Word: hasbro
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Given eBay's sensational ascent, it's hard to fathom the considerable prodding it took to get Whitman on board. Then at toymaker Hasbro, she hesitated to uproot her family from Boston to join "this obscure Internet company" out in California. And even after she signed on, there were difficult times. The falling Internet sector dragged the company's stock down to a low of $30 a share. And in May a federal jury ruled that eBay should pay $35 million in damages for infringing on the patent of a Virginia firm that developed fixed-pricing technology; eBay has challenged...
Looking for another way to keep the kids from driving you nuts on those long summer road trips? Hasbro's new VideoNow might occupy them for a while. The $50 portable gadget plays 30-min. videodiscs ($7.99 each) with excerpts from popular shows like American Idol, SpongeBob SquarePants and Jimmy Neutron. It runs on a pair of AA batteries that should last for seven hours. And if the videos get too noisy, the kids can plug in a pair of earphones. It's a nice idea, but the tiny black-and-white screen is a disappointment...
...early 1980's, Rhode Island-based toy company Hasbro hit upon the idea of releasing toys that transformed from vehicles into futuristic robots, essentially doubling each toy's play value. The line was a smash success, heavily buoyed by a popular television cartoon and comic book series. Despite succumbing to the fickle whims of popular taste, the line managed to rebound and, like a sort of Star Trek for children, has maintained its popularity through various incarnations over the years up to the present...
...listen. A used Fortress Maximus fetches $500, a gold-plated Optimus Prime, $3000. Three months ago, a seller on Ebay offered an almost complete mint collection of the original run. The asking price? A whopping $30,000. Joe Millionaire could live off that for a year. The Transformers toys, Hasbro's bread and butter, are even celebrities unto themselves. Fans whisper on newsgroups about the latest Optimus sighting in a remote Walgreens, and leak unauthorized photos of a nude (well, unpainted) Ultra Magnus to the web. Needless to say, cosmetic alterations to their beloved toys are greeted with the revulsion...
...Hasbro earns money by making the dolls as lifelike as possible, but the real threat that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers faced from chemical and biological weapons in the first Gulf War—and will face in the Second Gulf War—seems to be outside the scope of Hasbro’s realism. Unfortunately, this reflects a larger problem: Americans don’t fully appreciate the danger posed by these weapons, and even when they sense the danger, they don’t understand its imminence...