Listen to Fruchterman Interview, Part 3
Jim Fruchterman (continued): We were going international really quickly because we were all sharing the commitment to serving people with disabilities. So if you were an American, you were a member of their community. I heard stories about being treated badly by the French. And my first night in Paris was pretty miserable. I think I actually ordered a tuna pizza, canned tuna pizza. But as soon as I hooked up with some blind people who had agreed to meet with me there, suddenly I was part of a community, a family, and I was treated really well.
We quickly found dealers all over the world. Gilles Pepin, of VisuAide, a guy whose personal history is a lot like mine. We are about the same age, electrical engineers, and he had invented a number of products at VisuAide, including a reading machine. And we ended up partnering and we ended up licensing technology to each other.
In Europe, Nick Cantisani—who's a brother of Peter Cantisani, who's well known here in the U.S.—was living in Belgium and became a dealer there. And I ended up working with Joachim Frank, who had been lurking in the halls of Calera probably five years earlier with his ideas for this. And the list goes on.
So within a few years, 30 or 40 percent of our sales of reading machines were outside the U.S. and we were reading 10 different languages, as well as English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, etc., etc.
Tony Candela: Was it hard to do the language translations?
Jim Fruchterman: It was actually really easy. Because back then all the language screens were in a text file. So I would hand the text file to our dealer in fill-in-the-blank country. Easy Scan, which was very basic and didn't have a lot of stuff, could be translated really quickly.
The Calera engine by this time had acquired multiple languages. There were synthesizers, not the DECtalk, but there were other synthesizers that spoke quite a number of different languages. So we were able to move very quickly. And the market was hungry. Consumers were hungry. We were catering to a movement where consumers in the general population were being empowered more and I remember, people used to talk about us as "Arkenstone, that's a guerrilla movement, that's a cult." Because we were grassroots.
But the fact was that we ended up being purchased by the government agencies. Not because we had sold them so hard, but because blind people came to them and demanded our product. And that was how we could offset the fact that we didn't have marketing dollars. But we didn't have a lot of capital, we couldn't advertise. It was the grassroots, word-of-mouth approach that served us really well.
Tony Candela: And this is the very late 80s, now moving into the early 90s.
Jim Fruchterman: Yeah, Arkenstone was founded in February of 1989.
Tony Candela: And the consumerism movement was building up a tremendous head of steam. Just as an example, a year after your founding, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed here in the United States, which was the culmination (and then the beginning) but the culmination of a lot of years of building of a head of steam.
I am surprised, a little bit, I'm wondering what you make of the phenomenon of some of those companies out there not hiring blind people, during this period. It's kind of a strange juxtaposition, isn't it?
Jim Fruchterman: It was. But you know any civil rights movement doesn't suddenly hit its objective, day one, right? And so you see movement that happens steadily over time. If you're a typical activist, you're very impatient with the slow pace of change. But if you take a longer view, you can say, "We're right now so much better than we were 25 years ago." And the goal is to keep the progress moving and not to lose ground.
...I remember having a conversation with some venture capitalists who did not want to hire a woman executive. These were still acceptable sentiments to utter in the 80s, at least the beginning of the 80s. But now it's inconceivable that someone would say you can't hire a woman for an executive position [because] they have babies, or whatever.
It was the same kind of thing with disabled people. Even though you were selling to disabled people, I think that the organizations, the companies that were successful then, when your products were that expensive, individual disabled people couldn't afford them. And employers really weren't buying them. This is pre-ADA.
So in the 80s, the way you made a successful business is you sold over the head of the disabled person to the rehab agency or the VA. If your view of your end user is that they are not part of the sales process—they're kind of like the beneficiaries, but they're not actually important—then saying that you should believe in their empowerment is not as natural as it seems today.
And also the ADA has moved our awareness of these issues. It's still not everything we want it to be, but it's helped.
Tony Candela: It's a great way of explaining it. It was a groundswell that still had evolution in front of it and then there was kind of an almost custodial approach still going on back at that time.
Now, 10 years later, when you sold Arkenstone, roughly, had you noticed, I know you noticed the change in the hiring of people who were blind and people who were visually impaired, but had you noticed the change in who was buying the products? Was there an increase in the number of individuals buying the product?
