemical, a Brookfield, Wis., chemicals supplier, has cut its telecom bills in half by using TurboGold to speed up the time its sales force spends replicating pricing updates from the company’s enterprise resource planning system into a local Notes database. The shortened replication time will result in a sales force armed with more current information, says Jim Krueger, director of information services. Before deploying TurboGold, sales personnel “would get frustrated and not always replicate,” Krueger says. Hydrite this month will begin using replication to download CRM data into Notes databases.

But many administrators would like tools such as TurboGold built into E-mail. At American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s San Francisco film-production company, bandwidth is the No. 1 E-mail problem, Webmaster Tom Edgar says. The movie business requires employees to swap huge video files that can tax the network, and the struggle to keep up with bandwidth needs has Edgar looking for better compression and decompression tools in future Notes releases. (Lotus says R6, due later this year, will feature improved network-compression techniques.)

In the meantime, Edgar has concentrated on providing wireless access from Zoetrope’s 200 employees. The company has set up Wi-Fi networks using the the 802.11b standard at two of its facilities–its soundstage at the Niebaum-Coppola Winery in Rutherford, Calif., and at Coppola’s resort in Belize, which is a popular refuge for staffers. Employees at those two locations can use their Notes E-mail, provided they’re within a couple hundred feet of a transmitter. Remote access elsewhere is available via a secure Web-mail interface.

But Edgar and Zoetrope are ahead of their peers. So far, wireless access to company E-mail has been a question mark for E-mail vendors. There hasn’t been widespread customer demand for better wireless access, but Lotus and Microsoft both expect wireless networking to become more pervasive. They’re promising to make E-mail access simpler and more efficient for all types of devices.

Keystone Marketing’s CEO Karen Settle uses E-mail to link the company’s far-flung field reps. In its next Exchange server update, due for release next year, Microsoft plans to offer native support for wireless devices so they can connect directly to an Exchange server. That would let each device interact with the company E-mail system differently, which is important because an executive doesn’t necessarily want to listen to an entire 600-word E-mail over the phone. “In the car, they don’t want to read E-mail, but they do want to know if an appointment’s been rescheduled,” says David Siroky, lead product planner for Exchange.

More adventuresome wireless users will have to look to smaller vendors for the time being. Last month, Cutting Edge Software Inc. and Corsoft Corp. teamed up to let users of handheld computers running the Palm OS and Corsoft’s Aileron wireless E-mail application exchange word-processing and spreadsheet attachments with desktop PCs. Aileron has been integrated with Cutting Edge’s Quickoffice suite of Palm-compatible productivity apps, automatically converting Microsoft Word and Excel documents into Quickword and Quicksheet, and vice versa. Such capabilities are a step toward bringing mobile-device users into the collaborative environment via E-mail.

Despite the security threats raised by extending E-mail beyond the company firewall, smaller companies that depend on remote workforces often are reluctant to deploy virtual private networks and take on the resulting IT headaches. Keystone Marketing Specialists Inc., a Las Vegas company that provides high-tech clients with retail representation, is unusually dependent on a virtual workforce. Keystone supports fewer than 20 employees on its network, which runs Outlook and Exchange, but it manages about 1,000 field representatives working in teams of 10 to 15 people. E-mail is the primary link between the company and those groups.

CEO Karen Settle requires her remote employees to have their own Internet service provider accounts, because it makes no sense to extend the company’s tiny network to such a large mobile workforce. But the setup makes Keystone susceptible to the Internet’s traffic and reliability problems.

To minimize the risks, Keystone recently made a change in the way it communicates with its reps. Instead of E-mailing complete models of in-store activity for a given client, the company uses a secure Web site to post the models, then sends notification messages via E-mail, as well as small changes to the models and important alerts. This approach has reduced Keystone’s bandwidth requirements and made reps less dependent on the performance of their ISPs.

Businesses are using E-mail in new ways, and E-mail, in response, is changing into an integrated, collaborative tool. This doesn’t mean E-mail has to lose its appeal as an elegant, simple means of rapid communication. Rather, it can make a world of complex enterprise applications more accessible.

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Can a Kid Squeeze by on $320,000 a Month?

January 20, 2002

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

THE tale of Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, the 36- year-old former tennis pro who is demanding $320,000 a month in child support from her former husband, the 84-year-old billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, has caused a stir among hard-working Americans.

Mrs. Kerkorian, who was married to Mr. Kerkorian for one month in 1998, filed court papers on Jan. 7 seeking support for their daughter, Kira, 3. Among other things, she wants $14,000 a month for parties and play dates; $5,900 for eating out; $4,300 for eating in; $2,500 for movies and other outings; $7,000 for charitable donations; $1,400 for laundry and cleaning; $1,000 for toys, books and videos; $436 for the care of Kira’s bunny rabbit and other pets; and $144,000 for travel on private jets.

