DATELINE–Durham, N.C.

Fitness machines to power poor neighborhoods.

At 5:45 pm, the Duke University basketball team files into its nautilus room for a daily routine of weight lifting and aerobic conditioning. Abu Nazer, a junior who plays guard for the Blue Devils, immediately steps up to a stair-climbing machine and begins a 20-minute session. Halfway through his workout, Nazer looks down at the LCD monitor to track his progress. After ten minutes at a blistering pace, Nazer has already generated enough watts to power a light bulb for several hours.

Nazer is not the only Duke student generating power these days. An average of 400 students a week participate in a pilot program run by the school’s engineering department to convert “workout’s” into energy. The program is sponsored by the Enron corporation, a young and profitable consortium of energy companies with operations around the world, and is the brainchild of Jules Howell, a physicist at Duke.

After three years, the program has generated nearly 80,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity by tapping into a few of the exercise machines in Duke’s fitness facilities. Currently, the program includes 22 stationary bicycles, 15 rowing machines and almost three dozen stair climbers.

Howell and his team of engineering students named the program the Kinetic-Electric Distribution System, or KEDS for short. This innovative approach to power redistribution consists of little more than standard exercise equipment and eight large batteries. A device the size of a portable radio is used to transfer the energy now in the form of electricity from each exercise machine to a battery. The electricity is then supplied via a proprietary line to the local power company.

Howell’s experiment has earned the light-hearted nickname “Watt-a-Workout” from its regular student participants. But despite this humorous moniker, the program has a serious goal. From its inception, all of the power produced by KEDS for the Durham Electric Service has been earmarked for residents of the city’s low-income neighborhoods. As a result, the KEDS program has actually provided a year’s worth of free electricity to an entire city block.

“Engineers work with basic terms,” says Howell, “waste, conservation, entropy, etc. If you look at machine-aided workouts from this angle, you see a lot of waste.”

According to Howell, the energy produced by a person on a StairMaster® greatly exceeds the amount of work required to achieve a tight stomach or lean thighs. Howell elaborates: “At the end of a typical exercise session, the person might look better or feel better, but 90% of the energy they’ve produced has been wasted.”

Using a grant from the Enron Corporation, Howell developed KEDS to demonstrate that “given the right system, the energy a person produces while exercising can actually be put to good use.” The KEDS team hopes to expand their program by bringing local fitness clubs into the picture. The team’s chief engineer, Ph.D.-candidate Francis Benjamin, thinks the project has increased energy awareness both on campus and in the city of Durham.

Increased awareness about energy is exactly what Enron spokesman Tim Holmes says his company was looking for when they sponsored the KEDS project. “Our activities transcend industries…regional boundaries and most importantly, traditional methods of thinking about the energy business,” states Holmes, who concludes, “This means looking across the world or across the street to find ways in which we can all work together to make a change.”

DATELINE–WASHINGTON, D.C.

Consumer polling touted as solution to impeachment quagmire

These days there is only one question left to be answered in the nation’s capital: What impact will the Lewinsky Affair have on the upcoming congressional elections.

While Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives contend with the tainted image of the once popular President, Republicans find themselves in a similar bind. An already wary public could easily turn on members of the GOP who make the Lewinsky Affair a backhanded campaign issue, leaving both sides unsure of what direction to take in the coming campaign season.

But one group of political insiders is certain it has the map for the road ahead. Comprised of a few former congressmen, media executives and anonymous investors, the group which calls itself the Coalition for Constitutional Consumer Polling, believes the aftermath of the Lewinsky Affair has created an ideological vacuum they are ready to fill.

The group, which champions an overhaul of the electoral process, points to the recent crisis over a possible presidential impeachment as evidence that the current system, with its ambiguous distinctions between legal and political proceedings, is in dire need of repair.

“Was the Starr Report an objective, investigative report executed to the letter of the law or a politically motivated slander campaign,” asks James Blaine, one of the coalition’s chief officers. According to Blaine, “the answer is not either/or but both/and – which makes the question moot to begin with.”

Instead, Blaine and his supporters offer up what they consider to be “the real question before the American people": should the public be forced to pay for investigations into alleged presidential misconduct or can it simply determine for itself what is the proper response in times of constitutional crisis.

The Coalition favors the latter course of action and has been working for the last two years on a constitutional amendment that would allow the public to weigh in more heavily on matters pertaining to presidential misconduct. At face value, the Coalition’s amendment does not differ greatly from past legislative propositions that have also called for national referendums on a variety of issues. But what sets this plan apart from earlier proposals to expedite the electoral process is the appearance of an agent hitherto excluded from constitutional debates: the consumer.