Jim Fruchterman: Well you see Arkenstone had this very odd purchasing approach. So, for example, if you thought about, right when we got started, that almost everybody was selling to the big institutions, Arkenstone, because of the way we chose to distribute the product, the bulk of our customers in the first couple of years were individuals and their families. This is where we got this guerrilla movement thing. Because we were selling to the community, through the community. We were putting it within a price range that was accessible to those people. So it really was consumer-driven, and that was completely at odds with what the rest of the industry was doing.
Then...as consumers put pressure on the institutional clients, saying, "We want this product," we were able to crack organizations like the VA, who became our biggest single customer. It was consumer-driven, it wasn't us-driven.
The ADA made employers become a much bigger part of the pie, so by the time 10 years had gone by, I would say that in the U.S., in round terms, people buying our products were probably one-third individuals and their families buying out of their own pocket; one-third the government, the school systems—rehab, largely defined—the VA; and then one-third by employers, saying that this is part of the standard kit that a blind employee has here.
And of course that's different than it was in Europe. Europe was probably 95% funded by social insurance. But we just adapted to the different markets. I would say that by the time that our percentages had come into that range, I'd say most of the players in the industry had also seen a movement to where that was their mix of who was buying. But we all moved to this sort of more balanced mix of, "Who's paying for this stuff? Okay, well if it's these three different groups, well let's go sell to them."
Tony Candela: Adapting to the marketplace. Continual adapting. Who were your major competitors back in 1989–1990?
Jim Fruchterman: Well, the competitor that was clearly front and center in our mind was Xerox, which had bought Ray Kurzweil's company, eight or ten years earlier. And Xerox was our major competitor at Calera, so I was duking it out with them in the commercial markets and so I understood their technology pretty well, because I competed against it.
So a lot of our focus, almost all of our competitive focus in the early years, was on what was Xerox going to do. What ended up happening was that Xerox had to match us.
Now Xerox also had a card product, but they really hadn't pushed it into the blindness field as much. But they had to follow suit and they tried to keep a premium pricing strategy for awhile. That didn't work so they had to come in and be price competitive, because we had a really good product. Our OCR was really good. That was the technology that Calera had made its reputation on. It was great character recognition technology.
We had a meeting with Telesensory about a year in. I later found out more of the history. Telesensory had a reading machine product that had been killed a couple of years earlier but it consumed a lot of money. It was basically the "Talking Optacon project" was one of the things it was called. I remember getting quizzed by Jim Bliss and nine months later they came out with a very comparable product to the Arkenstone Reader called OsCaR. Telesensory was the really big giant in our field and actually, the guy who had written OsCaR is Dave Offen, who is our current head of engineering. He's been head of engineering here for five, six, seven years. So, he was my competitor and now he's been the rock of our engineering team for a long time.
But they were our major players. There were some niche players that had been in the market so for example, VisuAide had been developing a product. Nobatech in Germany had developed a product. There were people who were sort of looking at these card-based OCR systems and building products. For the most part, we were able to collaborate with them for awhile. So VisuAide, for example, we're still partnering with [them] and have been partnering with [them] on our GPS projects, on Bookshare. We often find a lot of common interests there.
Novotech we worked with for awhile but Novotech had a bad reputation with customers and there were some law suits between Novotech and customers. We ended up dropping Novotech as a distributor because we weren't comfortable with that.
Then there were companies who I think tried to be more competitive against us. There was Ad Hoc Systems. There was a group of guys out here in California, in Southern California that started a competitor that made a reading machine. There were some reading machine makers from Australia, like Robotron. But none of them really made a dent compared to the big three, which in the U.S. were Telesensory, Xerox, and Arkenstone.
Tony Candela: And the difficulty to compete was because of the arrangements that companies like yours and perhaps Xerox [and] Kurzweil had of ways to keep the costs down.
Jim Fruchterman: Yeah. Xerox was the manufacturer of their products so they didn't have another layer. And in my case, I got a very deep discount from Calera, in exchange for this non-compete. But, as I recall—the numbers might not be quite right but [they're] roughly right—if a Calera card cost $6,000 normally, dealers would...get a discount of 25 to 40 percent off of that. Well, I got a 75 percent discount. So I can take a $6,000 card, I could take a quarter of that price and lop it off the top and sell it to a blind person for $4,500. I could take another quarter of that gross price and give it to my dealer and I could take the rest and give the last quarter to Calera.
