Stories about: Mattel

Is there a greener way to surf the Web?

Mattel, the £2.8 billion (AU$6.9 billion) toy company, last week put its IT and supply chain systems under pressure again when it issued its third product recall, this time of 848,000 Barbie accessories and Fisher-Price toddler toys that could contain lead paint.

When Joe Eckroth moved from the top tech spot at toy maker Mattel to the CIO post at New Century Financial a year ago, he wanted to play fair with his new employees from the start. He was open about his game plan with staffers, some of whom were unsettled by the change in leadership. But Eckroth didn't let his concern for them stop him from pushing his agenda forward. He honestly stated his belief in outsourcing, for example, even though he knew it might further disturb some employees.

Amazon.com has launched new toy and baby stores that feature tens of thousands of products, including hard-to-find items from specialty retailers.

Fred Held was CIO at Mattel Toys Inc. for most of the 1970s. He recalls the day a gung-ho marketing executive, apparently having just read Popular Science, asked, "Can we put a chip in every product, hook up to spy satellites and track where everyone goes, so we can really see who buys our toys? We could check which stores have too much inventory and transfer product accordingly."

In an airport at Frankfurt, Germany, a maintenance worker crawls through the cramped ventilation system, wearing a small device that reads data from chips positioned throughout the system to verify that he's done his job. At a U.S. theme park, a teenager on a waterslide wears a special wristband with an embedded chip that will remember how many rides he has taken, no matter how wet he gets. And at a large drug company's warehouse, a shipment of the regulated narcotic OxyContin gets tagged with chips to track its route, and discourage theft and counterfeiting.

Tech-savvy leaders that can deal with customers and their company's IT infrastructure will replace the sales and marketing types that dominate executive ranks today, according to Michael Capellas, president of Hewlett-Packard Co.

Having recently created a new Entertainment business unit to deal with its interactive computer games category, Tech Pacific has appointed Jeremy Hilton as the division's business manager.

A court this month invokedrecent legislation protecting companies from cybersquatters when it ordered a pornographic Web site to stop using Mattel's trademark "Barbie" as part of its domain name.

Legislation passed last year to protect companies from cybersquatters passed a critical test July 13, when a judge from the Southern District of New York ordered a pornographic Web site to stop using Mattel's trademark "Barbie" as part of its domain name.

While dozens of brand-new business-to-business exchanges are eager to grab the spotlight, an older service provider used by high-tech manufacturers active in Asia offers a telling lesson on the advantages and drawbacks of online supply chains.