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People
Sailmaster
Scott Hassan is done with the Net for now. The founder
of eGroups, who sold his company to Yahoo! a year ago, spends his days
at Spreckels Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, debugging his latest
creation - a robotic sailboat. The 42-inch craft houses a 486 Intel
microprocessor,
a Linux-based OS, GPS, and navigation software that Hassan wrote himself.
Unlike the remote-controlled vessels it's often confused with, Hassan's
creation, called the Hina Project, sails itself. By monitoring
ground speed, water currents, and wind direction - and trimming the sails
accordingly - the boat stays on course better than a human can. Hassan
plans to make 6- to 10-foot seafaring vessels capable of toting a half-ton
of cargo, and he'll sell them for $1,000 each. "I need to get it into rough
weather, so I can get better data," he says. "But I'm in no hurry. I have
no competitors, yet."
- Jeffrey M. O'Brien
Initial Public Forecaster
In or out, open or closed? When it comes to predicting when the IPO window
will reopen, physicist turned venture capitalist Kathryn Gould is of two
minds: rational and irrational. The cofounder of Menlo Park-based Foundation
Capital believes the irrational view -
that the economy expands and contracts in response to quirky external events
- will ultimately hold sway. (Think eBay's public offering, which restarted
the stalled IPO market after the Russian financial default of '98.) The
likely watershed case: In-N-Out Burgers' much-anticipated fall or winter
IPO. "When it goes public," says Gould, whose firm has written off 5 out
of 45 portfolio companies during the past year's meltdown, "it could
blast the market wide open."
- Michael Menduno
Jabber the Hack
Instant-messaging pals through the disparate tongues of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!
can feel like trying to chat in the Tower of Babel. Jeremie Miller solves
the incompatibility problem with Jabber - the Esperanto of IM. His XML-based,
open source software (www.jabber.org)
rolls all three networks into one seamless system by reverse-engineering
the specs of each service. Yahoo! and Microsoft don't seem to mind that
their servers play host to foreign messages, but every so often, AOL, seeking
to protect its dominant position, changes its protocol, leaving Jabber
out in the cold. That's when Miller rallies the troops from his home in
Cascade, Iowa, to hack back in - usually overnight. "Interoperability:
It's just the way it should be," says Miller.
- Adam Fisher
Gorillaz in the Mix
Jamie Hewlett has an answer to the world of prefab concerts and
manufactured
bands: Go 2-D. Co-creator of the raunchy comix queen Tank Girl,
Hewlett joined forces with Blur frontman Damon Albarn to conceive Gorillaz
(www.gorillaz.com),
an alt-pop group that will perform "live" onscreen in the US this September.
The music comes from a collaboration of artists, including Miho Hatori
of Cibo Matto and Ibrahim Ferrer from Buena Vista Social Club; the staging
is courtesy Hewlett's six-person design shop, Zombie, who bring forth the
badass ensemble by combining Flash and hand-drawn illustrations. "Using
images, and sticking them in a computer," he says, "we find clever ways
of making them move."
- Sonia Zjawinski
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