“Talk to any analyst this week and they’ll make the same contradictory remarks,” argues H.R. Millhouse, one of the Coalition’s top legal experts and a former Solicitor General, “on the one hand, they say voter turnout is going to be low this year and then they say that the public is tired of the Clinton-Lewinsky story. How do they know what the public feels given its reticence at the polls?” Millhouse’s eyes open up wide as he pronounces the Coalition’s answer: “Consumer polling.”

In a recent letter to the editor of the Washington Times, the Coalition declared that the era of constitutional consumer polling had already arrived and that “few of the logistical details still needed to be ironed out.” The Coalition’s plan would draw heavily on both broadcast media and the Internet to help create “a political stage upon which the public could finally voice its opinion.” Not surprisingly, Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire Australian with a media outlet in most English-speaking countries, is rumored to be one of the Coalition’s leading financial supporters.

But the Coalition’s critics, and there many of them on both sides of the political spectrum, claim that using the media to try anyone, let alone a top government official like the President, is a violation of due process if not a step towards anarchy.

James Bowdoin, an expert on constitutional law at Harvard University, says “[the plan] is mob rule by remote control with the remote in the hands of an elite few.” Bowdoin discredits the Coalition’s efforts to win legislative support for their constitutional amendment as opportunistic grandstanding and doubts the group will have any success. But like other critics of the Consumer Polling Amendment, Bowdoin does not underestimate the political reach of its proponents.

Earlier this week, the Fox television network, one of Murdoch’s U.S. companies, shelved a made-for-TV movie based on a journalistic account of the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment scandal. Although Ted Turner’s TNT network had also begun and then axed a movie about Thomas’ nomination hearings before the Senate in 1996, Bowdoin believes Murdoch’s decision to scrap his own network’s version betrays an underlying bias in the Coalition’s objectives.

“It’s too bad the project was dropped,” muses Bowdoin, “because the Thomas-Hill movie would have been a great test for the so-called constitutional consumer poll.”

DATELINE–San Francisco

San Francisco-area entrepreneurs are marketing boutique water bottled at unlikely sources.

These days when the jet-set crowd walks into a bar in the chic SOMA district of San Francisco they’re just as likely to order water as a nouveau cocktail in a martini glass.

But it’s not simply water they’re ordering. Instead, they’re sampling HQ2O’s signature collection of “corporate watercooler” waters. For consumers who hanker for water with the rarefied air of high-tech success, HQ2O offers natural spring water drinks containing distilled drops of water siphoned from the company headquarters of Yahoo!, Wired and Silicon Graphics, to name a few.

Only in San Francisco, where juice bars are now as common as pizza parlors and smoking is prohibited in bars, could water with a high-tech aura fetch as much as $5 for a 6 oz. glass. Across the city, bartenders take orders for “coolers” that claim as their source 12 different “corporate headwaters.” A few drops are ceremoniously served up from a vintage apothecary bottle, and the drink is topped off with HQ2O’s special brand of natural spring water.

The cool new product which originated as the barroom brainstorm of two twentysomething entrepreneurs has struck a chord with San Francisco’s growing population of multimedia professionals.

“It’s like walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” jokes Faye Mulholland, the female side of HQ20, “except you’re only walking as far as someone else’s water cooler.” Mulholland believes that the brisk sales of HQ20 can be attributed to a growing sense of self-awareness among the digiterati. “The industry has matured,” she explains. “A company like Yahoo! had less than 30 employees four years ago. Today it has 600…Startups are becoming regular companies with more turnover, and techno-literate employees are looking for a second wind.”

Now that San Francisco’s multimedia firms have grown into their own, a whole host of new businesses have sprung up to cater to the sophisticated tastes of their upwardly mobile workers. From wireless modem networks to 24-hour gyms, the market seems to be wide open for any company that can capitalize on emerging lifestyle trends.

Founded by two ex-multimedia types, HQ2O is a telling example of just how profitable a little knowledge of this demographic can prove to be.

It was shortly after Mulholland left her position as a product manager at one of the high-tech firms whose “water essence” she now sells, that she met Sam Taylor – also recently downsized – at a trendy San Francisco nightspot. The two struck up a conversation about how they could turn their bad fortunes into instant stock options.

“We talked about a software firm, a consulting firm, even about starting a technology news magazine we jokingly called ‘Mo’ Beta Blues,’” reminisces Taylor, “but in the end it was the wackiest idea that seemed to make the most sense.”

“Wacky” is making a lot more than “sense” these days for Taylor and Mulholland. While the seed of the duo’s business idea may seem untraditional, the business plan proved rock solid. “The day after I was laid off I realized the thing I missed most about my old job wasn’t my co-workers or even my paycheck but the water cooler,” ventures Taylor, “and if I was willing to pay money to recapture that water cooler mystique, it wasn’t hard to figure out that other people would, too.”

