Bob Kirkpatrick His Dogear Inc. Is Wired Into The Internet For The Millenium

Don’t want to make the treacherous trip up Highway 95 to Bonners Ferry, Idaho?

Dial it up on the Internet.

Bob Kirkpatrick has recreated the Idaho town on the Web with the help of the Kootenai Valley Times, radio station KBFI-AM and other sources.

The site, he says, has everything the real town does, even the gossip.

“We present Bonners Ferry to Bonners Ferry and anyone else who wants to look,” said Kirkpatrick, who wants to replicate the page for other North Idaho communities, then tie them all together into a megasite by the end of 1998.

The address, by the way, is: bonner.msgbase.com. Or you can start at the site for Dogear Inc., the company Kirkpatrick founded 11 years ago from a rubble of computer components in his living room.

When friends said the heap looked intimidating, Kirkpatrick described the loose cables and uncovered cases as the electronic equivalent of yellowed, dog-eared books that still had a story to tell.

But if the name harkens to another era, the battery of computers, servers and other gear crammed into the company’s “skunkworks” says Dogear is wired for the millenium.

Kirkpatrick, 50, said he is preparing a sample live-action, online resume for a local actor. Others want to follow.

The presentations will allow them to demonstrate their skills instead of just listing credits.

Dogear also has conducted online training for the employees of two banks.

And Kirkpatrick devised virtual home tours that rescued agents from frustrating treks across town to properties clients rejected before they even got out of their cars.

There were almost 250 users on line at any given time.

Dogear, Kirkpatrick stresses, does not provide the dial-up Internet service with which most Web users are familiar. That business takes time and resources away from the company’s focus on “netcasting,” the blend of video, audio and test signals Kirkpatrick predicts will be common in households within a decade.

He hopes to create a site that taps some of the same technology MSNBC uses.

More mundanely, Kirkpatrick acts as registrar and coordinator for the Net’s U. S. Domain Authority.

“I provide what goes behind the ‘@’ sign,” he said.

Another client is Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Expeditions, which treats troubled youths. Kirkpatrick speaks proudly of the turnaround a month’s stay there worked on his daughter, who had been a chronic runaway.

He also has two sons. One is a Lewis and Clark High School student, the other, at age 17, already an extremely well-paid programmer for Netscape.

He has contributed numerous hours to the Children’s Home Society of Washington steering committee, and as a guardian ad litem for Spokane County Juvenile Court.

He spent most of his youth in private schools as his parents moved from East Coast to West and back again.

The U.S. Army taught him how to be a parachute rigger, then put him on the ground in Vietnam and assigned him to a tactical operations center.

Three days short of his departure date, he was severely wounded in his left knee. With a rap on the plastic replacement, he praised the Medivac units that had him in a base hospital in 20 minutes. He was in surgery in Tokyo eight hours later.

Back in the states as a gofer for a Philadelphia radio personality, Kirkpatrick recalls he unwittingly ended up at Woodstock because no one else wanted to go.

He humped equipment for a station engineer who brought back 25 reels of tape from the most famous concert in rock history. The recordings never aired because of copyright problems.

Kirkpatrick was still in radio when the eruption of Mt. St. Helens grounded him in Spokane. A pilot himself, he had flown up from Portland to visit an air show in Sandpoint.

“There was no way I was going to fly my airplane in that stuff,” Kirkpatrick said.

Because driving also was inadvisable, Kirkpatrick and his wife hunkered down with his in-laws in the Spokane Valley. His Portland employer, unaware of the severity of the situation, fired him a week later.

So Kirkpatrick got a short-term job as an assistant service manager with Spokane Lincoln-Mercury. Then he checked into Spokane Falls Community College, where he finally indulged his interest in computers.

He followed that up with a degree from Eastern Washington University and computers have been his lifeblood ever since.

Kirkpatrick said Dogear has struggled this year, in large part because of technical problems he attributes to US West Communications.

But the company has contracts that assure profitable operations next year, he said, and the trend should continue with deployment of a sales force.

“We have good reason to be confident,” Kirkpatrick said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo