STAR Point Transcript - Mike Calvo from Serotek Corporation
>> From the depths of ingenuity to the heart and soul of assistive technology for people with disabilities, STAR is a System of Technology to Achieve Results.
>> STAR Point does not endorse or recommend any product, individual or agency. The information expressed on STAR Point is informational in nature and does not imply endorsement by STAR's funders, the National Institute of Disability Rehabilitation Research or the State of Minnesota.
Earle Harrison: Hello and welcome to STAR Point. My name is Earle Harrison. STAR Point is a project of the Minnesota Star Program, a System of Technology to Achieve Results.
My guest in the studio today is Mike Calvo of Serotek Corporation, a Minnesota-based company; however, you're not from Minnesota, are you?
Mike Calvo: No, actually I'm from South Florida.
Earle Harrison: South Florida?
Mike Calvo: Well, actually, I currently live in Orlando. I left South Florida about a year ago. But I used to live in Miami for many years, and now I live in the land of the mouse.
Earle Harrison: What are the types of projects that you're involved with here in Minnesota with Serotek?
Mike Calvo: Serotek was developed to make people's lives easier by providing people an easy way to deal with technology. Being a member of the blind community and being a trainer for many years, I realized that technology is not the easiest thing for us to handle sometimes.
I, for example, know how to use a screen reader, know how to use a computer; but, frankly, my biggest motivation, of course, was the need to eat and feed my family. If you don't have the need to eat or feed your family, then chances are -- or perhaps you're older and retired and don't require a job to eat or feed your family, then the chances of you taking on the monumental task of learning how to use a computer may be a bit daunting. And even those who do learn how to use a computer rarely learn how to use it all the way.
It takes the average person about 20 hours using adaptive technology just to learn how to send a simple e-mail. And that -- I don't mean how to hit the send button. I mean it's actually turn the computer on, get their screen reader or accessibility option of choice up and running, log onto the Internet through their ISP, bring up their e-mail program, get to the in-box, check the messages, read them, get an idea of what they say and then be able to effectively respond to them. And if they get themselves in a pickle of some kind, whether it be an error while sending the e-mail or checking to see if their connection is up or what have you, being able to get out of it.
Earle Harrison: At that point I usually go to lunch.
(Chuckling).
Mike Calvo: I can't. My stomach is usually so twisted I can't even have lunch. Great diet plan.
But actually, you know, the interesting thing, though, is that there's a Catch-22 in all of this, because you've got to learn the operating system to learn the technology, and you've got to learn the technology to learn the operating system. So that puts you in a very interesting situation, because how are you going to do that? How are you going to get this thing up and running and how do you really explain to a blind person how a window screen looks?
I mean, I can conceptually understand it. I'm totally blind. I have been that way since birth. But how do you explain to a blind person that a window screen is very fluid; that you can actually have a program in the foreground, yet you can see through to another program in the background and then you have to click on an icon which is a little picture which represents what the function -- you know, at that point you've lost the blind person.
It's not like when we were dealing with DOS or these things where you had a grid and you could explain to a blind person, well, a computer screen is like a grid. It's 80 columns by 25 lines. There's text up on that screen and if you hit this key this is going to happen; if you hit that key, this is going to happen. Windows was very challenging for me as I'm sure for many others.
Earle Harrison: And DOS, that was the era of millions of key strokes.
The thing that a lot of folks appreciate, whether or not you're blind, is the idea that many of the Windows key strokes carry over from program to program. So is it fair to say that once a person learns how to use a Windows application, that they pretty much know how to use most of them?
Mike Calvo: That's an interesting question. The fundamentals, the basics are there. I mean, usually if you want to get to the files menu, it's an alt F. If you want to get edit menus, it's alt E. But it's teaching the person the whole concept, once you hit the menus, then you open up boxes and you open up windows and God knows what's in those windows. And every program is different.
And then when you get out onto the Internet it's even worse because every web page is different. I'm fond of saying in presentations that there's 50 ways to skin a web page, and God knows, if you want to be effective, you better learn all 50 ways.
I say all this to get to the point of what Serotek does. When we started Serotek, we set out to produce a product that would give equal access to everyone. It didn't matter if you were using the Internet for years and years, or if you just started. We knew that there was a need, and there really wasn't a product for this.
There's a couple of different things that really hold people back from being able to advance themselves with technology. As I mentioned before, of course, there's the 20 hours that it takes just to learn to send a simple e-mail. That's the first thing.
The second thing, of course, is the cost. The average screen reader costs anywhere from a thousand to, oh, about $1400 nowadays. And, of course, you've got to get yourself a nice powerful computer to be able to do that, to be able to run the screen reader and all the associated technologies.
So you're looking at maybe, you know, two or three grand by the time all is said and done. And then what do you have? Well, you have a very expensive paperweight, because you really have to get some training. And unless you have a good friend who can train you, or you're very proficient with using the tapes, which these systems come with, and, hey, I learned how to use it but I had some prior computer experience, so I was well versed in the way a keyboard worked and the way an operating system worked; and, as I said before, I had the concepts of the operating system down, so all I had to do was learn the technology to access the operating system.
If you can do all these things, then you will get to go for a swim in the pool. The pool being technology. We like to look at technology as a swimming pool, where you don't want to take someone and throw them in the deep end of the pool and say you need to learn how to swim. You basically want to take them and put them in the low end of the pool and say: Here you can walk until you feel comfortable getting out there and swimming. Well, our technology is that way. You can speak to the Freedom Box. You can use a keyboard to communicate with it, a mouse, or a touch screen.
