Listen to Fruchterman Interview, Part 1
Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology
Palo Alto, CA
July 30, 2004
Introduction to Interview with Jim Fruchterman
Tony Candela: It's hard to believe that somebody who is only in his mid-40s has already been in the blindness assistive technology business for nearly 20 years. It's even harder to believe that someone so young can be so accomplished. But Jim Fruchterman is one of those individuals and that's why he is considered a legend in the blindness assistive technology industry.
Jim started a company known as Arkenstone in the late 1980s. Arkenstone, of course, became famous for developing optical characer recognition (OCR) scanning technology. Arkenstone became the third company, along with Blazie Engineering and Henter-Joyce, to fold into the larger conglomerate now called Freedom Scientific. Along with Kurzweil Educational Systems, Arkenstone has led the way in OCR scanning technology for blind people for more than 15 years. Blind people also know Jim Fructerman as the creator of Bookshare.org, the online service that provides thousands of scanned books, ready to read, for download.
I met with Jim Fruchterman in Palo Alto, California, at the offices of his newest company, Benetech. Benetech stands for Benevolent Technologies and it is in keeping with Jim's mission to use technology to do good that he formed his latest company.
Interviewing Jim was exciting; his enthusiasm is contagious.
Beginning of Interview
Tony Candela: Jim, thanks a lot for agreeing to do this interview with me. I just want to note the proper spelling of your name is F-R-U-C-H-T-E-R-M-A-N, and it's pronounced...
Jim Fruchterman: Fruchterman as in "I am not a crook."
Tony Candela: Fruchterman. What is the origin of [the name]?
Jim Fruchterman: It's from Romania. It's a Saxon, German name. So I can lay claim to some Transylvanian heritage here.
Tony Candela: But you don't bleed your competitors?
Jim Fruchterman: We try to take a Pillsbury Doughboy approach to working with our competitors. If they succeed we say, "That's great." It's sort of like being punched in the stomach as the Pillsbury Doughboy: "Oh, that feels good."
Tony Candela: And you mentioned you have some Irish in you, as well.
Jim Fruchterman: Actually, I'm three-quarters Irish heritage, but it's your great grandfathers who determine your surname. It's my background. I grew up in the greater Chicago area.
Tony Candela: How old are you now?
Jim Fruchterman: 45.
Tony Candela: You're one of our younger legends and pioneers.
Jim Fruchterman: Yeah, I feel old knowing I've been in this field for more than 15 years.
Tony Candela: And what's interesting is that this field is, for all intents and purposes, not much more than 30 or 35 years old, depending on where you want to make an arbitrary beginning.
Jim Fruchterman: I tend to look back to inventions like the Optacon as being the founding invention of the field that I consider myself part of.
Tony Candela: Tell us about what you are doing these days. Benetech is a very different organization from most that we think about [in terms of] corporations and organizations in technology. Can you tell us a little bit about Benetech?
Jim Fruchterman: The joke about Benetech is that it's the deliberately non-profit high tech company in Silicon Valley, as opposed to all those accidentally non-profit high tech companies.
We're actually organized as a charity according to the U.S. tax code. Benetech is the new name of Arkenstone, which is the 15-year-old non-profit that was started in 1989 to make reading machines for the blind.
I would say right now a lot of the Benetech direction is [looking at] how we can do what we did at Arkenstone, but through a new venture every year or two.
And our major areas of focus are, of course, disability technology, access technology, and human rights technology. And we have a handful of new projects, two of them related to books and book scanning and two that are related to human rights and giving social justice groups better software.
So we think of ourselves as the people who plug the giant gap between projects that make enough money to attract [the kind of] venture capital that high tech companies go after and projects that can probably break even eventually. And there's just so many opportunities in that space. Not only are we trying to do one or two major projects a year but we're trying to convince more of the technology community that this is a great way to express their social interest, their social conscience, to invest some of those resources in not making more money but trying to give back some to the communities that created that wealth by consuming the products.