It never did quite work out that way but it ended up being a pretty even split between the consumer getting a discount, the dealer getting a chunk of the sale [and] I was getting a chunk of the sale.
In Silicon Valley, the typical mark-up on a hardware product for manufacture was you took the hardware cost and multiplied it by between four and six. We multiplied by two, and gave half of that to our dealer and half of it to us. So we had a significant pricing advantage. It was more comparable to being as if we were part of Calera. And that's like we were just one of their customers. And they didn't give that price to anybody else. So, it helped us to be price competitive and it also gave us some room to create a business.
Our partners pretty much had to choose to buy the cards commercially from a commercial distributor or to buy it from us and our pricing was better. And if you wanted to compete with us, that made it hard because the only practical place to buy the Calera card was from us. That's why Telesensory got started when Caere entered the market, and they had not been competing with Xerox or us. When they entered the market with a card product. I think they based their initial product on the Calera card and then moved quickly to the Caere card when it became available. That's the history.
Tony Candela: So Arkenstone got on its feet and then the software started to evolve. By the time you were done, you were a kind of a multi-aspect company, with a learning disabilities piece and a blindness piece. So the company began to evolve. How did that evolution go?
Jim Fruchterman: Well, I think our earliest stuff was defined by people like Clare Ham, who's now Clare Geoffray. She's married to one of the GW Micro founders. But Clare was I think employee number one, and Mickey Quenzer employee number two. I think Bill Schwegler was employee number four.
We set this consumer-based, service-oriented culture that I think served us really well in the field. We knew that software-only was coming. We knew there was a need for a dedicated reading machine, because there were a lot of people who weren't comfortable using PCs. So we came up with a product called OpenBook, which is essentially a PC encased in a special case with an HP scanner attached to it and a special key pad, so that you didn't have to use a keyboard. We redesigned the keypad so that it would be very easy for a senior to use. I think it's called the "knuckle test" because you have to be able to operate it with just your knuckles. Because a lot of seniors have diabetic neuropathy and don't have the sensation to do fine controls.
So we built the OpenBook product and we also went to a software engine rather than a card. That was when we could lower the price considerably, compared to the card products. So we built a version of the OpenBook software that you could just buy and add to a PC. And we sold some high-performance coprocessor cards, but people pretty quickly moved to the software product, because of the price advantage.
Tony Candela: What technically was going on around you in the technology world that enabled you to transition from a piece of hardware, a card, stuck into the back of a machine to software only? You knew it was coming but finally you were actually able to do it. What happened?
Jim Fruchterman: The OCR companies were doing it. They had the commercial incentive to grow their market by moving. And what was happening in the field was that Intel was moving from a 286 [card], which did not have the power to do character recognition effectively. And so the Calera TrueScan card was essentially a powerful minicomputer in a card form that sort of gave this giant brain boost to your basic IBM AT computer.
Now as we move to 386s and 486s, by the time we get to the 486, you clearly had a computer that was about as powerful as what had been on the coprocessor card. And then you can say, "We'll move our software to operating in the Windows environment and you won't have to buy a card."
At the same time, other technologies were going through the exact same evolution. So we went from needing a DECtalk card, which cost $1,000 on a special deal, or a Votrax or other kind of card that cost a couple of hundred bucks to where voice synthesis was just straight software, that worked on top of a Sound Blaster.
So that was the evolution of our product. [When] it started, it cost about $5,000 to add a scanner and a coprocessor card to a PC. Then it went from 5 to 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 1/2 to 1.25 to 1.1. We went to selling the products from below commercial price to where the price for an OCR system kind of plateaued at about $1,000.
That was one of our challenges. We thought it would erode, but it didn't erode and it wasn't a practical way, given the small size of our market. If we were netting a couple of million dollars and we wanted to pay several engineers and tech support and a couple of sales people. That's the challenge that a lot of AT vendors face, as they find a stable point: they can't take any dramatic changes because it will cut their staff a lot.
But anyway, I hope I answered your question.
Tony Candela: Yes. I don't think I ever had the perspective, technically, that you just provided of these boards essentially being replaced by standard hardware built into the PC.
