Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INTERNET & WWW (92%); COMPUTER NETWORKS (92%); BANDWIDTH (90%); DELAYS & POSTPONEMENTS (90%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (90%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT MFG (77%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT (77%); CONFERENCES & CONVENTIONS (72%); BROADBAND (72%); FIBER OPTICS (72%); PUBLIC POLICY (68%); TELEPHONE EQUIPMENT MFG (62%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (63%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (78%)
COMPANY: CISCO SYSTEMS INC (58%); GOOGLE INC (57%)
TICKER: CSCO (NASDAQ) (58%); CSC (LSE) (58%); GOOG (NASDAQ) (57%); GGEA (LSE) (57%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS334210 TELEPHONE APPARATUS MANUFACTURING (58%); SIC3661 TELEPHONE & TELEGRAPH APPARATUS (58%); NAICS518112 WEB SEARCH PORTALS (57%); SIC8999 SERVICES, NEC (57%); SIC7375 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES (57%); NAICS519130 INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING & WEB SEARCH PORTALS (57%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BOSTON, MA, USA (79%) MASSACHUSETTS, USA (79%); MINNESOTA, USA (73%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: March 13, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: GRAPH: BUSIER AND BUSIER: Projections that the increasing amount of data on the Internet will cause user demand to overwhelm the available capacity are disputed by many experts. At the current rate of growth, global internet traffic could quadruple by 2011. (Source: Cisco Systems) (pg. C5) Graph showing global internet traffic could quadruple by 2011. GRAPH: GLOBAL CONSUMER INTERNET TRAFFIC (Source: Cisco Systems) (pg. A1) Graph showing video and data traffic growing, but possible showdown predicted by analysts.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

985 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 13, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

The Cost of Overlooking Old Equipment
BYLINE: By BRENT BOWERS
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; IN THE HUNT; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 1221 words
DOES the Panasonic phone that is gathering dust in your basement still work? Where did you store the Dell monitor your brother gave you after he acquired a wide-screen Samsung? Whatever happened to your original computer -- the one you used to write the first draft of the Great American Novel?

If millions of Americans have trouble keeping track of the technology equipment they have accumulated over the years, companies large and small find the task so daunting that many do not even try.

But sloppy inventory control can cause major headaches for companies. In January, the credit card company GE Money USA reported that a computer tape that contained personal data about 650,000 customers had disappeared. In 2006, within the space of a few weeks, the Veterans Affairs Department lost both a laptop computer with information on millions of soldiers and veterans and a desktop computer that contained medical records of 38,000 patients.

Thomas Watson, president and co-founder of Asset Management International, a small Seattle company that tracks the flow of information technology equipment and other fixed assets into, around and out of corporate and government buildings, said the problems are far broader than the well-publicized data losses. Companies that fail to keep track of their technology assets face potential tax and legal consequences.

Mr. Watson has his own trove of anecdotes about missing equipment. He recalled a manager at an insurance company telling him that 300 computers bought three months earlier for $600,000 could not be located and had to been written off the books.

And a story circulated at the annual CA World conference in Las Vegas last year, Mr. Watson said, about the chief financial officer and the chief information officer of a major company who were inspecting their warehouse. ''One of them pointed to a dusty old box and asked the other, 'What's in the box?' '' he said. ''They found a $2 million Sun Microsystems server that had been sitting there for over a year.''

Mr. Watson, 35, started AMI in 2003 with Ken Suzuki, a business colleague, to develop a method for continuous tracking of assets from the warehouse receiving dock to the trash bin.

''There is so much activity in I.T.,'' he said. ''Teams move, equipment gets shifted around. End users see a fancy new monitor on somebody else's desk and just take it.''

After five months of tinkering -- yes, in their basements, with only their savings to finance the project -- the two partners came up with a product that uses a bar code scanner, software and a database.

AMI landed its first contract in April 2004. The $30,000 deal was tiny, but the customer, Unisys, was a technology giant. AMI's job was to help Unisys monitor the flow of technology assets throughout the Transportation Security Administration.

