CALIFORNIA PROPOSAL PUTS LEGISLATIVE INFO ONLINE

The online community has rallied around a new bill introduced in the California legislature that will require almost all legislative information to be made available to the public by means of access through a computer modem — including full text of bills, amendments, bill analyses, bill history, bill status, veto messages, daily files of each house of the legislature, each House committee’s schedule, state codes (statutes) and the full California Constitution.

For the first time, citizens, reporters, community and interest groups, unions, corporations, city and county employees could have access to legislation that directly affects them, even while it’s in progress. Like Hawaii’s FYI system, Assembly Bill 1624 offers leadership for those states — and Congress — not yet providing timely, comprehensive, economical online citizen access to the process of their governance.

This California bill was introduced March 4th by State Assembly Member Debra Bowen (D-Torrance). And since then, it has been bounced around several times. Initially it was held up in committee, ostensibly to study the technical feasibility of doing an online service, but the information is already available online — for a fee.

To date, the legislative information has been sold to a few high-priced information distributors for $300,000 to $500,000 per year, according to Jim Warren, a staunch advocate of the bill and the founder of the conferences on Computers, Freedom and Privacy. (It was Warren, who provided Bowen with a 16-page implementation plan for free distribution of the information via the nonprofit, nonproprietary public Internet.) So far, only well-funded lobbyists and special interest groups can afford the high per byte and per minute fees of those few private data distributors that have monopolized online access to these electronic public records. The select group includes Legi-Tech and State Net — two of the bill’s strongest opponents.

Much of the online community has rallied around AB1624, however, and are unwilling to let the bill disappear without a fight. Concerned individuals have been sending information over the Internet about the bill’s progress and encouraging citizens, who are interested in seeing the bill passed, to make their opinions known to their representatives — through faxes, phone calls and letters.

According to Warren, who often writes about public access to information as a columnist for a variety of trade publications, these paper and electronic messages are the only thing that has kept this bill moving forward. In fact, it was shortly after an all-out fax blitz to the office of John Burton (D-San Francisco), the Assembly Rules Committee chair, that the Assembly — after five postponements — reheard the proposed bill. It passed the Assembly Rules Committee 8-0.

Since then, the Assembly Ways & Means Committee chaired by John Vasconsellos (D-Santa Clara) passed the bill 21 to 0. And the full Assembly passed it 72 to 0. But the proposed bill still has to pass the Senate and then must still go back to Burton’s Rules Committee.

Individuals interested in more information on AB1624 can contact Hon. Debra Bowen, State Capitol, Room 3126, Sacramento, CA 95814 or request electronic information on the bill from Jim Warren at jwarren@well.sf.ca.us.

MICROSCOPES FOR HIGH-DENSITY STORAGE

In the near future we may be buying microscopes for our personal computers — not as scientific instruments, but as data storage devices. On May 18, Professor Calvin F. Quate of Stanford University described to the Clara Valley Electron Devices Society of the IEEE recent progress in the use of scanning force microscopes (SFMs) for storing information at very high densities and for measuring surface roughness.

An SFM moves a very small, sharp probe across a surface, keeping it only a few atomic diameters away from contact. It measures the infinitesimal force of attraction or repulsion between the surface and the probe tip created by electric or magnetic fields. Because the tip is only two or three atoms in diameter, the SFM can actually locate the individual atoms and molecules that make up the surface as well as ones that lie on it. Derek Bennett introduced the SFM as a variation of a similar device, the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which he invented with Heinrich Rohr at IBM’s Zurich laboratory.

Eric Bentzig at Bell Laboratories has used an SFM with a magnetic probe tip to read data recorded as magnetized spots. He created very small spots by illuminating the surface of a magneto-optical material with light sent down a tapering mirror-surfaced plastic rod. The light emerged through an opening smaller than a wavelength of light at the end of the rod, hitting the surface before it could spread out. This equipment was able to store information more than 500 times more compactly than an ordinary computer disc drive — 45 gigabits (45,000,000,000 bits) per square inch.

At that density, a 50-megabyte file would just cover George Washington’s eye on a dollar bill.

Other techniques include sensing the electrical attraction of trapped charges in an insulating surface, denting the surface with the probe tip, and moving individual atoms around on the surface. At IBM’s Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, CA, scientists scratched the word “HEUREKA” on an ordinary audio compact disc — between two of the microscopic pits that encode the audio signal data!

