JAMES HARDING - VIEW FROM THE VALLEY
The latest invention to come out of Palo Alto should improve the life and productivity of many a computer nerd. But it is not a computer, peripheral, hardware device or software innovation - it's the microwave clothes dryer.
Imagine the joy computer-obsessed single men will reap from such a handy machine - not to mention the time they will save. My main concern is what will happen when they leave a Zip disk inside their pocket and nuke it in the microwave dryer, although the inventors reckon their sensors can detect such things. However, it won't stop those who are so wrapped up in computers that they rarely wash clothes from putting their zip-fly, ice-wash jeans in the microwave. Kaboom.
The Staples diet
Office Depot, a big US retailer, was not allowed by the US government to merge with its big rival, Staples. The $4.6 billion merger - the equivalent, say, of Dixons buying Currys - was judged to be harmful to competition and the US consumer. So, a few weeks ago, Staples bought Quill, a catalogue office products supplier, for $685 million. Now Office Depot is firing back, snapping up fellow mail-order specialist Viking Office Products for $3 billion.
The fact that retailers are merging to gain economies of scale and expand in global markets is not surprising, nor is it a shock that both retailers are expanding into the catalogue business. What I find interesting - especially bearing in mind the antitrust case against Microsoft - is that these aggressive US retail businesses are being allowed to grow without being allowed to dominate the high streets or out-of-town shopping malls. Dixons has achieved that in the UK with no restrictions.
King of the wusses
The Celebrity Wuss Scale is one of those strange, ridiculous phenomena that only the internet could host. The site is at snoot.com and, as the title suggests, it rates famous people according to 'how hard they are' and how they would fare in a fight against other people in the wuss scale.
After surfers judged the results of 57,000 rounds of fighting, you may not be surprised to find that Darth Vader, Genghis Khan, Godzilla and Superman are at the bottom of the list because they are not wusses. There are only two IT people in the list. America Online CEO Steve Case must be embarrassed to be the fifth wussiest person on the list, but even Leonardo Di Caprio and Hanson are considered harder than the biggest girl's blouse in the ratings - the king of wusses, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
Flash Larry hits the Heights
Oracle boss Larry Ellison has been at it again - spending his rather large wad of cash. He was supposedly in the final stages of the bidding for a 1.1 acre plot of derelict land in San Francisco. The plot is the only empty area in the posh Pacific Heights region of the city and is arguably the most sought-after piece of weed-covered ground in the US.
The city of San Francisco had finally decided to sell the site and the bidders, rumoured to include Don Johnson and Nicholas Cage, were asked to deposit $650,000 just to participate. Ellison owns a huge building across the road so he wasn't too disheartened to lose out to a local property developer, Mitch Menaged, who paid an astounding $13.65 million for the land. At least this guy will use the land for homes - Elllison would probably just use it as a storage facility, or a hangar for his fighter aircraft or something.
Cola shaker
Richard Branson has invaded the US again and this time he is sufficiently well-known to command interview slots on national network television.
Virgin is known in the UK for its Megastores, record label and airline but, rather like selling coal to Geordies or flash suits to Computacenter employees, Branson was in the US to say he is going to sell cola to Americans.
Virgin Cola is expected to be launched in six cities, at prices close to those charged by Coke and Pepsi because Branson isn't silly enough to start a price war with those two. His main concern, interestingly, is in the reseller market. Branson said he hopes the competition will not use strong-arm tactics when Virgin 'comes knocking on the doors of some of the big retailers they are in'. So that's what tier two PC manufacturers are up against.
Underground overground ...
Even at this advanced distance, I have heard about the London Underground and its #1 billion investment in smart card technology to improve its ticketing.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but as a Londoner myself, I always thought the most modern part of the Tube was the ticket barrier system, which was only recently upgraded from 'this is a single ticket, sonny' to 'bee bee bee beep'. The rest of the Tube, from the stations and trains to the mice that live on the tracks, is old, ugly and in desperate need.
Naturally, saving money from ticket fraud is the motivating factor for LU. Technology drives efficiency, once again.
In the sober light of day
Driving into Palo Alto last week was a real eye-opener. At first, I thought the people dressed as brightly coloured squares were Stanford students in fancy dress because it was the one day of the year that they get drunk.
Alas, no.
It seems the people were from 3M, whose storage arm, Imation, has launched a disk medium. They were dressed as disk cartridges and were stone-cold sober, dancing around to draw attention to their high capacity - capacity for storage, that is, not beer.
That's the power that the marketing specialists see in Silicon Valley - it's even worth spending money on people by the side of a road into Palo Alto.
James Harding is US editor of VNU Newswire, based in San Francisco.
He can be reached at [email protected] or on 00 1 650 306 0879.