DeKalb may be known best for its corn seed, but this particular Illinois agricultural hub also boasts a high-tech category-killer outfit in MicroSolutions Inc., which shipped an amazingly small CD reader/writer device, the $450 Dual Port backpack bantam CD-rewriter. It fits in the palm of your hand and, when plugged into a Pentium laptop or desktop, allows users to write 650 megabytes of data to a CD-R disc that can be read by any Windows computer with a CD-ROM drive or, if music is recorded, played in any music system.
CLICK THE HALLS
WITH BALES OF MONEY
For the well-heeled but harried household that just can’t find the time to go looking for an overpriced tree in a vacant lot comes an offer from the www6.garden.com Web site to let you do it on-line instead.
Austin, Texas-based Garden Escape Inc. is taking Web orders to deliver to your home a 7.5 foot Fraser fir tree complete with tree stand, ready for trimming, for $120. A 4-foot tabletop tree in a stand costs a mere $50. As Tiny Tim would say if he were around to see this, God bless us everyone.com.
IT’S DARK AS A DUNGEON
DOWN IN THE DATA MINE
Major league number crunchers at Chicago-based SPSS Inc. are jubilant over release of software called Amos 4.0 that they say could work wonders for business folk “baffled by decreasing sales.” This analytical software collects every computer record about every aspect of a business and then runs millions of comparisons to find everything in common when sales for a product tank or soar.
Past applications of this technique, called data mining, have found things like shoppers tend to buy more soft drinks when disposable diapers are on display near the cooler. Nobody knows why this happens but it works, and tricks like that can be the gold nuggets in any data mine.
NOTHING SAYS LOVIN’ LIKE
SOMETHIN’ FROM A MODEM
Without care packages from pop and mom it would hardly be worth going away to college, and Chicago-based college bookstore giant Follett Higher Education Group has added an icon to its www.efollett.com on-line textbook store to have the Peapod Web grocery shopping service put one together and ship it in loco parentis.
Y2KORNER
After Jan. 1 passes with little more than a hypertext hiccup here and there, heavyweight stock market players are planning a rush back into risky junk bonds and high-flying stocks. Look for a “January effect” to run up the Dow big time, J. P. Morgan’s Roberto Plaja told Reuters.
