• by January 8, 2004

BUT WILL FLATTOP EVER GIVE UP HIS LAPTOP - Digital media scion Bill Gates often seems a bit like a cartoon character, but his latest media vision comes straight out of the funny pages. In fact, the kind of wristwatch communications devices Microsoft will introduce next week were being used by Dick Tracy in the early part of the last century. Of course, nobody could buy them, much less use them outside of a comic strip. That will all change as consumers begin buying timepieces from Fossil and Suunto equipped with Microsoft's MSN Direct technology that will enable them to download and display tiny bits of text information from the Web, including news, weather and financial data. It's not the first time watchmakers have tried to crack the Dick Tracy market. Timex and Seiko introduced earlier versions that didn't exactly keep on ticking. But with Microsoft soundly behind it, this year's so-called "smart watches" promise to be equally as big as last year's tablet PC introductions. For Gates, the move is part of an ongoing strategy to insinuate his software into the most common and everyday consumer devices and extend his reach well beyond the desktop and laptop computer applications Microsoft now dominates. In fact, a smaller, less talked about company owned by Gates, digital image licensing company Corbis, has been a leader in developing the marketplace of downloadable cell phone images.

USING RADIO TO TARGET AN AUDIENCE OF ONE - Don't you just hate it when you forget whether you're on TV or the radio? Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was in the middle of a debate with Howard Dean and other candidates when he pulled out a pie chart. Too bad it was only on radio, a fact that National Public Radio's Neal Conan made painfully clear: "Congressman Kucinich is holding up a pie chart, which is not truly effective on radio," he said. Give Kucinich credit for a great comeback. "It's effective if Howard can see it," Kucinich said, referring to the front-runner.

A SLACKER BY ANY OTHER NAME, WOULD SUCK JUST AS MUCH - Just as the Riff was finally getting hip to all the buzz surrounding the demo du jour, metrosexuals (or is it meterosexuals?), a new, suspiciously familiar demographic descriptor may be emerging. "Metrosexual is bidding for the 21st century, but we propose a new demo: the Loser," tout the publicists at publisher Arriviste Press who are doing their darndest to win some readers for "Life As A Loser," a new book by Will Leitch. "If all losers are like Will Leitch, they provide a fair portrait of the present-day twenty-something," proclaims the book's promotional materials: "technically savvy, artistically motivated, yet still hobbled by the same issues that young men have faced for years - doomed relationships, parental expectations, professional uncertainty. Leitch has faced them all - and in some larger-than- life scenarios." Gee, sounds like an older demographic descriptor to us, slackers.