Tony Candela: Most people who will be listening to this recording are aware of the blindness technologies that you have been involved in. And we will talk about that at great length.
Tell us about the human rights technologies and that whole side of Benetech, and, I guess, your career.
Jim Fruchterman: I'd say that it's something I wanted to do for a long time but it wasn't until we sold the Arkenstone reading machine business, four years ago, that we had the money to go into the human rights field.
I think that it's an idea that I've been kicking around for more than 10 years. There's a pretty famous massacre, called the El Mozoti Massacre that happened in El Salvador. It happened in the early 80s but it was effectively covered up. The civil war went on. A lot of people got killed. And then ten years later, the early 90s, soon after I started Arkenstone, the word came out about the cover-up and the fact that more than 500 people [had been] murdered in this one village.
And I took Dave Ross, who is the same guy that started my first OCR company, my second OCR company, co-founded Arkenstone with me. So we went hiking in the hills here in Silicon Valley and we talked about how can you defend innocent people, or certainly non-combatants, from being killed by the military or the police or the rebels or whatever.
And when you think about it, and when you try on all the fancy ideas for defensive technologies, and all that, it really comes back to the only effective tool, the only weapon against human rights abuse, is the truth, information.
And if the information about a massacre is available worldwide, authoritatively, reaches the right kinds of people quickly, the likelihood that there'll be another massacre or a giant scale human rights abuse is lower.
So the whole goal is [to] give the human rights field information access to tools that help their voice get heard, get the word out, and reduce the incidence of human rights abuse by spreading the word and hopefully reducing the cost, and, in the most optimistic scenario, even obtain justice against the people who perpetrate these human rights abuses.
So when I look at what Benetech does, and has done, it all revolves around information access tools. How do we get communities that aren't the richest communities, that aren't the biggest markets, but have a desperate need for these tools, how do we get these tools to them? So that they can help themselves, whether it's pursuing education, pursuing employment, pursuing justice, pursuing their personal religious interests or just simply securing their right to vote or participating in civil society.
These issues come up over and over again and I'm very excited to be pushing the envelope in this area. And my community, and I consider myself a member of the Silicon Valley technology community, is far more interested in these larger issues say in 2004 than they were at the peak of the dot-com bubble, in 1999 or 2000. I'm getting a better hearing.
So our timing is good. I hope we will help catalyze a larger movement.
Tony Candela: Why do you think you're getting a better hearing now than let's say five years ago?
Jim Fruchterman: I think it's a combination of the dot-com crash, which brought reality back into the tech community. Most techies are techies because they like to solve problems. They like to build things.
Certainly my generation never thought we were going to get amazingly wealthy. We did technology because it was cool, it was what we were good at.
Yes, some people managed to make money in the business, but it wasn't the norm. And then we had this sort of moment when everyone, just about everyone, stated the collective fantasy that your chance of becoming a multimillionaire was one in two. And the dot-com crash brought it back to people that it really is more like one in five hundred. And it really is a lot more about luck. It's not an expectation. It's not a birthright. And that maybe we should go back to what it is that attracted us to technology in the first place. Which is solving problems and making important contributions to society.
So I think that a lot of technologists are taking a step back and saying, "Well, if I'm working 80 hours a week and sacrificing my family life, maybe my marriage, and I'm not getting rich, is this really what I want to do with my life?"
Add to that 9/11 and I think a realization that we're part of a larger community. And we're part of a larger community that we have helped to build. Silicon Valley does not get wealthy by selling to Sacramento and Bakersfield, California. We get wealthy by selling across the planet. So if we're going to take care of our community, the community we helped build, this global village, we've got to start thinking nationally and internationally.
So I think the combination of those two events has shaken that temporary aberration of what it is that we are here to do. And I see more and more people in a wide variety of demographics grappling with this.