Researchers at IBM, Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT) and other laboratories around the world have even been writing their companies’ names with atoms such as gold and sulfur in letters as small as five atoms high — arguably the world’s smallest type font.

RAE BUILDS A PIM FOR PEOPLE ON THE GO

Rae Technology, a startup specializing in personal information management (PIM) software, has set its sights on becoming known as the PIM developer of choice for computer users who can’t wait for Zoomer or Newton PDAs to hit the market.

Next week the Cupertino, CA-based company, which has focused on developing PIM technology for the emerging PDA and mobile personal computing markets, is expected to ship its first shrink-wrapped product called Rae Assist.

The $199 personal information manager is the first PIM to combine a relational database — Rae Assist is built on a subset of ACI’s 4th Dimension database engine — with Hypercard-like capabilities that enable the user to create unstructured associations, such as object linking within different categories of information.

In addition the application is the first of its kind to include an “agent” or smart assistant that helps users import, find, link and tag information. The smart assistant can connect and disconnect links between data objects either automatically or based on a request from the user.

Initially Rae Assist will be available only for Apple Macintosh, PowerBook and Duo platforms, but, according to David Kleinberg, Rae’s vice president of sales and marketing, the company is interested in developing its proprietary technology for other platforms — both existing computer platforms such as Windows and consumer devices still in development. The Rae Assist architecture underlying the application is platform independent, according to Kleinberg.

Rae Technology was cofounded by a team of experts in database and hypermedia technology, including its chairman, chief operating officer and president, Samir Arora, an ex-Apple employee, who was part of the original 4th Dimension engineering team at Apple and ran the applications tools group responsible for 4D and Hypercard. His proprietary object-oriented Solo technology forms the core of Rae Assist and differentiates the product from other PIMs.

In addition to developing off-the-shelf software, Rae has been building customized corporate information management databases for companies that deal with sales automation, project management and electronic catalog publishing. It will continue to design, develop and install these proprietary databases. Kleinberg says Rae also plans to develop tools that will enable Rae Assist users to “personalize” applications.

SANCTUARY WOODS EXPANDS OPERATIONS

Sanctuary Woods Multimedia Corporation, the Canadian-based interactive media company best known as the publisher of actress Shelley Duvall’s first multimedia title, recently opened a U.S. headquarters and announced plans to expand its interactive publishing operations to include delivery of 21 educational and entertainment titles for the Macintosh, Microsoft MPC and 3DO platforms this year.

The five-year-old company, which has focused primarily on developing customized interactive business applications for corporations such as Northern Telecom and Bell-Northern Research as well as for federal agencies, has been struggling to create a presence in the new media market since 1992 when it launched its first two — and to date only — commercial CD-ROM titles: The Vampire’s Coffin and Shelley Duvall’s It’s a Bird’s Life.

To increase the company’s visibility in the U.S. multimedia publishing market, Sanctuary Woods has named Scott Walchek president and COO of the company. The former director of worldwide product marketing for Macromedia, he will run Sanctuary Woods’ business operations out of the new offices in San Mateo, CA, while title development will continue in the original Victoria, British Columbia, location.

The next six months “will be the greatest opportunity this company has had,” according to Walchek, who says Sanctuary Woods will deliver 10 titles each for the Macintosh and MPC platforms. In addition Sanctuary Woods plans to release It’s a Bird’s Life for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer when it is shipped. According to Walchek, the company will produce titles for other CD-ROM-based platforms, including Philips’ CD-I and Tandy’s VIS systems.

In order to establish its titles in the U.S. channel, Sanctuary Woods has signed as an affiliate label of Electronic Arts. In addition Walchek has established a brand name identity strategy for the company’s content in the hopes that consumers will begin to recognize their favorite types of titles by category. The company has lined up the rights to and owns the trademarks of the names I-Tales, I-Adventures, I-Movies, I-Games, I-Learn, I-Mysteries, I-Catalog and I-Education.

In addition to creating original content and repurposing material from print, Sanctuary Woods is seeking to acquire other multimedia publishing companies as well as the digital rights to movies, videos and music CDs. According to Walchek, the company just secured the digital rights for all interactive platforms to Once Upon a Forest, a 20th Century Fox feature film to be released in 1994.