Jim Fruchterman: Yeah, and that is the evolution that we had seen. We had started with...I mean our $50,000, $40,000 scanner had four boards in it and a handful of custom chips and four different microprocessors in it. And then it became a single standard microprocessor on a coprocessor card. At least what was happening is it became really clear that custom hardware was going to fall behind the mass market hardware. You couldn't justify creating a custom fast piece of hardware because the industry, Intel, was just moving too fast. So you needed to shift your horses.
Of course, that was part of the process that we did. We knew going to the PC was the right move. As time went on, we did less and less hardware and more and more software. And so even though Arkenstone didn't grow in size, we got better margins that enabled us to do more and more technology. Of course we went from selling to probably a couple of hundred people in the early years, to where we were selling to four or five thousand people in later years.
So we built the OpenBook, we built the OpenBook Unbound, which is a software-only product. Those are the things that really took off and got us into thousands of people a year.
We surveyed our customers at a pretty early date and were surprised to find that 15 percent of our customers weren't visually impaired. They were people with severe dyslexia who had heard about us, sought us out, bought our product. We knew a couple of these stories but we didn't realize it was such a significant part of our audience.
Plus we were getting these sort of anecdotal things. We got this phone call from a blind woman who was a college student in Maryland. She was calling up on one of our sort of subsidized, used equipment deals. She wanted to buy her own Arkenstone reader. "The dyslexic kids are hogging the system in the rehab center and I need my own."
So we actually did a little bit of market research and we found what the dyslexic students really like was seeing the word and hearing the voice synthesis at the same time. And we had this feature which we've done pretty much for low vision people, which was to spotlight the word visually as you're hearing it. But it's that bimodal approach that turns out to be really key to people with dyslexia.
But most of our user interface was completely wrong for a dyslexic person. They're not memorizing keyboard controls. They don't want the interface to talk as much as a blind person's interface talks. But they wanted something that's more mouse and visually driven.
So we essentially took the same basic product and we made a more visual version of it, with icons and large print and all this. And it turns out that it's also popular with low vision people so depending where you are in the vision spectrum you either go to the more-talking interface or the more-visual interface. For people who are sort of in the middle, either one will deliver both.
Tony Candela: Did you give it a different name?
Jim Fruchterman: We did. We called it "WYNN." It was an internal code name. We would scan the image of the page and that would be a picture of the page and we used to call that "the "WYSIWYG": what you see is what you get. It's an old term from the word processing industry. Then we would take the text, recognize it, and then we would make all the changes that a dyslexic person might need, or a low-vision person—make it bigger, change the contrast, change the colors, add more spacing between lines or words. We used to call that "what you see is what you need." And then it got to "what you need." And so we were calling it the WYN view and we're using it for an entirely new product. We called it "what you need now:" WYNN.
So by the time we rebuilt the reading machine into a different kind of reading machine that was encased in a wood case, it was called VERA: very easy reading appliance. It was designed to be a stand-alone, single, wooden box that looked like a piece of furniture that might appeal to a senior who is scared of the computer but might do this.
By the time we actually sold Arkenstone to Freedom Scientific, we had three different product lines: We had OpenBook, which is for the blind; WYNN, for people with dyslexia; and VERA, which is for senior citizens. At the core were the same basic character recognition, image processing, scanner, PC, but each one got packaged differently and looked quite different, depending on who the audience was.
Tony Candela: What made you put into some of the original software features for low vision users? It's not necessarily obvious to a third party observer that you would do something like that.
Jim Fruchterman: Well, you know, we were very blindness focused from the start. But the more we got to meet our customers, the more we realized that there are a lot of people who we identify as blind, but who are really low vision. Especially when we started talking about reaching seniors. Cause the majority of blind people are seniors, and yet less than 10 percent of our customers are seniors.
So we kept going, "Wait a minute. Most of our customerbase is seniors, why aren't we reaching them?" We spent a lot of time trying to find that out. [One of the answers was] "I hate synthetic speech." People would say, "I'm interested in a reading machine." Then they hear the voice and they go, "Ahhh. Keep it away from me."
The second [answer] was that reading machines did not solve the problems that they had. So if you're happy with what you get from NLS, nicely recorded audio books, for free, why would you go to a synthetic speech, if you're not motivated to read the stuff that you can't get? So we appealed mainly to people for whom NLS was not delivering the content they wanted, or not fast enough or they were employment-oriented or education-oriented and we were there, if they couldn't get it from anyone else, then they would scan it.