For people who are early in their careers, they're saying, "I'm more idealistic. I want to work in the non-profit sector. I want to work in the social sector." There've always been people like that but for awhile it was almost embarrassing to say that you wanted to help society.
Now people realize that service is not a dirty word. To career professionals who've said, "I been successful being a programmer or a marketing person or a business development person, or whatever it might be, and I'm going to place my life where I can try something different, where I don't have to make maximum money. My spouse supports me in this. I'm going to give the non-profit sector a try."
And Benetech is a particularly attractive place for people in technology. We're halfway between the high tech industry and the social sector. We're at that intersection and it's very attractive.
Tony Candela: Can you explain that a bit more? "Halfway between"?
Jim Fruchterman: Well, we're a hybrid in a lot of different ways. The terminology shows up in many different forms. One is that we're a double-bottom-line free enterprise. Our goal is not to make the maximum amount of money, it's to make a strong social impact and run a business that in an ideal situation will eventually break even. Arkenstone is our prototype example. We broke even for ten years. We were a $5 million social enterprise.
So we're hybrid in that way. So if you come to us from a high tech company, you see that we do all the things that high tech companies do. Our product managers try to figure out what the users need, our developers try to build it, our finance people try to keep the accounting right. All that stuff, it looks familiar, but then it's got this twist. The primary objective is how do we serve the most people cost-effectively? How do we make our users very powerful?
It happens to be that if you're a regular for-profit business, it's actually a pretty good approach to take, but we take it that step further and say our bottom line financial objective is not how we extract the most money, but how do we deliver the most value.
So people understand that.
The other thing is that we're at the intersection of technology and the social sector because we see the social sector redefined as needing technology tools. Whether it is the individual with disabilities, who with the right tools can go out for an education or the right kind of job without needing help—so, independent access to opportunity—to a human rights group who needs the right kind of tool to spread information they're collecting so the world knows about [an issue].... These are things that we interact with.
How can you make a product that costs a thousand dollars right now, how can we make it for $50 tomorrow?
The $1,000 product can reach 1% of the community you want to reach and the $50 product can maybe reach 20%. These are all, again, challenges that merge the expertise, knowledge, and professionalism of a technology person but infuse it with the social mission, the fact that they're doing something important, something that they can tell their kid about and the kid will understand why it is important. A lot of technology people have a hard time explaining to their family what it is they do for a living.
Because this field is so wide open, the projects that we can take on, people grasp instantly. We make reading machines for blind people. We provide software to human rights groups so that they can spread the word about human rights abuse. We're going to make a land mine detector to prevent people from being blown up in the developing world. These are things that people [understand] viscerally and that's what I mean by being at the intersection of these two places.
Tony Candela: I had heard about the plans for making land mine detection technology of some type, Is that a project that has actually begun or is it something still on the drawing board?
Jim Fruchterman: It's a project that has been on the drawing board for four years. And in many cases, we see an opportunity and decide the time isn't right and keep it sort of simmering on the back of the stove. And the land mine detector project is now being moved to the front burner. Just in the last couple of months. We decided the technology is ready. I found someone who has both the technical background and the burning desire to make an impact. Someone with a 25-year history as a scientist and a leading entrepreneur, the head of engineering for an MRI company is now saying, "I've reached a point where I want to do this."
So, in essence, the ingredients for making this successful have sort of started to come together. The money has started to come together. We've probably raised $100,000 in the last six months to get going on this. Whereas we probably spent $20,000 in the prior four years.
And I went to Mozambique last month, in South Africa. I spent more than half my time meeting with disability groups but I talked to the mining groups, and then Ted Briscoll, the guy who's heading this effort, is just back from Southeast Asia where he went to Vietnam and Cambodia, and met with mining groups there. And pretty much that's a key part of our approach which surprised people in the Arkenstone days is that we actually go directly to the users and say, "What are the problems that you face? What are your needs?"
