Technology briefs for January 15, 2001

Monday, Jan. 15, 2001 | 11:34 a.m.

'Brick films' available on Internet

It was not until the recent holiday shopping season that Lego Systems Inc. rolled out the Lego & Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Set, a $180 kit meant to turn children into makers of short digital films featuring Lego characters and props. But online, where Lego fandom rages, such films are nothing new.

"Brick films," as they are sometimes called in reference to the term Lego uses for its construction pieces, have been available on the Web for several years, according to Todd Lehman, co-founder of Lugnet.com, the online Lego users group.

The films, which so far have generally been made by adults for adults, tend to be stop-motion animations that range in length from a few seconds of jerky, silent action to movies of 10 minutes or more with complex scenes and soundtracks. Many take their inspiration from Lego's theme construction sets, like the vastly popular Star Wars series. Others mimic or parody big-budget films, as with "2001: A Lego Odyssey" and "Titanic Legos at Sea."

A new website (at brickfilms.topcities.com) offers a growing directory of these online films. The site's founder, a computer consultant named Jason Rowoldt, said the arrival of inexpensive digital cameras in the last year had helped spur the brick-film boomlet.

Tech guy with the hat identified

The photo session with President-elect George W. Bush at a recent meeting with technology executives looked like a collage of Fortune magazine covers. Louis V. Gerstner Jr. of IBM, Carleton S. Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Michael S. Dell of Dell Computer and John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems were all prominent in the front row, decked out in standard business attire.

So, was the grinning guy in a baseball cap next to Chambers a gate-crasher? Nope. Meet Gregory Slayton, president and chief executive of ClickAction, a developer of e-mail marketing programs in Palo Alto, Calif.

Well known in Silicon Valley for transforming ClickAction from a plodding software vendor into a growing e-business, Slayton was a founder of Silicon Valley Bush 2000, the coordinating group for Bush's campaign in high-technology corridors.

The cap bore a slogan promoting the Bush campaign, but Slayton says he doubts anyone would have suggested taking it off during the photo session on Jan. 4, even if the message had not been on point. "All these guys know baseball caps are kind of my trademark," he said. "If it were a nose ring, there might have been some objections."

Slayton, whose stock had declined 85 percent from its peak in March, was one of the few executives on hand capable of briefing Bush from direct experience of the current pressures on small dot-coms. But his pet proposal was federal financing of small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

New cellular company launches with big ad campaign

ATLANTA -- The image of Cingular Wireless has been a blank slate -- until now.

Beginning Sunday, the young company started touting itself in a nationwide ad campaign.

"It's more than a campaign. It's launching a whole new company," said Chris Hall, president and chief executive officer of BBDO South, the Atlanta ad agency responsible for part of the work.

Not exactly. Atlanta-based Cingular is a joint venture of BellSouth and SBC Communications of Dallas. As such, Cingular starts with the advantage of having 19 million customers, all gleaned from its predecessor wireless operators that include Nevada Bell, BellSouth Mobility and Southwestern Bell.

Those brands are disappearing under the Cingular umbrella. The big task is making Cingular an identifiable brand.

The Cingular name was announced about three months ago.

Now it's poised to join the wireless fray. Cingular faces several daunting competitors, notably Verizon, AT&T and Sprint. Verizon itself is less than a year old and is already running an aggressive schedule of commercials.