That contract helped AMI win a contract with CA Inc., formerly Computer Associates. Mr. Watson said he hoped that his company's relationship with CA would lead to even more business. He aims to double his company's revenue to $1 million this year and to $4 million by 2010 by the time-tested entrepreneurial expedients of pampering customers and sticking to his knitting.

Other companies promise to track every asset, including desks and light fixtures. AMI focuses on technology equipment. Mr. Watson said clients were attracted to the simplicity of his technology and the fact that AMI trains the client's employees to use the technology after AMI has done the initial cataloging.

''We are offering a system that is both foolproof and easy to use,'' he said. ''If a system isn't easy to use, people will stop using it.''

One fan is Brian McIlrath, an asset management coordinator at Unisys who uses AMI's AssetTrack software to track computer equipment at a consumer products company. ''AMI's bar code scanner is very, very reliable and fast, a huge advantage over manually copying and transferring the information by e-mail,'' he said. ''I can scan 20 assets in one room in two minutes, whereas if I did that by hand, it would take 10 minutes, and be more error-prone.''

Why is it so important for companies to keep a close eye on their technology assets? Aside from the obvious financial benefits of knowing where the assets are, up-to-date records reduce the risk of theft or loss of confidential information that could expose the companies to lawsuits and public ridicule.

But there are other reasons as well. Federal law requires publicly traded companies and government entities like school districts to keep accurate count of capital assets; depending on the circumstances, they could lose federal financing, face tax penalties and, in extreme cases, criminal charges for failing to do so.

Not only that, if assets are given away or otherwise disposed, but not taken off the books, companies must continue to pay property taxes on them to state and local governments. Mr. Watson cited the case of a company that paid millions of dollars in taxes on 20,000 computers it no longer possessed.

He said companies like his could help technology clients like Unisys assure the accuracy of the data they provide to their customers, thereby avoiding contractual penalties for falling short of standards they promised.

Mr. McIlrath of Unisys cited two other benefits of tracking technology assets. Since companies do not buy software, only entitlement rights to it, he said, they can waste a lot of money by unintentionally becoming ''overlicensed'' or face penalties and even legal action by providers if they are insufficiently licensed.

Similarly, if an organization donates outdated leased equipment to a worthy cause, he said, it will have to buy out the lease at expiration -- ''a cost that probably isn't covered in its budget.''

Mr. Watson said a report several years ago by Gartner, a technology researcher, found that only 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies had advanced systems to track computer equipment. ''Obviously, the percentage would be much lower for smaller companies,'' he said. ''That presents an enormous opportunity for companies like ours.''

Or at least it should.

Mr. McIlrath said that in his eight years in the business, he continued to be surprised at how little attention corporate executives have paid to asset management. One reason, he said, might be that they do not see the payback on the cost.Christopher Gerhardt, the president of Denali Advanced Integration, a Seattle provider of information technology outsourcing services with projected revenue of $90 million, lamented that ''almost no I.T. organizations get this right.'' He added: ''I know of one technology giant that basically throws out the assets when an employee leaves. They don't know what else to do with it -- where to store it, how to redeploy it.''

Mr. Gerhardt, whose company has formed a partnership with AMI, tells the story of a local company that preordered $5 million in equipment that managers figured they would need the following year. They stored it in a warehouse, he said, where it sat for two years, losing $2 million of its value in depreciation because the company had no system in place to check its inventory. ''It would be like buying a car and leaving it in a garage for several years without using it,'' he said.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS (89%); DESKTOP COMPUTERS (73%); PERSONAL COMPUTERS (90%); COMPUTING & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (77%); INFORMATION MANAGEMENT (74%); MEDICAL RECORDS (73%); WRITERS & WRITING (72%); LAPTOP COMPUTERS (78%); INVENTORY MANAGEMENT (70%); CONFERENCES & CONVENTIONS (64%); PAYMENT CARDS & SERVICES (55%); CREDIT CARDS (55%); COMPUTER SCANNERS (50%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (77%)
COMPANY: SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC (52%); GE MONEY (57%)
TICKER: SUW (LSE) (52%); SUNW (NASDAQ) (52%); JAVA (NASDAQ) (52%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS541512 COMPUTER SYSTEMS DESIGN SERVICES (52%); NAICS511210 SOFTWARE PUBLISHERS (52%); NAICS334111 ELECTRONIC COMPUTER MANUFACTURING (52%); SIC7373 COMPUTER INTEGRATED SYSTEMS DESIGN (52%); SIC7372 PREPACKAGED SOFTWARE (52%); SIC3571 ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS (52%)
PERSON: ANN LIVERMORE (56%)
GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (94%)
LOAD-DATE: March 13, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Thomas Watson of Asset Management International, with an AssetTrack device used to keep track of technology equipment.(PHOTOGRAPH BY STUART ISETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

