These Telegrams Really SingImagine dental floss with...

These Telegrams Really Sing

Imagine dental floss with your own Mom’s voice nagging you about gum disease. Or a Valentine’s Day card that whispers--literally--affection from your beloved.

Talking products aren’t new. But now you can record your own message through the nation’s first personalized voice-chip technology, offered by Orex Products of America Inc. The Japanese parent firm, Orex Ltd., sells personalized greeting cards at Tiffany’s in Tokyo. Here in the United States, the Torrance subsidiary is hoping to expand across the specialty gift market, including cards, invitations, tree ornaments, flowers, telegrams, children’s books.

Using a special recorder in the store, you can record up to 16 seconds of message or music. It can be played back about 500 times. The “Message Module,” which includes the microprocessor and ultra-thin speaker, is the size of a matchbook and costs $8.50 each in quantities of 1,000. That means a personalized greeting card might run up to $20.

But with singing telegrams going for $80 and delivered flowers $35 or more, company officials think that there’s plenty of room for a new greeting gimmick.

Calling All Environmentalists

Making a dollar by doing good is a neat trick.

Consider Working Assets Long Distance, a phone service that donates 1% of your calling charges to environmental groups. The network has grown from 5,000 customers to more than 50,000 nationwide. Donations go to the Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace and the like.

The service costs consumers nothing. Working Assets donates part of the money from a marketing fee that it receives from its partner, US Sprint. The No. 3 long-distance provider in turn gains access to environmentally conscious consumers.

Those customers also get to vote on where the Working Assets Long Distance money should go. Working Assets Funding Service, a San Francisco-based “socially responsible” consumer-services company, has been using similar “green tapping” since 1985 to raise funds for various issues from its Visa and MasterCards as well as a travel service. For information: (800) 522-7759.

Peter Barnes got the inspiration for such painless fund-raising in classic California fashion: in his hot tub. Barnes was previously a Newsweek correspondent, an editor at the New Republic, publisher of Mother Jones magazine and a solar equipment entrepreneur. His company, with 12 on staff, has given away $700,000, more than its cumulative profit. It hopes to give away $500,000 in 1990 alone.

Taxing Offer for MCA Moguls

A Century City law firm that last year became the first in the nation to help a Japanese company buy a U.S. concern entirely for stock, said it will offer its expertise to MCA Inc. Chairman Lew R. Wasserman, who faces a big tax bill if he cannot find a way for giant Matsushita Industrial Electric Co. to acquire his company without using cash.

Mark Garcia, a spokesman for the Spensley Horn Jubas & Lubitz law firm in Century City, said attorneys there helped Kyocera Corp. acquire AVX Corp. of New York in September, 1989, by using the Japanese company’s American depositary receipts, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

ADRs are special securities that allow American investors to purchase equity in a foreign company whose stock does not trade on U.S. exchanges. He said the law firm could draft a similar arrangement to spare Wasserman and other large MCA shareholders a huge tax bill.

Of course, Garcia says, the advice won’t come free.