Babes in Toyland

Brandweek, Oct 2, 2000

What becomes a dot-com executive most? For many digerati, they're never fully dressed without their favorite high-tech gadgets.

Jeannette McClennan

For Jeannette McClennan's most recent birthday, she didn't receive mere tokens like silver earrings or a bouquet of flowers. Instead, McClennan's husband Bill Rohifing surprised the president of OgilvyInteractive with Vtech's E-mail PostBox, a portable, e-mail-dedicated device that requires no PC. Sitting atop the couple's kitchen counter, the e-mail appliance enjoys almost as much use as the stove or refrigerator. In fact, at mealtime, the family sometimes conducts "virtual conversations" with long-distance relatives or far-away friends via e-mail. McClennan's sons, 9-year-old Phillip and 7-year-old Derrick, who are tech savvy in their own right, quickly send after-school updates to mom when she's at work. "It's added some spontaneity and casualness to our usage of the Internet," says McClennan. Still mastering the finer points of dining etlquette though is 22-month-old Grant, who has yet to graduate to finer points of Netlquette. All in due time...

Peter Adams

Peter Adams frequents Gadgeteer.com and doesn't leave home without his Palm VII, Qualcomm digital cell phone, 35mm digital camera or ubiquitous laptop. So to ask Adams, CEO of New York-based Internet consultancy Primary Knowledge, to choose his must-have high-tech gizmo is akin to asking Jay Leno to pick his favorite classic car, Adams' choice of the Merlin wireless PC card, which attaches to a laptop and allows him to surf the Net, send and receive e-mail and documents without connecting to a hardwired phone line, comes without much hesitation. "I spend a lot of time in strange places where it's difficult getting on the Internet," says Adams. "The Palm is great to accessing very consumable places of Information but the Merlin allows you to work no matter where you are"

Richard Hart

"Baby, you can drive my car/Yes, I'm gonna be a star..." Richard Hart, host of San Francisco-based Cnets News.com TV program on technology investing, gets a charge out of his Honda EV Plus electric car. Forget the Net--Hart's roadster gadget gets him where he wants to go in the vast charted territory variously referred to as meatspace, IRL and f2f. Hart claims to have gotten the car up to over 90 miles an hour. "Every morning when I wake up, it's magically full of electrons," he says. "It's like having a gas station in your garage."

Theresa Duncan

When Theresa Duncan was a producer at interactive shop Nicholson NY (now Icon Nicholson) in the mid-'90s, she created a trio of playful CD-ROMs aimed at girls, which earned her a cult following and a well-deserved reputation as Silicon Alley's hippest digital diva. Since then, Duncan has moved on to digital filmmaking (her digital short The History of Glamour toured the art house circuit last year) and opened her own shop, Valentine Media that produces programs for Oxygen Media among others. While Duncan arrived at the photo shoot with her tangerine iBook as her favorite gadget, it was the Panasonic portable DVD player that caught her fancy. Ain't love grand?

Eric Wittman

While most desktop PCs have Macromedia's Flash player on-board, only a handful of hand-helds have the vector-graphics, player installed. Eric Wittman, senior product manager for San Francisco-based Macromedia, has one it's a Compaq IPAQ H3600 Pocket PC. But this is a prototype," he says. Consumer will be able to download Flash Player to Pocket PC devices by year's end.

Bob Lindstrom, Ardell Smith and Brennan O'Donnell

Cell phones seem to be basic equipment for today's college student. Take Bob Lindstrom, a senior at Columbia College, and Northwestern University seniors Brennan O'Donnell and Ardell Smith, who all carried mobile phones to work this summer as interns with Chicago-based Interactive shop Quantum Leap. But from there differences emerge: While O'Donnell enjoys his CD player and a mini-disc player he lent to his sister, Lindstrom says he can't do without is his Handspring PDA. "It goes everywhere pretty much," he says. "I'm not super busy, but I have enough stuff. I even put concerts in it."

Robert Siegel

The Webby-come-lately arrivistes may be flaunting their trendy browser-enabled cell phones and souped-up PDAs, but true cognoscenti disdain such faddish geegaws, Robert Siegel, editor-in-chief of Madison, Wis.-based satire publication The Onion, tries in to all the news that's fit to parody via his 14-year-old AM-FM Sony Walkman. "Basically it's a compact, lightweight, fully portable device that allows you to listen to audio input literally anywhere," Siegel says, "There are two types of software the you get with it-first, preprogrammed, read-only cassettes with a wide variety of stuff, all kinds of music, you can ever get actual cassettes containing books being read. And second, you can get read-write cassettes on which you yourself can program any audio you can imagine." Siegel is truly satisfied with the return on his $69 investment made in 1986." In terms of function, price and everything, it's got it all over most of these other gadgets."