And then we say, "We have this idea about technology that might help you—do you think it will help?" And if [they do not], we move on. But quite often we get an idea that is useful and then people tell us how to change what our original concept is to make it more realistic or practical, and then we execute on that plan.
Tony Candela: Broadly speaking, can you divulge at this point how land mine detection technology might work here in 2004?
Jim Fruchterman: Yeah. I'm able to go into a fair amount of detail. One of the things that we've gotten over the years is less proprietary about what we're doing. Sometimes we joke that we're the open source organization.
For example, we publish the business plan for Bookshare.org, which won a business plan competition. We got some money for it. We went ahead and posted it on the Internet so that if people want to read our plan and figure out how to do a social enterprise, they can do that.
We feel a lot less confidential. We do have to be sensitive to our partners if they have confidential information.
So the land mine detector project came from the head of the military's land mine detector research program four years ago. I was kind of going around—at the time I was selling Arkenstone—talking to people about technology, and I attended a session on land mine detectors that the military had funded and then I met the head, the woman who had basically funded all these presentations, all the organizations, and I described how Benetech worked, using of course the Arkenstone example, and she got very excited. "This is the solution to the problem we have which is that no defense contractor can afford to go after the humanitarian de-mining market. At best it's a few million dollars. These are companies that are only interested in $50 or $100 million dollar sales opportunities, though every one in the company is really excited."
So she introduced me to let's say five or six different organizations. She actually wrote an initial business plan for a land mine detector research project here. Her plan was, on top of all the money the military is spending on land mine detectors, you invest a few million dollars more and you'll end up with a $1 or $2 million a year break-even maker of land mine detectors that are an order of magnitude better than what people are using today: metal detectors, sharp sticks, and dogs. Technology really hasn't changed all that much in many years.
So the technology that we have mostly settled on, but not completely committed to, sort of our working theory, is a magnetic resonance technology. It sends the radio wave into the ground, at a very specific frequency, and if TNT is there, you get a response at that frequency. A different kind of plastic explosive is there, at a different frequency.
You essentially try these different frequencies, and if you get the signal back then you can say, "There's a mine there."
And so, it's much more like dogs, which actually can detect mines. Not all mines smell enough for a dog to detect, but most do. The dogs are expensive, and get tired and get sick in places like Africa and Asia.
[The MRI technology] actually detects explosives as opposed to metal detectors which detect metal. And in a minefield you'll often find 200, 400 pieces of metal for every mine you detect. So our detector will look a lot like a classic metal detector, except instead of detecting metal, it will detect explosives. And we're hopeful we can make it for a price that a humanitarian de-mining group can actually afford.
At this stage in the game, I'd say we have a working concept. We've sent people into the field, talking to mining groups saying, "If we build it, will you use it?" What we've learned has again modified our plans some and so we're in that process. It's still early, but part of what we do is be responsible about raising money and resources to do projects. So we try to take it one step at a time, and at each stage convince ourselves that we've done enough to reduce the risk that we can justify asking people for the money to go to the next stage.
Tony Candela: Well. the world wishes you lots of luck with that project. That's going to be one that's going to save many lives down the road, I feel.
Jim Fruchterman: We consider it prevention of disability instead of providing people with a tool to assist with the disability that you acquired.
Tony Candela: Saving of lives is only half of the battle. Saving of limbs and eyes and other things is the other half.
Jim Fruchterman: Altogether.
Tony Candela: Tell us about the other humanitarian tools that you are disseminating.
Jim Fruchterman: Our biggest project right now in that field is Martus—that's the Greek word for witness. And it was this project that we conceived of, initially, more than ten years ago, thinking about El Salvador and how we can help.
You can think about it as a tool that is kind of like e-mail, and we make it look like e-mail because when we are actually out with grassroots human rights groups, we would use e-mail. But they weren't much beyond that, in terms of their technology skills.
The unit of human rights information that we process is called a bulletin. It is a lot like an e-mail message; it's about as complicated.