But a lot of seniors are low vision. And so they'll make statements like, "I'm not blind. I'm not disabled. I just can't see so well." There's a lot more denial of disability status in the senior citizen community.
I remember talking to one ophthalmologist who said, "We don't use the 'B word.'" The blind word. Someone can be light perception only, but they don't want to be called a blind person. They don't have that consumer history. They come from a generation where being disabled was not a good thing. So unlike kids who are born blind today are more likely to get reinforcement than people of that generation.
Tony Candela: There are even still major philosophical battles among the consumer organizations about what one calls oneself. It may never end.
Jim Fruchterman: Certainly, we did get educated that for the bulk of our customers, using the "B word" was perfectly acceptable and trying to come up with elliptical phrasing was actually more offensive than just using it. But the senior citizen audience was different and so we had to accommodate them with more vision supports, for low vision. "You're not really blind. You can actually read. We're just going to make it bigger. But if you get tired, you can then listen to the voice. Then looking for more natural voice synthesizers and coming up with a more appliance-like interface. This is more like a microwave or a VCR, it's not a computer."
Tony Candela: Sticking to the familiar, as much as possible. When the Windows revolution happened, did it affect you, your company, your programmers?
Jim Fruchterman: Oh, yeah!
Tony Candela: It affected many people. How did it affect you?
Jim Fruchterman: Well, OpenBook was the first talking Windows application for the blind. That came out before screen readers did, because our job was fundamentally easier than the screen reader maker. We were building a talking application from scratch, not trying to make all Windows-based things talk.
And I remember the head of Microsoft's Federal Systems division dropping by Arkenstone and kind of asking the question, "Why do the blind people hate us so much?" As a techie, someone who understood technology could explain why Windows was such a scary thing.
I remember, and this was probably the first time I started getting involved in more activist elements, I remember there being a summit at NFB between the technology community, both the Canadians and the Americans. You'd have people like Deane and Ted and Kurzweil and Jim Halliday, Larry Israel. We'd all be there.
And I remember the first time [we tried] to explain why Windows was an activist issue that NFB and other organizations had to take on. And the first time through, there were people at NFB (like Curtis Chong) who completely got it, but it took longer to convince these organizations why the inaccessibility of Windows threatened to roll back all the progress they had made on adaptive technology, that enabled people to be mainstreamed in business and education.
It didn't take long. That was probably the first time they heard about it and within a year all the organizations were realizing what a threat this was to blind empowerment education and economic opportunity.
And so, we were, I think, an example of what could be done, that Windows was not completely negative. But it took screen reader vendors a good three or four years before they had something that was actually usable compared with what they had under DOS. And still more years before it actually got in the ballpark of the comprehensiveness of DOS. Which they never got to but got in the ballpark.
Tony Candela: Did anything happen in the 90s that caused any kind of quantum leap forward in what Arkenstone was doing or was it just a nice progression forward?
Jim Fruchterman: It was a steady evolution. Moving from a hardware card to software was a big leap. Both on the OCR and on the synthesizer side. Having scanners go from being over $1,000 to being under $100. That was a big leap. Having PCs go from $3,000 to $800 or less was another big leap. But they were sort of steady evolutionary things.
That was part of my motivation in the '95-'96 time frame. I said, "OK, I've been doing this for awhile. What can I do [that's] new?" And we tried to break out of the mold. We tried a talking GPS product, but we ended up having to table it because Ray Kurzweil started his second OCR system for the blind company from scratch.
Tony Candela: Kurzweil Educational Systems?
Jim Fruchterman: Right. They started becoming a strong competitor and we were taking a lot of our money and putting it into the GPS project. So we looked at ours from a growth/break even area and [saw that] the Strider product, the GPS product, wasn't going to be financially successful in the foreseeable future and we had to shift gears and take the money we had been piling into that and put it back into our reading systems and regain our technical leadership, which at that time we had temporarily surrendered to Kurzweil. And then we seesawed back and forth for a few years until we sold to Freedom Scientific, on one of our upswings.
