In this post-enron era, there aren't too many CEOs who will cheerfully volunteer to a reporter, "My company's never made a dime!" But the American Technology Corp.'s Elwood (Woody) Norris isn't your typical CEO. Blessed with the bone-crunching handshake of a used-car salesman, the R-rated vocabulary of a drill sergeant and the potential innovative genius of a Thomas Edison (Norris's previous claim to fame was creating a forerunner to the sonogram), Norris has an enthusiasm for his latest contraption that's infectious. He's standing in a corner of his cluttered San Diego office, holding a gizmo that looks something like a retro-futuristic waffle iron with a portable CD player Velcroed to its back. "Are you ready?" he asks, then points his invention directly at the head of someone who's just entered the room 10 feet away. "Now, can you hear it? Can you hear it? Isn't that unbelievable?" What the person across the room hears is, well, unbelievable: all of a sudden, the sound of a waterfall has materialized in his head. And, it turns out, no one else in the room can hear it but him. It's as if the sound is coming out of thin air. As Keanu Reeves said in "The Matrix": whoa.
展开▼