There'll be a few fields, such as: the time it was created, the date or dates that the bulletin is about, a title, a short summary, which group created it, etc. One of the key aspects is we've put really strong cryptography into the software.
Human rights groups are under a lot of pressure, from a security standpoint. Their computers get stolen, they get suppressed, all these sorts of things. So we want to give them the tool that will enable them to communicate securely, but make the security really strong and really simple so the groups actually use it.
So the human rights group will use this software on their local PC. [A mother] will come in and say, "My son is a member of this minority group. The police detained him last night. They kept him over night. They beat him. They broke his leg and they released him. So that's a unit of human rights abuse. So she might go into the members of this minority group for justice, an NGO in this town. There might be three people in the office and one PC. They'll take down this information, save it to their hard drive, and then essentially that story will be scrambled, using cryptography, so it can't be read if their PC is stolen.
The next time they connect to the Internet, it gets backed up to a server and we're building a server network all around the world. We have servers right now in Colombia and Budapest and Manila in the Philippines and obviously the U.S. We'll have more in Africa and other places in the not too distant future.
Once that bulletin is copied there, it also gets copied to other servers around the world. So that this information doesn't get lost. The majority of human rights information gets lost today. The groups get suppressed. They get burned out. They go out of business and no one pays to store the file.
So a large part of our motivation was to make sure that these stories don't get lost.
The last piece, which we just about we're sort of beta testing right now, is called the human rights search engine. Groups generally keep all this information private to themselves, using the cryptography. But they have an option to check a box and have the summary part made public, and then the rest of it is private. The private information might be name and address of victim, the doctor who treated them and said this was a beating, not a car accident. Maybe a witness's name and address too. And of course, you don't want to share that with the abuser, because they might go after the witness.
So they keep that stuff secret. To the public, they might give a very short summary. And we publish that on the web, using a search engine that is very Google-like. And we got police permission to borrow liberally from their user interface and make it look like Google, make it work like Google, so people will understand how to use it.
That way, if you're interested in abuses against disabled people in Southeast Asia, you can do a search that way. If you're interested in women's rights in the Muslim world, or Pakistan, you can do a search that way. And the idea is you'll find out what's going on, the groups that are active and then, depending on who you are, you'll use that information.
So we're giving you access to information that's hard to get ahold of today. And there's a wide variety of customers. You can be a member of the press, wanting to do an article. If you're a New York Times reporter and you call this group, they'll put you in touch with the mother who will tell you her son's story. Whereas if you're from the police force, they won't.
And it's also interesting to people who live in that country but whose press doesn't cover these things, that you can go to the Internet and find it out. Foreign ministries, obviously the human rights activists' community, prosecution people, international tribunals. I could go on and on. It's a really cool project and we rolled out about a year ago and we're now expanding.
The other thing we're doing in human rights, and you can think of this as we've acquired a program from another non-profit. I still think in terms of business terms: we "acquired" them. The non-profit [description] might be: that program moved from this non-profit to that non-profit. But it's the leading human rights stats group in the world. These are the guys and gals who will do the analysis for a genocide prosecution, will do an analysis for a truth commission, who will write history for a country, based on all the data that's been collected. We started working with them because they saw—and they were one of the key advisors in the creation of our first tool—if you could capture the story, then we come along with the truth commission five, ten, fifteen years from now, we'll have access to that information and we'll be able to add all the information together and say, "200,000 people died in Guatemala from the military." Or, so many people died from the Shining Path in Peru. Or: Gee, it looks like if you're an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo, you're ten times more likely to be killed than if you're ethnic Serbian. This seems to be proof of genocidal targeting.
And so we're basically working both ends of the human rights information technology tools business. Trying to get to the grass roots, a basic tool like Martus that allows [non-profits] to capture the raw material of what the human rights field is all about. That's what human rights groups do. They take down the stories and they try to basically do activism and advocacy, based on those stories.
