Big Blue Chases Spring Break Beach Bunnies

HOW TOUGH IS IT TO GET HIGH-TECH HELP these days? Tough enough to send IBM to the beach. That's right--Big Blue is hitting three spring-break hot spots to get a jump on computer rivals in recruiting techno-savvy 18- to 20-year-olds.

IBM tested the recruitment program last year in Florida. The company set up a booth at a job fair on the beach--even building a giant sand sculpture of an IBM ThinkPad laptop and hiring a plane to fly over the beach with a banner promoting Big Blue's job Web site. ''We don't expect them to have resumes,'' says Ralph Mobley, IBM's manager for college recruiting. After last year's promotion, the company saw a 58% jump in the number of resumes sent to its Web site, www.cybrblu.ibm.com.

IBM is trying hard to convince students that this is not their parents' computer company. At Lake Havasu in Arizona, its recruiters have rented jet skis to reach students tooling around on the water. Others will rollerblade along the shore, giving out Lava lamps and brochures to students. IBM will pull similar stunts in Padre Beach, Tex., and Panama City Beach, Fla.

By Ira Sager

The Business Card of the Future

FORGET ABOUT ALL THOSE DOG-EARED BUSINESS CARDS piling up next to your computer. A Sunnyvale (Calif.) startup called eCode is offering an electronic business-card service on the Web to make card-creep a little easier to manage.

Here's how it works: Register at the company's site, www.ecode.com, and you can create a colorful new E-card as an attachment to your E-mails. On their end, recipients can set up an online address book on eCode's site, which they can add to simply by clicking on the sender's E-mail.

What's more, if users tell eCode that they've changed jobs or addresses, other eCode users are notified instantly, and the changes are made automatically to their electronic address books. ''Everybody on the face of the planet will have an E-code instead of business cards,'' predicts eCode founder and President Rohit Chandra.

The service is free to consumers. But when customers use their eCode to register at Web sites, the company plans to charge the sites for personal information about those customers.

By Janet Rae-Dupree

Ten-Percenters of the Game Biz

COMPUTER GAME DEVELOPERS ARE GOING HOLLYWOOD in more ways than one. The latest rage? Hiring talent agents to sell their digital innovations. Developers say the games they write are creative products that require the same kind of marketing effort that music and books do. Besides, the developers are too busy coming up with hot new games to spend much time on the financial side of the business.

Berkeley (Calif.) game designer Peter J. Lincroft learned that lesson. Last year, Lincroft left Totally Games Inc., where he had worked for eight years, to set up his own three-man development team. But after spending more time haggling with game publishers over contracts than developing new products, Lincroft hired an agent. He and his team now have a contract negotiated by the agent, though Lincroft won't talk about the details of the deal.

As in Hollywood, the odds of success in the computer-game business are long--but a win can be lucrative. Developers can collect seven-figure advances, and blockbuster games can lead to huge payoffs.

By Janet Rae-Dupree

E-Stickers Grab the Sesame Street Set

FOR YOUNGER KIDS, STICKERS ARE ''THE BOMB.'' So Children's Television Workshop, which produces the Sesame Street TV show, figured that adding digital stickers to its Web site would be a hit.

They were right: Kids have flocked to CTW's Sticker World, launched last month without any fanfare. Using Sticker World's easy-to-follow instructions, more than 14,000 kids have set up their own home pages. Kids use them to store and collect their stickers, which include animated break-dancing bananas and smiley-face emoticons.

Here's how Sticker World works: When children register, they get 300 points and six starter stickers. On their home pages, they can change the background, arrange their stickers to create messages, and pick their own mottoes such as ''Animals rule, humans drool'' and ''Nothin' but Net.'' They can use the points to buy other stickers--and earn more points by visiting other kids' home pages or having other kids check out their site.

Aimed at children ages 6 to 11, Sticker World is part of the new Kid City area on CTW's Web site, www.ctw.org. Kid City is another step in CTW's plan to offer online ''edutainment'' for parents and children up to age 14.

CTW's site, which draws close to 1 million visitors a month, brings in money by selling Sesame Street toys and advertising space to companies such as Procter & Gamble Co.

PHOTO: Sticker World Web Site