Sure, that sounds like a lot of Taco Bell for a 3- year-old, but Mrs. Kerkorian will need every penny. Doesn’t Mr. Kerkorian realize how much it costs to raise a child in Los Angeles?

The list of required child-rearing items and services grows every year, Hollywood parents said last week. First of all, the moms and dads all get nervous about whose children’s party is bigger and splashier. The Hotel Bel-Air was the site last year of a tea party for a 2-year-old, and all the toddlers got full tea sets upon departing, complete with decaf Darjeeling. Who cares if they knew what Darjeeling was? Or, for that matter, if they could even say “Daddy” or “Mercedes-Benz” yet?

And there was the Hollywood mom who hired dancers from Cirque du Soleil for her child’s birthday party, spending $30,000, according to one guest. Mrs. Kerkorian herself gave a $70,000 party for Kira’s second birthday at the Hotel Bel-Air in 1999.

“It all got out of control when Peter Guber hired an elephant for rides at his kid’s birthday party about six years ago,” said one anxious Hollywood parent, who could afford only the guy who dresses up as Woody from “Toy Story” at his child’s party.

How can Mr. Kerkorian, who controls MGM and the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, among many other things, expect his daughter to develop into a responsible, caring, intelligent human being without a $70,000 birthday party every year? After all, just clothing the kids is hard enough in a city like Los Angeles. At Fred Segal in Santa Monica, children cry if they don’t get sequined and embroidered Replay sweatshirts at $74 a pop. (Watch the P.B. ‘n’ J., little buddy!) Another big seller is the full-length leather coat by Quincy, at $800 for 6-year-olds.

At the Neiman Marcus children’s department in Beverly Hills, the Burberry pram is a brisk seller for new mothers, at $4,250, but you have to get the Loro Piana cashmere throw ($525) and socks ($325) to go with it.

How can Mr. Kerkorian, who is trying to sell his 81 percent stake in MGM, ask his child to go without $325 cashmere socks? And how will Mrs. Kerkorian pay for the SAT prep classes (long-term programs in reading and math begin at age 4) at Score! in Beverly Hills on the $75,000 a month Mr. Kerkorian was shelling out until last September? A woman can barely get a set of acrylic nail tips for that in Los Angeles.

West Lost Angeles is one of the most competitive areas in the country for private schools. It is typical, one father said, for an 8-year-old to have taken prep courses for the Independent School Entrance Examination, given to children of grade school age who want to attend private school.

Getting around isn’t cheap, either, for children in the Benedict Canyon set. Though only a tot, Kira has flown 35 times on private jets to places like New York and France. For the $144,000 her mother has requested, she can probably get to France and back on a chartered jet only four times a month.

A Hollywood screenwriter said that a classmate of his son at the Brentwood School, an elite school in Los Angeles, reported that students were talking one day about travel plans. “One of them said to the other, `Flying commercial is so bogus, dude,’ ” he said. He added that he took his 11-year-old to a birthday party two years ago, and another child walked into the house and said loudly: “Oh my God, how can anyone live in this place? It’s so tiny.”

Newspapers have been flooded with indignant letters accusing Mrs. Kerkorian of avarice and of having an outsize sense of entitlement. One reader of The Los Angeles Times compared her lifestyle to “an orgy of consumption that rivals France in 1789.”

But if anybody prepared Mrs. Kerkorian for a life of consumption, it was Mr. Kerkorian – and his $6 billion or so. The couple met in 1986, playing tennis, when she was 20 and he 68, according to her court declaration. They became tennis partners, then lovers five years later when her first marriage fell apart. He spent lots of money on her. She quit working. He took her to Hawaii. She wanted to marry. He didn’t. He took her to Europe. He still wouldn’t marry her. She even became pregnant, but still no nups.

Finally, five months after Kira was born, Ms. Bonder and Mr. Kerkorian were married, to confer “dignity and respect” on the child, she said in her court papers. The marriage came with strings. Mr. Kerkorian stipulated that they divorce a month later, and Mrs. Kerkorian waived her right to spousal support. Child support was set at $35,000 a month, but under California law, she was free to negotiate for more.

Mr. Kerkorian had to see that coming. He and Mrs. Kerkorian, his third wife, had met at the magical crossroads of beauty, youth, sex and money, in a city where good looks are considered hard currency and more dependable, when invested properly, than Treasury bills. “Money was never a limitation, or even a consideration, when Kirk wanted to either construct, acquire, own, charter, hire or pay for such desires as homes, airplanes, yachts, hotels, cars, staff or entertainment,” Mrs. Kerkorian said in her court papers. “Essentially, whatever Kirk wanted, Kirk got.”

What Mrs. Kerkorian wanted, at least until a few days ago, was $320,000 a month. But her lawyer, Stephen A. Kolodny, now says that is not enough. “We forgot the category for major yacht charters,” he said.