I arrive at gofast.net's offices, which are located on the fifth floor of a renovated warehouse. I'm greeted by Griff Wigley, the company's HR administrator and the organizer of this meeting. After a quick tour of the space, including a visit to its legendary roof deck overlooking downtown St. Paul, Wigley ushers me into a conference room. As I pull out my presentation system, I mumble a prayer to the demo gods and hope for the best.
I connect the In Focus projector to the Compaq handheld by inserting a Colorgraphic VGA-out card into the handheld's PC-card slot. And that's it - I'm ready to go.
About halfway through my presentation, I hear a stage whisper from someone in the audience: "Ugh, it looks like he has some weird skin disease." The loudmouth is razzing my slide of Heath Row, an associate editor at Fast Company. While putting together my presentation, I used the new Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD71 camera to take some snapshots. Heath's photo looked fine on my desktop PC and on the Compaq handheld, where it measures just two inches square. But now that the projected image is larger than life, I must admit that the slide's color is way off.
The Mavica doesn't deliver the same image quality as my Olympus 35mm camera. But a digital camera is a great tool for customizing a presentation. The sleek, slim Mavica comes with photo-editing software and can take up to 950 photos per battery charge. Best of all, the Mavica can store images on a standard 3.5-inch diskette: To transfer the photos I had taken into my presentation, I simply inserted the disk into my computer.
Aside from one crummy slide, my talk was a success. The system didn't crash, and neither did I.
Coordinates: $799. Digital Mavica MVC-FD71 camera, Sony Electronics, 800-476-6972, www.sel.sony.com
"Who do we follow, man or machine?" I'm in panic mode again, screaming at photographer Christopher Harting. I'm driving a Hertz Mercury Sable on I-35W North, and I'm already late for my meeting at 3M. We've got about three seconds to decide whether to obey the computerized instructions from the Hertz NeverLost onboard GPS system or to stick with the directions given by my 3M contact. The robotic-sounding voice issuing from the GPS (global positioning system) tells me to continue on I-35W North; my contact's directions instruct me to take the exit for I-94.
NeverLost offers turn-by-turn driving directions to virtually any destination in the car's designated territory. A four-square-inch video screen is mounted on a swiveling stalk between the driver and passenger seats. The user enters in an exact address, and the system automatically calculates a route. Our destination is 3M Center (the headquarters of the $15 billion company), just outside of St. Paul.
But the computer seems to be misdirecting us. Pulling out the map that my contact gave me, I notice that there's an 8th Street in the general vicinity of 3M's headquarters. I enter "8th Street" into NeverLost. But then I have second thoughts. My contact's words echo in my mind: "3M's headquarters are right off I-94. You can't miss it." Just as I'm about to get on I-94, I swerve back into the lane, continuing on I-35W North. I turn to Harting: "We've been using this GPS thing ever since we arrived in Minnesota, and we've never gotten lost. I'm sticking with the machine."
"Okay. So I should have gone with the human!" I confess some time later. We've just turned onto 8th Street - a humble back road in the middle of nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere. We're in White Bear Lake, a suburb about 20 minutes north of St. Paul. I offer a lame apology: "Who knew that a tiny town like this would have an 8th Street?" Harting is not amused.
I grab my Sprint PCS dual-band phone. We're lucky that the cell-phone is dual-band: Since we're outside of a digital network, the cell-phone automatically switches to analog mode. The dual-band is bulkier than an all-digital phone, but it delivers far greater coverage. I call the Boston office of my contact and get new Coordinates:. About 30 minutes later, we finally pull into the parking lot at 3M. Amazing - all this technology, and the one thing that I absolutely couldn't have done without was some help from another human being.
Coordinates: $6 a day (on top of the rental-car rate). NeverLost onboard GPS system, Hertz, 800-654-3131, www.hertz.com; $149. Sprint PCS dual- band phone, Sprint, 800-480-4747, www.sprint.com
Gina Imperato (gimperato@fastcompany.com) is an associate editor at Fast Company.
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