September 18, 1988

LET’S DO IT: America’s quick-profit obsession makes it tough for ideas that require a gestation period to get off the ground. One such is called Know-It-All!, an “information utility” dreamed up by Bob Jacobson, principal consultant to the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee and impetus behind much of the recent telecom legislation that’s come to Sacramento.

Jacobson calls KIA! a kind of “information age Edison Labs” — a non-profit organization of scholars, analysts and executives that conducts commercial research for its sponsors. He sees it as a way to bring telecom where it could and should be in the 1990s, a three-year program culminating in a prototype system.
The utility he sees would be worlds apart from today’s on-line services. “In the U.S. there’s a lot of technology on the shelf that forces people to conform to it,” says Jacobson. “We need something that responds to the needs of people every day, when they wake up in the morning. They need a way to check into why their Social Security check isn’t on time, a way to comparison-shop, to buy an item cheap and easy, how to get the plumbing fixed.”

One specialist he has interested in the project is Brenda Dervin, an Ohio State University professor who specializes in what she calls “sensemaking” theory. It’s a fascinating philosophy for system design and study about how people use information. Others include hypermedia expert George Por, Denis O’Keefe, president of the French E-mail firm Com’X; author Howard Rheingold, expert on “virtual community,” and architect Romedi Passini, system design theoretician at the Universite de Quebec.

Telecom and computer companies have the most to gain from this kind of research. Jacobson’s approached a few, including Apple, GTE and Pacific Bell, but so far no one has cut a check. Can they afford to stay short-sighted? Can we afford to let them?

MOUSE-HUNTING: Mice need room to roam, and you’ve read here about various companies and inventors in the Bay Area and beyond who are working on pointing devices that don’t require desktop space.
Now hardware designer Lee Felsenstein’s come up with one, too, for IBM-clone personal computers. Although he’s loath to disclose its moniker until the databases have been checked for copyrights, the device is both functional and aptly named.

Felsenstein’s Berkeley company, Golemics, is in “serious negotiations with a major U.S. manufacturer” to license the device. What he likes best about his non-mouse is that a user can change its “personality.” He’s also designed the soft-and-hardware combo using a one-chip circuit, which makes it ridiculously cheap to implement.

This one may be a hit for Felsenstein, especially since IBM systems have been more than clumsy trying to make a go of graphical user interfaces. (The one-button Macintosh mouse beats the stuffing out of ones that work on PCs, with their two buttons and snail’s response time.)

PERSISTENCE PAYS: A while back, I wrote about how much better I felt when using the split-and-tilt keyboard that Tony Hodges built. Since then, Hodges has made a big splash in the press — Business Week and the Wall Street Journal, among others, picked up on it — but he’s had a heck of a time getting it made.
But a front-page story in the international version of Newsweek may have changed all that. Hodges called to say that an ergonomist at Credit Suisse, one of Europe’s largest banks, wants to see prototypes as quickly as possible. “I asked them how many units they were interested in, and they said, ‘What can I say? We’re the biggest bank in Europe,’” says Hodges.

Since, as he says, “no American company has picked up the phone” and expressed an honest interest in the producing the keyboard, he’s doing it himself. It will be ready to sell by Feb. 15.

A technical breakthrough is allowing him to produce it cheaply, and — this is the coolest part — it will be able to work with just about any computer. “It’ll be the world’s first personal keyboard,” says Hodges, so that with a change in cable you can connect it to Apple, Digital Equipment, IBM, a bunch of dedicated word processors and IBM clones.

He’s named his company American Renaissance Technologies because he’s using all U.S. parts and labor. “I want to keep things from going offshore. My idea is, let’s ship it to Japan and reverse the balance of payments. I admit that’s hyperbole,” he says with a chuckle, “but hey, it’s a start.”