And at the high end, which is trying to add analysis on top of the anecdote. Because we think the most powerful way to advocate for change in social justice is to say, "Here's the story of a real human being suffering this kind of abuse and it's not just her, there are 5,000 women just like her in this province or state."
If you're [fighting] against a civil rights advocate, [often] you attack the messenger. You say, "Your husband wasn't killed because he was a labor organizer. He was killed because he was a common criminal." So the question is how can we strengthen those arguments so doing ad hominem attacks doesn't undercut the basic argument. And that's what we think we can do, as technologists. We're not actually a human rights group. But if we make tools that make human rights groups more powerful, then we've helped advance society's commitment to human rights standards.
We're not a disability activist group, but yet if we provide disabled people with the tools to enable them to do things that they want to do, then we've achieved our goal, and advanced the cause of disability rights and economic empowerment, and all those good things.
Tony Candela: We will discuss what makes Jim Fruchterman gravitate toward these types of projects, in a little more detail, later. But before we do that, let's talk about the thing that the blindness community knows you for. Right now they know you for Bookshare.org. But tell us about Benetech and the disability products side of things.
Jim Fruchterman: Do you want to talk about today's products?
Tony Candela: Today's products first and then we'll work our way back.
Jim Fruchterman: Our biggest project overall right now at Benetech is Bookshare.org. We launched Bookshare.org two years ago and it was based on an idea that came to me four years ago. We were in the process of selling Arkenstone, and we knew that the reason that we would sell Arkenston—I'll talk about that more later—was we wanted to do more things, more than one thing. What we knew was access to books and information and printed documents.
So at the very end of 1999 we were starting the sales process of Arkenstone. My teenaged son showed me this neat thing that was on our computer called Napster. And I looked at this. We sat there for an hour playing with it. He would play me some punk band and I would go back to the 70s and 80s and pull back music from my youth. We sat there for an hour, playing different music, and having a great time and then we were just talking and I noticed that the hard drive kept going.
"What's making the hard drive go?" Then we suddenly figured out that we were serving out the legal copy of the music for the world. "This is so illegal." "It's so cool." "It's so illegal."
So I said, "We're going to take Napster off our computer." The idea had been made and it turned out that my son, Jimmy, had gotten Napster from a boy who lived two doors down, whose mother at the time was the acting CEO of Napster. So I looked into the Napster model and called this idea Bookster, for a short period of time, until wiser heads in the field, like George Kerscher, disabused me of that name. But how could we use this peer-to-peer concept to help the disabled field?
The idea that came immediately to my mind was that we had probably by then, 35 or 40,000 Arkenstone users around the world. The majority in the U.S. and they were scanning books all the time. They were not only scanning books, but there was a really big contingent. And the same books, in many cases, were being scanned over and over again. And I know how painful it is to scan a book, using a reading machine. We're trying to solve that problem. So the light bulb went on inside: What if blind people could legally share their books with each other? So if someone had scanned Bill Clinton's autobiography—which is the current hot book—it's not going to be necessary for a hundred people to scan that book in a hundred more times.
So we did a little bit of research on the legal side and found out, and we were completely stunned, that it was legal under the U.S. copyright law. Thanks to the Chafee Amendment which was passed in 1996 by the Coalition of Disability Groups and the publishers and the major services for the blind. And Chafee had never been written with this in mind, in fact they tried to write it very narrowly, but we said what we wanted to do pretty squarely.
And so our view is that we would find a place on the Internet where people can share their books. Bookshare.org is a cross between that Napster peer-to-peer concept and Amazon.com, NLS, the Talking Books Library, all rolled into one.
So we launched it two years ago. It's growing rapidly. We've got more than 18,000 books ready. We scan about a hundred books a week. The majority of our books still come from visually impaired people, their families, teachers. [We're] getting books from all over the country to the collection. Almost half of the books now come from essentially a volunteer team that has a high-speed scanning capability, chopping the binding off a book and scanning it in ten minutes.That's funded by grants—people, say, who are interested in having more educational books, more books in Spanish, more books about history, more vocational books.
