If a big pay day is what you’re after, there are the conventional avenues: winning the lottery, answering Regis, suing Big Tobacco and having the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol ring your doorbell on Super Sunday.
But there’s an easier way. And the pay is better: Go high tech! Just ask Irwin Jacobs and other Qualcomm Inc. disciples. Same goes for insiders at Omnipoint Corp., Phone.com Inc., Nextel Communications Inc. and other digital firms that lit up the scoreboard in 1999.
OK, so things weren’t so great in Nasdaq La La Land last week.
Speaking of which, did you hear about the new all-high-tech radio format that’s coming. AMFM Inc. and CNET jointly will launch it later this month in San Francisco and go national by year’s end.
Give the mike to self-styled cyberMessiah Steve Jobs. Jobs, answering Wall Street’s growing impatience with his tenuous iCEO status, last week announced (drum roll, please) he is dropping “interim” from his CEO Apple title. Oh, we’re saved.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison no doubt wants airtime to complain. The Silicon Valley billionaire last Wednesday sued the city of San Jose in protest of an ordinance that bans airplanes weighing more than 75,000 lbs. at liftoff from using San Jose International Airport between 11: 30 p.m. and 6: 30 a.m. Apparently Ellison’s $38 million Gulfstream V is overweight, not to mention egos of some Digerati.
Except for the Jan. 3, 19100, date on Al Gore’s campaign Web site, all was quiet on the Y2K front here in the nation’s capital.
But there were a couple major digital glitches beyond control of John Koskinen, Clinton’s Y2K caretaker. In fact, the snags threatened to bring official Washington to its knees early in the New Millennium.
Cox Communications, in a dispute with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, cut the cable on the Fox station here that carries Redskin playoff games and The Simpsons. The National Guard is on high alert for any trouble a la WTO.
In the other disconnect, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman (still under investigation for alleged influence peddling in the FCC’s big LEO satellite license award to Mobile Communications Holdings Inc.) backed down less than 48 hours after it surfaced that businesses were liable for federal health and safety violations at homes of telecommuters.
Over at the DOD, top brass announced cyber attacks-like the one reportedly used against Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkan War-will become standard fare in the military’s arsenal of weapons.
Oops, my computer just crashed …
