Ted Larson arrives at geek headquarters smack in the middle of
the much-awaited season premiere of UPN's latest Star Trek show,
Enterprise. The former chief technical officer at an Internet
startup, Larson sports blue jeans, a white Tech TV T-shirt, and
loafers with white socks, and is carrying a large, tattered FedEx
box that contains his own homemade, gyroscopically stabilized,
self-balancing robot.
The other geeks introduce themselves. Dean Heistad, 36, is a
director of technology in the information technology department of
Time Inc., FORTUNE's publisher. Paul Ross, 32, owns Sound
Integration, an audio/video store in Coralville, a suburb of Iowa
City. Larson, 37, details his own stellar geek credentials. His
favorite geek movie is Videodrome, starring Debbie Harry; his robot,
which he designed with a friend from robot club, balances using a
gyroscope, a two-axis accelerometer, and motor feedback. Few others
have figured out how to do it, he boasts.
Larson turns the robot on. A row of green and yellow lights
begins blinking. Suddenly the three-tiered, Leaning Tower of
Pisa-esque contraption stands straight up and starts scurrying
around the room like R2-D2 gone berserker. "All the robot guys at
the robot fair were like, 'Whoa!' " Larson says of his recent trip
to the San Francisco Robot Expo. " 'No way! I can't believe you got
that to work!' "
The geeks have arrived.
This is no ordinary reunion of the nerds. These geeks—as
different from nerds as orcs are from trolls—have been assembled as
part of an audacious experiment: Can they deliver digital happiness
to a small part of America and enable FORTUNE to ride the success of
the hit reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?
Ride? Make that improve on. In the show, a straight guy gets new
clothes, a redecorated apartment, a real haircut, and personal
grooming tips. Yet in real life, it's pretty clear that guys and
their families aren't looking for cleaner bathrooms and matching
belt-shoe combos, but for gadgets. Plenty of gadgets. In the last
quarter, Best Buy saw same-store sales rise almost 8% from the
previous year; Wal-Mart, Target, and Kmart are also aggressively
pushing into consumer electronics. But get some of these gadgets
into your home, and Best Buyer's remorse quickly sets in: Did I buy
the right DVD player? Why won't the wireless access point work with
the PC? Do I have a PC? Which got us to thinking—fashion is fun and
all, but wouldn't it be better if the Fab Five were a team of
super-tech-savvy geeks who could solve these real problems?
Sure it would. So we assembled a Fab Three, headed by Heistad,
and paired it with the most typically tech-less family we could
find: the Burkes of Sterling, Va., who consist of a salesman father,
a stay-at-home mother, and two small children. Heistad grilled them
on their tech needs—really, all they wanted to do was send digital
pictures of the kids to Grandma. Heistad came back with a shopping
list that would get them that, plus a home theater, a wireless
network, new computing, a tricked-out music system, and GPS
positioning capabilities. FORTUNE's requirements: The products
needed to be practical, easy to use, fully installed, basically
idiot-proof, and very, very cool. We'd pick up the bill for the
Burkes, paying a set media rate when companies offered it, retail
when they didn't. (We let the geeks pick their own uniforms, though:
They chose The Matrix: Reloaded T-shirts and Tevas.)
For three days the Fab Three took over the Burkes' home. And at
the end, it was nearing digital nirvana. But, O, Fortuna! It is not
so easy being geek.
