Now you can email around the globe; track vehicles, equipment or livestock; and monitor polluters and poachers ... all from the comfort of your own personal satellite! AeroAstro's Bitsy weighs under a kilogram and is about the size of a bloated PDA. This tiny orbiter is packed with an onboard processor, GPS receiver, pointing-and-tracking system, camera, radio and power supply. Educators, business people and rich dilettantes are all likely customers for the satellite, whcih is just 0.1 per cent the cost and weight of its more traditional neighbours in the ionosphere.Bisty: US$100,000. AeroAstro: +1 (703) 709 2240.
Stuck for a costume for the office fancy dress party? Or just need to put the frighteners on those teenage hoodlums that hang around your street at night? Either way the Complete Robocop Costume from Tombstone Productions is the answer. The suit's made from original movie moulds for maximum authenticity while, for those special occasions, the company also offers the Deluxe Complete Predator outfit an an Alien3 Alien suit.Robocop Costume: US$3,000. Tombstone: +1 (413) 534 5238, on the Web at empire.na.com./tomb/tombhp.html.
Think you're a whizz with a joystick? Then try your hand at this sleek hydroForce jet craft, with its beefy 120-horsepower Mercury SportJet engine. This lightweight speedboat is controlled with a joystick, allowing you to make 360-degree turns at full speed (45 mph) or spin round 180 degrees in about 2 seconds flat. Luxury features include a removable canopy to ward off the elements and two coolers to stock with your favourite ingestibles.hydroForce: US$11,995. Anchor Industries Inc: +1 (616) 946 2760.
The Solid Monitor speaker is just one reason why B & W has become Britain's most successful exporter of loudspeakers. The Monitor's multi-polymer components and plastic-coated drivers allow you to stick it anywhere - in the yard, by the pool or even in the shower. The Monitor is magnetically shielded, and the 1-inch ferrofluid-cooled tweeter and 5-inch woofer can handle up to 150 ear-splitting watts of power. Don't worry about damage from overloading; the built-in fast-acting thermal switch will shut down before any damge is caused.Solid Monitors: £199.95/pair. B & W loudspeakers: +44 (01903) 750 750.
There comes a time when even a gigabyte drive just isn't enough for all those multimedia files - that's when professionals reach for the nCUBE solution. As used in BT's video-on-demand trials, the 5-foot high nCUBE Model10 contains up to 512 independent processors - these can access a total of 2 terabytes (that's over 2 million megabytes) via external RAID drives. Cheaper entry-level packages provide everything you need to set up your own video-on-demand server, providing eight simultaneous video streams.nCUBE servers: from £250,000. nCUBE UK: +44 (0181) 561 0700.
You need never stick another cassette in a camcorder again - Avid's CamCutter is the world's first all-digital motion video camera. Intended for use by newsgathering teams in the field, it records up to 20 minutes of broadcast-quality images on a removable 2.4 gigabyte hard disk. This can then be slotted directly into a digital editing suite, to be recut and shown as part of the six o'clock bulletin. Next Avid plans to start retrofitting hard drives into existing video cameras.CamCutter: from US$38,000. Avid UK: +44 (01753) 655 999.
Beatifully restored by This Ole Office, the Blickensderfer is a state-of-the-art word processor from 1893. The first portable typewriter to offer interchangeable fonts, the "Blick" also boasted inventor George Blickensderfer's proprietary "scientific" keyboard layout, his "improvement" over the QWERTY layout. (You could get the QWERTY desgin on request, but you first had to sign a release stating you'd been warned that it was inefficient.)Blickensderfer typewriter: US$595. This Olde Office: +1 (619) 328 7876.
Calling New York? Tokyo? Sydney? Forget the usual array of clock faces or mind-bending mental arithmetic - the Geochron World Clock provides international time-zone conversions at a glance. It can even show how many hours of sunlight to expect at any given holiday location. Available in a selection of real wood finishes, it's an astonishing piece of electromechanical wizardry which would clearly be less costly if it was implemented in software on the screen of your PC - but then you wouldn't have such a striking conversation piece stuck to your wall.Geochron Clock: from £119.00. Bemaco Ltd: +44 (0181) 897 3353.