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Point taken; most of the really over the top hype seems to come from Steve Kemper. Still though, I don't recall a press release from Kamen saying "Everyone, calm down, it's just a scooter."

I did find this though on the theITquestion
website, which I think shows that someone had some perspective on what they saw, even back then:

...Brill's Content has learned that neither Jobs nor Bezos are investors in the company and both men are deeply critical of "IT's" design and release plans. Jobs said the design "sucks" and that "its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic." Bezos said, "I think this plan is dead on arrival. The U.S.A. is too hostile.".

Funny stuff.

okay, tough guy:

While, in the near term, people will now have the power to move faster, go farther, and carry more in a fun, environmentally friendly, and economical way, I believe the impact of Segway HT could be far more profound. This new technology fills a wide gap in the current transportation continuum and gives us the power to solve many of the problems, such as urban congestion and pollution, created by rapidly growing megacities.

from "A personal letter from Dean Kamen to the members of theITquestion.com"

that wasn't so hard.

Many people made predictions as to what "IT" was before yesterday's announcement. In fact, there is/was an entire website dedicated to the question. Interestingly, a poster with the pseudonym "Your Dad" seemed to be closest with "an electronic, gyroscope-stabilized G-spot locator." Not a g-spot locator, per se, but 2 out of 3 ain't bad! Nice guess, Your Dad.

--

Many people made predictions as to what "IT" was before yesterday's announcement. In fact, there is/was an entire website dedicated to the question. Interestingly, a poster with the pseudonym "Your Dad" seemed to be closest with "an electronic, gyroscope-stabilized G-spot locator." Not a g-spot locator, per se, but 2 out of 3 ain't bad! Nice guess, Your Dad.

--

But think about the people who will be affected by this. GREATLY affected by this. People who walk 8-5 as their job. People who live and work 10, 20, or 30 city blocks away. People who walk back and forth across warehouses, malls, and supermarkets all day. People who courier, deliver, or solicit donations door to door. This new invention allows them to go from stopped and interacting, to moving at a rapid speed with a mere thought and a quick motion.

This invention will fulfill everything that people on the inside have said about it. It will change the way we move in an urban environment. It is not just a 'scooter'; it cannot be replaced with a motorcycle. Try to pick up a Kawasaki and dodge people across city blocks (without causing panic or noise), turn into your office building, get on the elevator and stop at your cube. Sure it might be fun, but... ya know. Now pick up a motorized razor scooter and get across town quickly without smacking into someone, losing your balance, or getting it stolen (most /.ers haven't discovered that there is a digital keying system on the top).

There is a niche for this product and there is a massive one. You wont commute across suburbia with itm but it just might be the incentive you need to take public transportation (no more extra walking). Or maybe you were on the fence about walking for your commute. This will solve that problem. And finally might I say people can now use motorized transportation and talk on their cell phones without possibly hurting anyone but themselves.

This may not be your perfect solution to this inventor's puzzle, but for right now I feel it is the perfect solution.

Whoa! Dont go spreading your radical anti-materialism ideas here. Acording to the CIA, anti-materialism is a major threat to NATO countries. (Wildcards - Radical Ideologies).

What I'd like most this christmas is IT (codename: Ginger).

Where's IT err I mean Ginger.


;-)

If we could only find out what _it_ is.

theITquestion.com

This is a very smart idea, although it is not dissimilar to PRT (personal rapid transit), a sort of fringe and relatively unimplemented technology. As a public sector planner, I see three things to think about with this sort of 'personalized rail' approach:

(1) Capacity - These personal rail car concepts tend to fail when it comes to extremely dense corridors. As you can imagine, heavy rail can push many more people through a single rail corridor than this sort of technology. Right now you can push about 2K cars/lane/hour, compared to densities of nearly 10K for heavy rail systems. With this technology, you could decrease headways and maybe squeeze another few K through, but:

(2) Cost - these rail systems still cost on the order of $5M US/km to build, while each highway lane only costs about $200K to build. So, you are still getting less for your tax money with this stuff. Not that I am totally against this, though. Essen (Germany) has a clever system that does this, except the cars are busses that turn into light rail. I can see these applied intelligently for mid-range suburban corridors where other forms of transit are not applicable, but this brings us to the final issue:

(3) Consumer Adoption - when you are trying to get customers to change modes and you are asking them to make large capital outlays to do so, you are asking for trouble. This is the main issue with automated highways (like those prototyped at Berkeley). You can build the public infrastructure, but without private investment on a large scale, it does not fly.

For these reasons, I think that this might be a great transit technology, but will have a hard climb to become an accepted mode in urban areas. I guess that we will have to wait for the super-magical-mysterious panacea that is IT!

Looks like someone cracked.

"Dean's two-wheel balancing device is really cool," said Dr. Wise Young, director of the W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University. "It zooms around like lightning just by standing on it and leaning forward or backwards. The battery is the platform. Using it is totally intuitive. It will require reorganization of sidewalks because there will be people zooming all over cities with it."

Read the complete article.