Inventor Of Cds Is At It Again

If you play music on compact discs or use CD-ROM in your computer, thank Bellevue resident Jim Russell.

Russell, a Reed College-educated physicist, was working at Battelle Laboratories in Richland 23 years ago when he came up with the idea of a digital device that would replace the vinyl phonograph record. He received 22 patents related to the "digital optical recording" technology.

Battelle later licensed the technology to Philips and Sony, which commercialized Russell's invention so successfully that, by the late 1980s, vinyl records were becoming as scarce as buggy whips.

Fast forward to 1998.

Russell has a new invention, and it has the potential to become another hot money-maker. The new OROM (or optical read-only memory) promises to bring large databases to small computing devices. It's much faster than CD-ROM and it uses extremely little power because it has no moving parts.

Racing to bring OROM to market next year is a 7-year-old Bellevue company, Ioptics, where Russell is vice president and chief technology officer. Ioptics has raised $14 million from investors including Microsoft.

Postscript: Ask Russell how much money he's making from compact discs, and he laughs. "If I was getting royalties, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd be on a beach somewhere."

High-tech flimflam? Several readers who work in the software industry complained about my report last week suggesting that immigration rules must be relaxed if Eastside tech firms are to meet their recruiting goals. Hogwash, they say, arguing that employers simply want a new source of young, hungry programmers who will work longer hours for lower pay.

The result of such hiring practices, says a veteran Microsoft programmer, is "rampant age discrimination" and "sweatshop-style" working conditions. An experienced programmer with a doctorate in electrical engineering and a master's in finance reports that local employers won't even give him an interview.

Briefly: Wright Runstad's Sunset Corporate Campus in the Eastgate area of Bellevue keeps growing. Plans are to break ground on the third, 154,000-square-foot building in June, with construction to start on the fourth and fifth buildings at six-month intervals.

A week after Kirkland-based Royal Oak Mines announced it lacked the money to complete construction of its Kemess mine, the company has obtained $120 million in funding from Trilon Financial of Toronto. . . . Gart Sports of Denver has leased two-thirds of the former Ernst building at Main Street and Bellevue Way in downtown Bellevue.

Coming up: See the condos everyone's talking about on the "Walking Tour of Kirkland's Premier Condominiums" on April 4 and 5. $20 general admission and $15 for students and seniors benefits the Kirkland Performance Center. No children under 5 and no backpacks. For tickets, call 425-893-9900 between 1 and 6 p.m. weekdays. Keith Ervin's column appears in Business every Saturday. He invites your tips and comments. You can reach him by phone at 206-515-5632, fax at 425-453-0449, e-mail at: kervin@seattletimes.com or by writing The Seattle Times Eastside Bureau, 10777 Main St., Suite 100, Bellevue, WA 98004