986 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 12, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

A Tropical Hotel Weekend Just Outside Chicago
BYLINE: By LONG HWA-SHU
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; SQUARE FEET; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 1033 words
DATELINE: GURNEE, Ill.
With the snows of winter lingering, the opening of a $137 million indoor water resort with a 414-room hotel came at an opportune time in this fast-growing suburb 40 miles north of Chicago.

KeyLime Cove Water Resort, a sprawling site with a mango-colored exterior and a tropical theme, was packed when it opened on Feb. 29.

''The hotel rooms were sold out'' the first two weekends, said David W. Anderson, who is the founder and the principal investor in what calls itself a ''cruise ship on land.''

Inside the balmy 65,000-square-foot water park, built on a 30-acre site, waves pound a beach lined with Adirondack chairs against a ceiling-high mural with a seaside view.

Designed by Planning Design Build of Madison, Wis., which says it is the premier architect of water parks in the country, KeyLime Cove has five water recreation areas, including a creek that winds 560 feet for floating on inner tubes. One of the enclosed slides stretches 450 feet with a 40-foot drop. A 10-foot-tall pineapple-shaped bucket on top of a tower dumps 300 gallons of water every five minutes on those wishing to be drenched.

Out of the water, attractions include an 8,000-square-foot arcade, blazing with neon-lighted games; a spa offering a ''hot lava shell'' body massage; and stores selling beachwear. One of the six eating places, D. W. Anderson's Eatery and Ice Cream Parlor, has an old-fashioned fountain with soda jerks making banana splits.

Hotel guests wear wristbands that enable them to make purchases in the park and open their rooms with a flick of the wrist.

To Mr. Anderson, the indoor water park is an answer for Americans who want a short vacation not far from home.

''With the unrest in some parts of the world, the hassle of flying and the rising gasoline price, vacation trends are changing,'' said Mr. Anderson, 54, breezy in his signature Hawaiian shirt. ''The indoor water resort is really revolutionizing the way Americans go on their vacation.''

Mr. Anderson is an entrepreneur who used to barbecue ribs using an adapted trash can in the alley behind his home on the northwest side of Chicago before starting the Famous Dave's restaurant chain. He remains the largest single private shareholder of the chain, which has more than 160 locations.

He was also a founder of Grand Casinos, which manages casinos started by Indian tribes, and was an original investor in Rainforest Cafe, a restaurant-store chain with a tropical rainforest theme. He is no longer involved in those companies.

Mr. Anderson, who is of Choctaw and Chippewa parentage, acknowledged that he got the idea for KeyLime Cove from the Wisconsin Dells, a resort on the Wisconsin River known for its sandstone cliffs, water shows and rides in restored World War II amphibious vehicles.

''It was a dead tourist town in winter, until indoor water parks revitalized it,'' said Mr. Anderson, who had visited there seeking solutions to revive his resort business in Hayward, Wis., site of the original Famous Dave's. A lack of snow in the last eight years, he said, had all but eliminated snowmobiling and cross-country skiing at his Grand Pine Resorts.

In 1999, the Polynesian Water Park Resort Hotel and Suites at Wisconsin Dells was the first to put a roof over its outdoor water park. Since then, 20 indoor water parks have been built, many as additions to existing hotels in the region. This has transformed the Dells into a year-round tourist town, promoted as ''the water-park capital of the world.''