Indeed, HQ20’s products have lubricated countless conversations and launched more than a few partnerships in the over 20 bars and restaurants that now stock the high-tech beverage. Gus Samaristan, the proprietor of the slick Mission District nightspot Cosmos, confirms his clientele’s affinity for the high-priced and nonalcoholic drinks.

“Talking about computers in this town is like talking about the weather,” Bryant suggests, “and when you order a glass of Sun or a shot of SGI you’re letting everyone around you know that you’re in the game whether you work at one of these companies or not. Personally, I like it because it gets people talking, not drunk.”

DATELINE–Munich

Imagine sitting down to work at your computer and exchanging pleasant comments with a co-worker who is sitting beside you. Then, you both begin working on the same task while using the same computer through two different keyboards and separate mouse-like input devices. As the hours pass, the two of you more than double your team’s productivity while decreasing the health risks associated with discrete single-user computing.

This idyllic scene was painted for nearly 200 business executives and members of the press by CompVivere S.p.A., an industrial design firm based in Milan, Italy, at a recent trade expo in Munich. The product, Hands3, is a revolutionary computer and operating system that allows up to three people to literally share the same computer.

In the past, networking software and hardware has permitted groups of users to share the same files and, sometimes, even collaborate in real-time on a single task. But what sets CompVivere’s Hands3 machine apart from previous attempts at tackling collaboration in the digital workplace is its focus on the physical shape and form of the computer interface.

Designed by CompVivere’s chief engineer Paolo Feieraben in collaboration with system architects at IBM, the Hands3 computer consists of a circular CPU tower that drives up to four monitors and three keyboards at the same time. The Loom, Hands3’s input device, is equally cutting edge. It combines a laser pointer and hand-held mouse unit and can be adjoined with two additional units to create a device that can be held and used by two people simultaneously.

“It’s like a two-man saw only it cuts through paperwork,” quips Feieraben. “There was no sense in making a multi-user keyboard when we can just multiply their number…The real innovation came with the Hands3 Loom.”

While the Loom was undeniably the showstopper at the Munich expo, the possibility that a new type of computer is on the horizon has the high-tech industry abuzz. Despite its European design pedigree, the Hands3 project is not another gimmicky facelift intended to reinvigorate the flagging sales of a moribund brand. In fact, the origins of the Hands3 can be traced back to an even earlier – then revolutionary – paradigm shift in computing as mainframes gave way to personal computers.

It was in the mid-1980’s that CompVivere began working on the Hands3 project as a response to complaints from the manufacturing and industrial engineering sectors. Frederico Rogrezzi, co-founder and CFO of CompVivere, recalls those early years of frustration among programmers who had a difficult time making the transition.

“The first 30 years of programming,” explains Rogrezzi, “meant groups of engineers working together in the same room, sometimes at the same console, arguing about the same problem. As terminals replaced these single consoles and finally PC’s replaced terminals, all of those group dynamics were lost.”

Feieraben’s team of designers worked closely with industrial psychologists and anthropologists to study the interactions that take place between co-workers in the office. The eight-year investigation found scientific evidence that confirmed their clients’ aversion to the PC.

“While some tasks were better executed by individual workers at isolated workstations, other tasks – indeed, many – could only be completed after a series of errors were made and misunderstandings resolved,” says Feieraben. “Finally, it took up to 10 times as long to figure out certain problems when team members were divided at separate stations even if they all shared the same office space.”

But even if the Hands3 computer system is a hit with specialized computer users like students, artists, and scientists, there’s little guarantee that it will be able to usurp the dominant market position of the personal computer.

Indeed, the first generation of Hands3 computers were already being tested in the early 90’s, although this version was little more than a network of two computers physically fused together. But at the time computer manufacturers had no interest in developing a single computing system that could tolerate two users pulling at it from opposite ends.

Srini Kumar, a senior analyst with Robertson Stephens & Co., believes it’s remarkable that the Hands3 project may enter the marketplace at all. “From the ’80’s on, it’s been a highly competitive climate for computer makers with strong emphasis on unit sales,” avers Kumar. “The idea has always been to sell two computers to every one person, not one computer for two people.”

A beaming Rogrezzi is more optimistic. After nearly 20 years of research and development, his firm may be on the verge of making computing history. The Hands3 is slated to ship in the fall of 1999 and is counting on an already favorable response from industrial and academic users to insure a strong debut.

“We’re very satisfied with the Hands3,” says Rogrezzi, “At the very least, there’s going to be a few less stranded computer users in the world.”