In addition to sort of the books...the majority of our collection are chosen by blind people, by what they choose to read or share. But the rest of it is kind of listening to what our users are asking for and trying to find money to go after those books. And Bookshare.org was also a financial move. How could we take our reading machine kind of concept—which [provides] access to books and printed documents, and costs a thousand bucks—how do we do the same thing for a tenth or a twentieth of the price?
The cool thing about Bookshare.org is that right now we're charging $25 to sign up and $50 a year to be a member. But if I want to bring Bookshare.org to India some day, how can I charge people in India $5. Because $5 in India is equivalent to $50 here, more than $50 here. We'll give stuff away but we want to bring it to people at a price that is reasonable for their personal situation. To make access not just a question of information, but [also of] being financially accessible.
So that's Bookshare.org. And now we're growing Bookshare.org in a lot of different directions. We're growing it in terms of content, with our big push in the past six months on educational content. I see that as a major area of our work for the foreseeable future. Different languages. In the next six months we are going to add several thousand books in Spanish. That's an area that is traditionally neglected. And because of ... how inexpensive it is to add a title to Bookshare, we can afford to go after these books that large organizations haven't felt like they can afford to go after.
Tony Candela: I'm curious as to what software you're using for your volunteer scanning. Is it the old Arkenstone software or something more generic?
Jim Fruchterman: The engine that we mainly use is one of the engines that we added to the Arkenstone system in the last couple of years. So we're mainly using the Russian technology from Abbyy in doing our processing. And that Abbyy engine is now built into Arkenstone and Kurzweil reading systems, I'm sure.
Tony Candela: People who are using the Kurzweil and Arkenstone products have a nice easy linkage to Bookshare.org.
Jim Fruchterman: One of the really cool things throughout the last couple of years is how people who we used to compete with very strongly, like the Kurzweil team, have gone out of their way to cooperate with us, both because we share similar objectives but also because the Bookshare.org collection makes a reading system a much more useful tool.
Same thing about a braille notetaker. We've gone to every adaptive technology maker that we can think of and said, "How can we make Bookshare and your adaptive technology work better together?"
And some of them have done really clever things like with the K1000 you can search for and download books from Bookshare, without ever leaving their product. And it's a very simple but elegant solution. We'd love to see everybody do that so that getting a book takes you ten seconds.
Tony Candela: Are there any other disability products that you are working with right now?
Jim Fruchterman: Yes, as a matter of fact—kind of like we talked about the land mine detector on the back burner, but sort of simmering, there's a project that's how we bring something similar to Bookshare to the disability groups. So we're working on a literacy solution for people with severe disabilities, such as Down syndrome or autism. That's one that has been cooking here for awhile. We're trying to figure out the right way to get it done.
I'd say that the area that we see as being huge for us during the next few years is trying to do on cell phones what we used to do on the PC. It's called the PC Swiss Army knife for people with disabilities. It's a basic tool: it's cheap, it's useful, it's got all sorts of capabilities. And in cases of people with disabilities, you just add a couple of adaptations and you get the benefits of using all the things it can do. So it's a general-purpose tool.
The PCs have only a certain amount of penetration into the disabled community. Let's take the blind. If you're educated, of employment age, yes, there's a pretty good chance that you're using adaptive technology. But the average senior citizen, blind person, is not using much in the way of adaptive technology.
So, we're always thinking: how do we reach that particular audience? If you go outside the U.S. to a poor country, we have reached only the top five individuals in that country, who happen to have enough money to afford adaptive technology from U.S. or Europe.
But I think the most popular piece of adaptive technology for blind people today is probably the cell phone. The cell phones that will be the most common ones a year or two out, will have the processing power of the PC from a couple of years ago. So, if you put that equation together, you can say, "So, now I've got a tool that poor blind people in poor countries are getting." If that phone can read for you and find information for you and help you navigate and read books to you, then we have made a major step forward.
