He wins when clients laugh at his products.

Between describing the toilet-replica guest chairs in his vice president's office and explaining his idea for a talking camera that makes zit jokes, Leslie Mann takes a moment to point out that he's not running a freak show. As founder and president of a Davidson-based product-development company, he has given the world alarm clocks that insult people out of bed and edible watches that "run on saliva." But that doesn't mean he lacks a serious side. "We have some conventional products we develop," he says.

Conventional doesn't describe the office of Banks Product Innovations Group LLC. It's sort of a 1,600-square-foot amusement park. Door handles are rigged to shock. Chairs hang from ceilings. Outside, the Boinkmobile - "a cross between a VW and the Jetson vehicle," Mann says - taxis clients around.

Mann, 37, founded Banks in 1995 - the latest in a series of moneymaking schemes that started at age 12, when he painted mailboxes in his Toronto neighborhood. After high school, he taught skiing in Alberta, Canada, studied landscape architecture at Guelph University in Toronto and dabbled in real estate. In 1990, he started Toronto-based San-Ban International, a product-development firm. Among its inventions: a watch with a pop-up bubble-blowing wand.

After discovering Lake Norman on a drive to Florida, Mann sold his stake in San-Ban, moved to Davidson and started Banks. He drew up concepts for gummy watches for Mooresville-based Beacon Sweets Inc. Later, he invented the Rude Awakening alarm clock, Banks's most successful product, which sells for $25 and orders people to "get their fat, lazy asses out of bed." Banks markets 25 other products - 15 invented in-house.

About 70% of revenue, which topped $3 million in 1998, comes from inventing and hawking products for other companies, including heavyweights such as Coca-Cola Co. and Walt Disney Co. Among those developed for Coke: a talking soda can that oohs and ahhs when squeezed, "We're sort of a think tank," Mann says. "We help companies come up with ideas that would support their marketing and merchandising."

Payroll is up to 16 full-time employees - 11 in Hong Kong - and 40 sales reps, who work on commission. A Chinese factory, partly owned by Mann, makes the products. "We're trying to add a little fun to everyday products," Mann says. "If I get rich in the process, that's the price I'm willing to pay."

He tries to make cents off phone bills

Wade Wilmoth likes to talk. It's his main hobby. That's one reason North Carolinians for Telephone Competition, a new lobbying group, picked the 64-year-old Boone real-estate agent as its front man.

Wilmoth has used his gift of gab to get elected Boone's mayor and grab a seat in the General Assembly. These days, he's revving up the rhetoric to cut access fees BellSouth Corp. and other local-service providers charge to connect phone users to long-distance carriers. North Carolinians, he says, pay an average of 8.7 cents per minute for in-state long-distance calls, the highest rate of any state except South Carolina (9.1 cents).

In Georgia, people pay an average of just 2.7 cents, Wilmoth says, and Tennessee will drop its charges from an average of 7.3 cents at the start of this year to 1.5 cents by 2001. NCTC would like the N.C. Utilities Commission to follow suit. The group claims that providing long-distance access costs local carriers just half a cent. "I don't understand why we can't have it lowered in North Carolina, when it's lower in all these other places," Wilmoth says.

NCTC started in December with 25 members - most small-business owners - and now has 300. But it isn't quite as grass-roots as its name suggests. Long-distance giant AT&T Corp. provides money, information and an expense account for Wilmoth. AT&T wants to compete for local service, but local carriers use the high access fees as a subsidy to keep their local rates below cost.

Despite the backing, AT&T's local-competition agenda isn't Wilmoth's. "It may be the focus of the group," he says. "But I don't have a dog in that fight."

Wilmoth, a self-depreciating, likeable sort, would benefit from lower rates. His agency's bill "runs an unbelievable amount per year." But he also sees this as a crusade. "For what it will save me on my telephone bill for the next five years, it won't pay for a third of my time. It's kind of a cause, I guess."

Civic activity, he says, is his "genetic defect." He served on the Boone Town Council from 1973 to '75 and two terms as mayor before winning three terms as a Democratic state representative from 1987 through 1994.

Born in Surry County and raised on "the last tobacco patch before you get to Fairview," near Dobson, Wilmoth is proof that you can take the country out of the boy. He lives in town and "leaves all his gardening to Del Monte and Libby's." Which leaves more time for his favorite hobby.

Dully work leads to greater simulation

During a job interview with General Electric Corp. in the late '70s, Siu Tong asked what he would do if hired as a researcher.

The answer: Analyze a tiny portion of an engine, painstakingly changing each dimension in hopes of finding a better design. "That is very boring," Tong said. "We've got a few thousand engineers doing the same thing every day," he was told.

GE rejected Tong, then a doctorate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but the interview set the Hong Kong native on a new path: To show GE - and the world - how to solve design problems more efficiently and less tediously.

With that mission in mind, Tong's company, Morrisville-based Engineous Software Inc., has become one of the state's fastest-growing. Its software, iSIGHT, helps product engineers reduce the time and cost of improving product design. Engineers type in what they want a product to do better, iSIGHT calculates the best design and draws it on-screen. The software can be used, for example, to find out how changing a car - say, making it 2 inches long - will affect gas mileage.

The past three years, Tong says, Engineous' sales have shot up 2,800%. (Tong won't reveal 1998 revenues, but 1995's were $200,000, according to The News & Observer of Raleigh.) Last year, Tong, 46, was named North Carolina's emerging entrepreneur of the year by the accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP. Even GE has come on board. It is now a customer and minority investor. Tong owns about 50% of the company, which has 65 employees and more than 30 customers.

iSIGHT helped GE shave $250,000 off the cost of the multi-million dollar engine that powers the new Boeing 777. The U.S. Navy used iSight to reduce the time needed to design propellers from eight weeks to three. Each license costs more than $20,000. The company's largest deal is a $3.2 million contract with the Department of Defense.

Tong came to the United States in 1972 to attend Ohio State University, then Cornell University in New York, where he earned a bachelor's in civil engineering. Though his first interview with GE was a bust, Tong eventually joined the company as an aeronautical engineer in 1983 and finished his doctorate a year later.

At GE's research center in Schenectady, N.Y., he spent seven years honing simulation software dubbed Engineous, before starting a consulting firm, Optimum Technologies, in 1994. Consulting paid the bills while Tong tinkered with a variation of the software. His company moved to Morrisville in 1996 and changed its name to Engineous Software Inc. - with permission from GE.

Tong hasn't seen Hong Kong in 20 years, but his speech still carries a thick accent - and a healthy dose of tech terms. "English is my second language after Fortran and C," he quips.