If you think spying on top secret U.S. weaponry has gone the way of the 5.25-inch floppy disk and the Cold War, consider the cloak-and-dagger crowd at London-based Eidos Interactive PLC, a computer game manufacturer. The multinational company (Nasdaq: EIDSY) is boasting in its pitches to investors that Eidos’ latest shoot’em up, Joint Strike Fighter, is based on details of Boeing’s classified X-32 fighter that were acquired after the offshore outfit “invested heavily into intelligence gathering surrounding the Pentagon’s top secret JSF project.” Does Janet Reno know this? Will she tell Louis Freeh?
GADGETS
BAUER’S BOOMER
Sales folk at the glitzy Mag Mile Eddie Bauer store say they can hardly keep the second-floor display rack filled with Eddie’s own brand of a tiny AM/FM stereo radio with a digital deep bass boost feature that already has blown away many an office-bound Boul Mich audiophile.
After you stick in a triple A battery, this 2.2 ounce, $25 bugling baby of a binary boom box looks like a business card on steroids and sings like an angel. It can be seen as a slight bulge in the pocket wherever Chicago’s more sorely afflicted gadget freaks and music buffs gather.
HUBBUB
NETWORK THIS!
If you’re really a gadget freak, geniuses at California-based Bay Networks Inc. think they can sell you a $179 computer “network in a box” that turns your whole house into a Local Area Network (LAN). Netgear SB104 lets a buyer connect 2 PCs (say Pop’s 486 in the den and the new Pentium II in Jr.’s room) into a 10 megabit-per-second household Ethernet hub. You get a 4-port hub box and 2 networking cards to stick into your computers. You also get a pair of 25-foot cables to do the actual wiring. You do not, however, get a life. If you had a life, you would not do this.
RAT FACTORY
GOOFY GELT
Itasca-based Fellowes Inc., once was regarded as a Mickey Mouse outfit that sold the mundane cardboard containers called “bank boxes” that corporations favor for storing outdated business records. In the Information Age, however, Fellowes has blossomed from the dull back-room office supply game into a privately held gold mine selling a wide variety of computer accessories–stuff that the digerati call “monitor pets”–to the public at a stiff price. Now Fellowes has become a Mickey Mouse outfit for real by purchasing the rights to plaster Walt Disney’s seminal rodent and other cartoon icons not only on those boring commercial bank boxes, but also on Mickey Mouse computer mice, Mickey Mouse mouse pads and a whole mess of other Minnie and Mickey monitor mates.