Tony Candela: Most of us know the GPS system. I guess for the first time in the Gulf War of 1990, 1991. And then we started hearing about the satellite system that the military had and I guess the Clinton Administration began to release some of its wherewithal to the general population. And so the satellites became available and companies like Arkenstone started looking at the Guidance Tower of the GPS. So you couldn't resist. You leaped into this. Did anybody talk you into it or was it your idea to go with GPS?
Jim Fruchterman: Well...fortune favors the prepared mind. And one of our first five customers was a guy who worked for Kodak named Ed. I don't remember his last name. Within the first month of starting Arkenstone, he called me up and said, "Jim, all my life I've wanted to be able to read a book and drive a car. And now thanks to you, I can read a book. When are you going to help me drive a car?" In a nutshell, [we get our ideas by] talking to blind people about what challenges blindness creates, information access, but most specifically access to printed documents, computer information, and personal mobility— the ability to drive a car, which most people in our society take for granted.
So if you break down driving a car, one of the parts of that is personal navigation, knowing where you are. It's called orientation, I think, is probably the best word. Where you are and how you're going to get someplace. Then you have, you know, mobility skills, how you avoid running into things, with a cane and all that. So, we just had this idea. And I remember Mickey Quenzer would take a bus to work and I remember vividly one morning he came in cursing a bus driver, saying, "If I ever learn to drive, the first thing I do is run over that bus driver." It was so apocalyptic a vision of how mad he was because this guy had dropped him off at the wrong stop and Mickey had no idea where he was. And buses in Silicon Valley don't run all that often either, and this was before cell phones.
So what happened is, thinking about GPS units, the idea came to my mind that we could use a talking GPS to help blind people. I thought it was an original idea and of course, doing some research I found that there were guys at Smith Kettlewell that proposed doing it with Morad, which has an accuracy of half a mile or something, ten years earlier. So the idea had been floating around. But we saw that it was practical and we started building a prototype and we contacted some of the leading firms, which we always do. And they always are interested in talking to us, because we talk about fun, cool applications for technology.
Actually, the Gulf War was a piece of that history. The government ended up with a fuzzing algorithm which made GPS less accurate for civilians. The military got essentially a security tool that allowed them to have access to the thing that knew where you were within 10 feet. And what they would do is fuzz it for civilians to 300 feet. Which was useful but not incredible.
Then people started working around it. So for example, during the Gulf War, they needed more GPS units so they turned off the fuzzing and started providing troops with commercial GPS units. The standard GPS units would give you 30-foot accuracy if the fuzzing was turned off. It was called selective availability.
Well the government started looking at whether they should turn off selective availability and we sent Mike May to the White House to be part of that announcement, that they were going to turn off selective availability and our application of helping the blind was one of the civilian reasons given. That blind pedestrians needed 30-foot accuracy rather than 300 foot accuracy, to know where they were rather than roughly where they were.
So we built this prototype. We got a patent and Charles LaPierre, who was a visually impaired engineer from Canada who had worked for VisuAide [and] ended up falling in love with Clare's sister and moving here and working for us, was a co-inventor. ...Mike May joined us as a sales executive, partly because he was entranced with Strider technology and began to use it. And that's how we got into that.
So it was just knowing the type of problems that blind people face, building a prototype and then we looked into the reality that the funding streams incentive wasn't there to spend $4,000 six or seven years ago, to get a talking GPS. But now Mike and VisuAide had bought our products at a $1,000 range and they're selling reasonably well. And we had to try and figure out how to bring it down to the $5 a month range, maybe, or something like that.
Tony Candela: And of course the Strider product, named after another Tolkien character. Describe the Strider product a little bit.
Jim Fruchterman: Well the original Strider product was a laptop computer, a voice synthesizer, a GPS receiver, something called a differential GPS receiver, which actually tried to get around selective availability by giving you corrections that would make it more accurate. It was in a backpack and you had a little keypad, that enabled you to control it and a voice synthesizer.
And people were excited, but price point and the fact that people don't actually want to be listening to an orientation device while they're navigating through traffic and trying to figure out things [were challenges]. ...You want to be able to consult with it and you want to be able to consult with it without whipping out a laptop computer, on the pavement in the middle of a city somewhere. So that's part of why my long-term vision is if it's just something that a cell phone does, that will become a successful standard part of the kit for every blind person.
