IT revealed: Dean Kamen shows off mystery transportion device

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:53 AM 12/03/2001 -0500, Declan McCullagh forwarded articles on
the Ginger Hype Generation Machine finally being revealed.

Boy, what bad timing Kamen has.  Not only is it too late for
Christmas sales (if in fact the things are shipping anytime soon,
as opposed to this being a demo for next Christmas shipping),
but overall it's a year or two too late to catch the Razor Scooter fad
and the San Francisco geek toys market, where there are
some people still commuting on $500 electric scooters
(Doug Barnes used to haul one on Caltrain, for instance),
but an N-thousand-dollar device that's only usable for short hauls
within cities, it'll be a real tough sell.

The real question is whether, next year when he's trying to sell quantity,
anybody will list to the next round of hype.  On the other hand,
this announcement is at least timed to keep people from
totally forgetting him as more dot-com vaporware,
so maybe it's not that bad timing after all.