Mr. Anderson said he chose to build KeyLime Cove in Gurnee because it was halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, an ideal location for what he called ''a destination urban resort.''

KeyLime is opposite Six Flags Great America, an amusement park with an outdoor water park, and next to Gurnee Mills, billed as the world's largest outlet mall, with more than 250 stores.

The population of Gurnee, a rural community until Great America opened in 1976, has grown to 31,500 in the last 20 years, from 3,800, according to its longtime village administrator, James Hayner.

''KeyLime is a great attraction that will complement Great America and Gurnee Mills,'' Mr. Hayner said. ''It will benefit the village with an additional $900,000 in sales tax receipts in its first- year operation.'' In addition, 500 people are employed at the resort.

As an incentive for building in Gurnee, the village will repay KeyLime half of the 7 percent local hotel tax it collects for 20 years.

Last year, Gurnee received $17.1 million in sales tax receipts. The revenue covered more than half of the village's general fund of $32 million. There are no local property taxes.

Mr. Anderson said plans were already in the works to add 200 hotel rooms, to expand the indoor water park by 35,000 square feet and next year to start building a 60,000-square-foot outdoor water park on the site.

Mr. Anderson envisions building KeyLime Coves in several major metropolitan areas if the Gurnee park proves successful. ''This is our prototype,'' he said. ''We plan to open one in the Dallas-Houston area in the next 18 months, followed by another one in Connecticut. Our plans are to have 20 across the country in the next 10 years.''

''We're also thinking about going global, with sites in Shanghai and Beijing in China and Paris and Munich in Europe,'' he said.

So far, he has been encouraged by the response. According to William Morrissey, president of the Morrissey Hospitality Companies of St. Paul, which manages the resort, hotel reservations totaling more than $1.5 million have been booked through June. He said that 98 percent of reservations had come from within 120 miles of the resort.

But KeyLime Cove is not the only indoor water park near Chicago. Its competitors include the CoCo Key Water Resort at the Sheraton Chicago Northwest in Arlington Heights and the Mayan Adventure Indoor Waterpark in Elmhurst, west of Chicago.

While these water parks are open to the public, KeyLime is open only to guests at its hotel and to groups. But its six restaurants, arcade, spa and other shops are open to the public.

''You won't have long lines to wait to access the water park here,'' Mr. Anderson said.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: HOTELS & MOTELS (89%); RESTAURANTS (89%); THEME PARKS (89%); DESTINATIONS & ATTRACTIONS (78%); RESORTS (78%); THEME RESTAURANTS (76%); RETAILERS (76%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (73%); CRUISES (70%); SHAREHOLDERS (69%); RAIN FORESTS (60%); GASOLINE PRICES (50%); OIL & GAS PRICES (50%); WATER PARKS (92%); AMUSEMENT & THEME PARKS (89%)
GEOGRAPHIC: MADISON, WI, USA (56%) WISCONSIN, USA (91%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: March 12, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: KeyLime Cove in Gurnee, Ill., top, has five water recreation areas. David W. Anderson is its founder and principal investor. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER WYNN THOMPSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

987 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 12, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Trying to Add a Pulse To a World of Machines
BYLINE: By KATIE HAFNER
SECTION: Section H; Column 0; Museums; Pg. 28
LENGTH: 1029 words
DATELINE: Mountain View, Calif.
THE Computer History Museum could not be more conspicuous. Since 2002 its home has been a 120,000-square-foot building just off the freeway in this city in the heart of Silicon Valley, a microprocessor's throw from Google.

Yet although the museum has the largest collection of computer artifacts in the world and has raised tens of millions of dollars, it remains relatively little known. Last year, the Silicon Valley Concierge Association, a hospitality industry group, gave the museum its Best-Kept Secret Attraction award.

The museum is evolving at a far slower pace than the industry whose history it chronicles. Even its officials call it ''a museum in progress,'' and they continue to work at making a compelling story from historical artifacts that consist mainly of nondescript machinery.

The museum's principal current exhibition, called ''Visible Storage,'' which showcases about 500 of the collection's most notable artifacts, ''amounts to a warehouse with labels,'' said Len Shustek, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is the museum's interim executive director and chairman of its board of trustees.