Tony Candela: Another aspect of what blind people face is social interaction made easier through the use of your eyesight. Face recognition, knowing if there's somebody in the room. That kind of thing. And I think the cell phone technology, with the cameras that come with them, might help in that regard too. Especially with pattern recognition.
Jim Fruchterman: Oh yeah. If you take off the hat of "what can we use for blind people today?" and ask blind people what they really, really want. If they didn't think about technology limitations. There's a big demand for access to social information.
I remember, probably ten years ago, taking a long walk with Joachim Frank, this very visionary blind guy, in Germany. And Joachim described essentially the way the Strider product should work. In his mind, he described the entire product. So it knew where you were and how to get places. It could read signs. It just didn't read every sign, cause that would drive you nuts. It actually knew something about you. It knew that if you walked by the grocery store window and it had brussel sprouts, to stay silent. But if it had smoked pork chops, it would say, "Smoked pork chops are on sale."
And furthermore, you know, if the woman you were walking nearby is particularly attractive and she's your type, it would guide you into bumping into her and you say, "Oh, excuse me. Sorry." ...It would detect, "There's a ring on the ring finger," if you're looking for a spouse... and then when you're in the conversation, [it] might give you social clues. This is something that Joachim and I didn't talk about but it's come up since, is that it would be helpful to know, is the person giving me the social clues that they're very interested in what I'm talking about or are they looking around the room, trying to figure out a way to escape, kind of the things that people can then process who can see and then decide, okay, "I'm losing their interest. Do I change tracks to regain their interest or have I completely totaled this and am boring them, so maybe it's better if I just shut up."
That's stuff that is conceivable. Joachim joked about having a cell phone. We didn't think about a cell phone. We thought about a device. This was pre-cell phones. A device that would know that the person who's been following you for the last two blocks is actually on the list of known muggers and guides you into the police substation that's two blocks over so that you don't get mugged. All the things that people use vision for that blind people don't have access to and it turns out that the social side, for the average blind person, probably is increasingly the important unsolved problem.
Tony Candela: When Freedom Scientific approached you, or maybe I should ask you to tell the story about how you and Freedom Scientific came to be discussing the sale of Arkenstone.
Jim Fruchterman: Well, the history was, after six or seven years doing the same thing, I was saying, "How can we do more?" Beause we plateaued. We [were] a certain size. We had had to table the Strider product because we didn't have enough money. I started to grapple with this limitation that in retrospect seems kind of obvious, but it took me a while to wrap my head around it: If you're running a break-even social enterprise, you don't have a lot of extra money to create new ones, yet we didn't want to jack our prices up. So we decided we had a need to raise more money. We wrote an internal business plan called the Benetech Initiative. That was its internal name. Which was, How can we do Arkenstone a second time? How can we raise the money?
We kicked that around for a few years but we really got hot on it in 1999, and pretty much finished this plan. And this was the peak of the dot-com bubble. There were all these freshly minted billionaires running around saying, "I'm going to be charitable." We'll write the business plan and we'll get tons of money from these really rich people. And we'll go out and we'll do Arkenstone a second time.
So we started actually going around and talking to people and people weren't immediately opening their check books, or they would make pledges to their old school or something like that. They were kind of getting started. A lot of people in their thirties and forties aren't thinking about how to give away millions of dollars. It takes a little while to wrap their brain around it. About this time, Dick Chandler, who was creating Freedom Scientific, came by and said, "I want to buy your reading machine business." And I said, "Go away. We're non-profit. We don't want to sell. That's not what we do."
Tony Candela: Did this seem like an out of the blue thing? Was it a hostile takeover type feel to it? What kind of a feel?
Jim Fruchterman: It was more of a softer feel. Dick had disability credentials that you could check up on. He'd founded Sunrise Medical. And I had seen some of the different companies that they owned in the augmentative communication and wheelchair areas.
He said [he was] the founder of Sunrise Medical, which is this $100 million firm in the physical disability and internal medical business. He had credibility, he had stepped down and was looking to do something new and so he was putting out feelers. It was a bit surprising, because we'd never thought in that direction, but it did make sense that there might be people prowling around the industry thinking, "Maybe I can buy a few of these companies and do something."
We said we weren't really interested, but he was persistent and probably I met him at a big show in Germany or something, maybe at CSUN. He was still around...
