World Briefing: Mar. 24, 2003

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Wireless Stereo: A Tune for Each Room

When Mom wants her Celine Dion, Dad wants Placido and Johnny demands Ja Rule, it used to take three stereos to satisfy all. Now comes the Yamaha MusicCast, a wireless, digital home music system, out in June. MusicCast is based on the same Wi-Fi technology that powers many PC networks, using a server, CD player/recorder and hard drive to store hundreds of hours of music. Once downloaded from your CDs, music is sent to as many as seven small receivers, or clients. Five can be wireless, and each can power a pair of wired speakers. MusicCast can simultaneously transmit different music to, say, the kitchen, den and two bedrooms. You can also compile custom CDs from the server to play elsewhere. This family jukebox isn't cheap: list price for the server and one client will be $2,800; additional clients, $600 each.

FASHION Hip-Hop Sells the Classics

It was at a 5 a.m. meeting over scrambled eggs after an all-night album-release party when hip-hop mogul Sean (P. Diddy) Combs got a look at a few $300 replicas of old sports jerseys--like a 1970s mustard yellow and brown number from the San Diego Padres. He liked what he saw. Combs wore 10 of the jerseys, sold by Philadelphia-based sports-nostalgia company Mitchell & Ness, at different times during the American Music Awards last year. Rappers like Bow Wow and Snoop Dogg followed, choosing royal blue 1960s L.A. Lakers duds for videos and concerts. Now Reuben Harley, 29, Mitchell & Ness's marketing director (and the man who met with Combs), says the jerseys have helped boost the company's annual sales to $25 million in 2002 from just $2.8 million in 2000. That makes Mitchell & Ness, formerly a little-known supplier of quaint 1930s-era wool baseball jerseys, the latest "urban gear" phenomenon. Other customers include Allen Iverson, the rapper Eve and a growing coterie of buyers in Asia.

HEALTH CARE Digital Doctors

At most hospitals, one can only hope that caregivers' minds aren't as cluttered as their workplace--what with medical records stacked outside patients' rooms, lab orders pinned to hallway bulletin boards and little sticky notes pasted everywhere. The new $60 million Indiana Heart Hospital will try to avoid such a mess as the world's first paperless, all-digital cardiac facility.

The sleek-looking, 88-bed, for-profit hospital, which opened in February, uses more than 650 computer stations made by GE Medical Systems to store records, test data and diagnostic images. Bedside terminals are intended to make patient care swifter and more customized--and safer, with mandatory bar-code scanning to cut the chance of a drug mix-up. Of course, the "paperless office" has been touted for years and has seldom materialized. But the hospital says its goals will be met if it can boost productivity 20%.

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