The exhibition is open only 15 hours a week, spread over four days, and last year it attracted only 15,000 walk-in visitors. Dr. Shustek said most of them probably learned about the museum by word of mouth, as it currently does little to promote itself.

That will change. The Visible Storage exhibition is just a warm-up act, Dr. Shustek said, for what is to come in 2009: an ambitious 14,000-square-foot interactive timeline depicting 2,000 years of computing. ''The real measure of success will be the much larger audience that will come when we open our first big exhibit,'' he said.

The exhibition will start with abacuses and progress through mechanical calculators and the failed attempts in the 1800s to build the first computing machines. The bulk of the timeline will focus on World War II and the postwar evolution of electronic computing, the companies it spawned and the people who started them.

The goal is to weave the artifacts together into a story line. And the importance of this is very clear to Dr. Shustek. ''A museum is not about objects,'' he said. ''A museum is about telling stories.''

John L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University, takes a group of undergraduates to the museum every summer. ''It provides an incredibly valuable perspective on how much progress has occurred in the field, and how radically technologies have changed,'' said Dr. Hennessy, who is an engineer by training.

But it's all about objects that are ugly, slow and obsolete, and while those qualities in a stegosaurus, say, might make for a fascinating dinosaur museum, they don't do much for a computer exhibition.

''The question is, how do you create as much excitement around this as taking kids to see dinosaur bones?'' Dr. Hennessy said. ''We've got this vision of that dinosaur walking. When you see a box sitting there, that doesn't do it.''

For that reason, he said, it is even more important to tell stories. As he and his students stand in front of an early computer called the Johnniac, for instance, he tells them about John von Neumann, the computer pioneer after whom it was named. And he shows them the old machines he used as a young programmer in the 1960s, like an I.B.M. 360 mainframe and a punch-card machine.

''When I tell them, 'By the way, this machine is maybe one one-hundredth or one one-thousandth as powerful as the computer on your desk,' they're astounded,'' said Dr. Hennessy, who also takes the same group of students across the street to Google, so they can glimpse the future.

Gregory Dreicer, a historian of technology and long-time museum curator who is vice president of exhibitions at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, said that fostering a sense of astonishment can be important. ''You need to be able to reveal to people things they don't know or you will lose most of your audience,'' he said. ''There's a surprise factor that's very important in any exhibition. Surprise is the key. You use that to hook people in and make them want to learn.'' Dr. Shustek said the museum's new timeline should help do that. ''The exhibit will show visitors that much of what they take for granted in computers today was there 50 years ago, only much slower, bigger and more expensive,'' he said.

Fittingly, the museum is in an office building that once belonged to Silicon Graphics, one of the valley's most prominent success stories. Among the museum's most famous artifacts is an imposing nine-foot-tall metal rack crammed with vacuum tubes and colored wires. It represents just a portion of a 1945 Eniac (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the world's first electronic digital computer. The complete Eniac filled an entire room, weighed 30 tons and had about 200 bytes of memory.

The museum is also the repository for an Apple I computer, signed by its mastermind, Steve Wozniak. Bill Gates has donated the paper tape of a computer program he wrote as a Harvard student.

Mr. Gates and other wealthy entrepreneurs have also helped by giving money to the museum, which does not charge admission. The plan is to raise $120 million, and so far the museum has collected $64 million of $73 million in pledges. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated the most, $15 million. Dr. Shustek and his wife, Donna Dubinsky, who helped create the original Palm hand-held device, gave $10 million, as did Eric Hahn, another Silicon Valley entrepreneur. John Doerr, the venture capitalist, gave $5 million.

The museum is also becoming a community center of sorts. Public lectures and other events attracted 50,000 people to the museum last year.

As the museum continues to expand its collection, Dr. Shustek said, its task will no longer simply be to declare every computer a piece of history but to identify only those that are relevant.

''From now on, everything that has a battery or plug will have a computer,'' he said. ''That's one of the existential problems we have: When a computer is part of everything, will we have to exhibit everything?''