SMART, USELESS.(The Talk of the Town)

Four years ago, three cheery gadget geeks--Dan Dubno, a.k.a. Digital Dan, the chief technologist at CBS News; his younger brother, Mike, then the chief technology officer at Goldman Sachs; and Greg Harper, an all-around tech wizard--met for a dinner that quickly escalated into a gadget showdown. Dan, or maybe it was Greg, drew a device from his pocket and said, "Have you seen this?" To which Greg, or Dan, producing an identical object, replied, "You mean this?" So it went for several minutes, until fifteen pounds of cutting-edge electronics were piled on the table, and a winner--no one can, or cares to, remember who--was declared.

Thus was born Gadgetoff, an annual convocation of like-minded gear-heads. It is an exclusive, sub-radar affair that is devoted, as the motto goes, to "bringing the smart and the useless together." To get asked back, you had better show up with something neat-o. If someone bombed Gadgetoff, the future might cease to exist, or look too much like the present.

This year's Gadgetoff went down a few weeks ago on Governors Island, the abandoned, state-owned conundrum in New York Harbor. While fielding an array of private redevelopment proposals, Leslie Koch, the state's viceroy on the island, called in the Dubno brothers and their band of wacky geniuses, in the hope that a workable notion or two might drop to the ground. So it was that on a dismal rainy morning two hundred or so gadgeteers availed themselves of some unimprovable technologies--the ferry, the rain poncho--and took over the old island for a day.

There was something wonderfully incongruous about turning these futurists and their toys loose on the grounds of a derelict military base. The Gadgetoff headquarters, and any gizmos that could fit through a door, were in the Admiral's manse. A program of show-and-tell bits, each three and a half minutes long, was held in an abandoned church. Scattered about the island and its shores were four submarines, a helicopter, a hot-air balloon, and robots of various sizes and intents. Segways sped to and fro in the mist. There was a self-balancing skateboard, a smokeless cigarette, wicked-cool folding thingamajigs, and magic lock-picking keys, as well as presentations on a jet-powered Volkswagen Beetle, the growing sport of rocket racing, driverless S.U.V.s, and computer printers that "print" 3-D objects.

The person who perhaps best embodied the smart-and-useless parameter was Yossi Vardi, the tech ...