So, we've decided that we would like to work on applications of smartphones, these more powerful phones. We held a brainstorming session here last year and got a lot of leaders from the social sector, and users. We got together and talked about things we could do with this technology, and three projects came to the top. Some of these projects we had talked about forever. One of them is called The Reading Cam. It's how you make a cell phone into a reading machine. Like an Optacon, you'll probably never want to read an entire book with this because it would be very slow. But it could read a sign, a business card, a menu, whatever it might be, it would be very useful.
This is technology that does exist. It's a question of how can we package it and make it into a product.
A second thing is, how do you use a cell phone to become an audio book reader for the blind. If you think about the average blind person in a poor country, they can't afford a $200 or $300 DAISY book reader. And yet a used cell phone that maybe costs $5 or $10 in the market should be able to play an audio book. So how do we actually deploy that capability?
And the third one, of course, is something we've been working on for a decade easily, my first patent and all that, which is the talking GPS unit for blind people. We tried to bring it to market seven or eight years ago and it was too heavy and too expensive to be successful. Mike May left Arkenstone to pursue this because he was our one user of this technology and thought it was just too important to let it die. And Mike has struggled mightily and has gotten to the point where there is a viable product. It costs $1,000, but you can add onto a note taker and it will help you navigate. VisuAide has a similar product. And they're both interested in licenses under a patent. But I'd like to take it the next step and say, "How can we use an off-the-shelf cell phone?"
Arkenstone's VP of Engineering also loved the GPS business enough to go into the commercial GPS business. And one of his engineers built a prototype Talking GPS locator on the standard cell phone, for blind people. Just built it as a prototype. So, again, we have the technology. It's creating a sustainable enterprise to bring this to a lot of blind people around the world [that is the issue we're working on].
So, I'd say, watch the cell phone space. That's the direction we really want to go with adaptive technology. And we think it will be very, very exciting for not just our traditional blind audience but for the wider audience that is not really taking advantage of adaptive technology today.
Tony Candela: How did you get into the technology business to begin with? Are you trained as an engineer?
Jim Fruchterman: Yup. Engineering scientist. I went to Caltech and got a bachelors in electrical engineering and a maste'rs in applied physics, then came up to Stanford to get a PhD in engineering, which is how I got to this specific geographic area.
I started an entrepreneurship talk series with four engineering students at Stanford. The first speaker was a founder of a local computer company and that was really exciting. Actually, that was my first exposure to an engineer who had turned into a business person and was telling us a little bit about how businesses really work. It was a great session. The founder of Cromemco. Our dorm was nicknamed Cromeam and so that was the linkage.
The second speaker was a private rocket company guy, who was building a launch vehicle to compete with NASA. We took him to dinner after his speech and it was really exciting to hear about. He asked me what my favorite science fiction character was. I told him. It turned out that mine was by the same author as his favorite science fiction character. And so he offered me a job on the spot.
I didn't accept on the spot. I went in and met more of his team and the guy who was going to be my boss, who answered with both the right author and the right character, was a guy who would be my business partner for each of the three successful ventures that I created. Two for-profit, one non-profit.
So we started off on the rocket project together. It lasted for me for about six or seven months, before the rocket blew up on the launch pad. I was the main electrical engineer. And outside my office is a fin and a picture of the rocket blowing up, which I carry with me, from every company, as a reminder of what my roots are. It enables me, of course, to say, "That sounds like rocket science."
I am a rocket scientist, so it's okay.
So I basically came from a strong technical background. My goal in life was to become a professor of engineering, to do research, teach. But meeting this rocket guy and taking a leave from my PhD program to become a rocket scientist, is what fundamentally changed my direction into becoming an entrepreneur, as opposed to a researcher or scientist.