The technology will access the Internet, and it will run on a series of platforms. It will run on Windows. It will run on Linux, and soon to come it will run on Macintosh. And it's all based around what we call our flexible user interface. Our company motto is "We are here to humanize computers, not computerize humans."
So that is the short version of what Freedom Box is and what it does.
Earle Harrison: You're listening to STAR Point, a project of the Minnesota STAR Program. My name is Earl Harrison. My guest is Mike Calvo of Serotek. Are we talking about technology that is headed in the direction of a universal design, the idea that here's a wonderful tool for everybody to use, regardless of whether or not they have a disability?
Mike Calvo: Absolutely. I think universal design is the way, of course, all of us would like to see software written and implemented. The digital divide is growing so much more and more every day. Technology refreshes itself, what, every couple of months now. Every time you get something new, just about when you install it and take it out of the box, whichever comes first, I think sometimes I install something before I take it out of the box. It seems whenever you get new technology, it becomes obsolete almost the moment you plug it in. And this is a problem, because generally the disability arena has or what we call the disenfranchised community, has been able to get access to technology later.
This is not a good thing. When you've got version 1.0 coming out in January and by June we're at version 5.5, you know? So what needs to happen is companies need to start designing with the disenfranchised user in mind from the get-go, that person who, for whatever reason, may not be able to look at the screen at this moment in time or may not be able to have their hands on the keyboard or use a mouse or what have you.
For example, when we started, it was all about, okay, let's develop something for disabled folks that's going to be cheaper but yet it's going to maintain the quality. Let's make something that's going to cut down on the learning curve, and really what we ended up with was this flexible user interface that you can apply to car applications. I mean, imagine the person driving down the street in their car. They'd love to talk to their e-mail. They'd love to talk to the web browser, or they'd love to be able to talk to their audio collection in the car and play whatever they would like to listen to.
They would love to be able to talk to a GPS system, find out where they're going or get a traffic report or what have you. So this is not just a technology that is here for people who are disabled. This is for people who, be it a permanent disability, a temporary disability, they will be able to accomplish what they're looking to do. And our society right now is a society that's on the move. Multi-tasking is not just a word, it's a way of life. If you can't be checking your e-mail, cooking dinner and putting the kids to bed all at the same time, and, by the way, you know, advancing in your career, then you're not considered to be a super mom. If you're not the President and CEO of whatever kind of company and you're trying to work your way up, even though you're at the top of the corporate ladder, still trying to work your way up higher, being the captain of the football team with your kids, being soccer dad, all of these different things, and being able to maintain your corporate status, your financial status and everything else, you're considered a failure in business. And, unfortunately, we've become a society that is very, very centered on what do you do and how fast can you do it.
Our technology enables people to do things faster and do things smoother, and it also takes away the boundaries of the digital divide. The same person that can use the Freedom Box to send an e-mail that has all of their skills, all their cognitive skills about them, their eyes, their hands and whatnot can use it. For whatever reason they're going share their technology with a blind person, they can. They don't need to worry about, oh, let me load up your screen reader or what have you, which makes the technology great to be able to plug into public situations, where you may have, for example, an Internet cafe, where they have access there and they just can't afford to put a thousand dollar screen reader into each place. And if they did, who the heck would support it? You know, who knows how to use it? It's better to make the speaking part of this thing just kind of a byproduct. One of the things we believe strongly at Serotek, it's that it's not the community that is disabled anymore. It's, frankly, the software that is. Technology is here disabled because of the lack of consideration of software vendors and the lack of knowledge of those people, the programers that work for those vendors in knowing exactly what makes up accessible technology.
To go a step further, the companies that these software programmers use to compile their programs, to design their web pages, all of these things really need to start taking into consideration that people all the time can't just use the computer one simple way. You may be using the web page from your cell phone. You may be using it from your computer. You may be using it from your PDA.
So all of these types of hooks need to be built into technology.
Earle Harrison: You mentioned a lot of different applications. GPS, browsing the Internet, doing e-mail, so forth, are you saying that Freedom Box is essentially a culmination of all these different types of technologies?
Mike Calvo: Freedom Box at this point is a software package that acts a lot like an on-line service that provides you access to e-mail, to chat, to different websites, to thousands of radio stations, hundreds of radio reading services. It's an on-line community aspect. The Internet is all about community and all about getting people together that share similar common interests in one place.
So Freedom Box is basically a product that was built using our flexible interface technology. But that technology that we call FUI, interestingly enough as opposed to GUI, graphical user interface. Flexible user interface is actually the technology behind the Freedom Box. We expect in the future to be able to license this technology to other application writers and developers for their applications. We have three patents pending on the technology. They are the core components of our technology.
Earle Harrison: You're listening to STAR Point, a project of the Minnesota STAR Program. My guest is Mike Calvo of Serotek Corporation. My name is Earle Harrison. We're going to take a short break. When we return, we'll see exactly what the Freedom Box can do.
(Music)
Earle Harrison: Welcome back to STAR Point. My name is Earle Harrison. And we're pleased to have Mike Calvo in the studio with us today. We're talking about the Freedom Box developed by Serotek Corporation.
Mike Calvo: The important stuff about our technology is that after several years of development, we've been able to accomplish a product that first and foremost is free, which is a new word to hear in the adaptive technology field. It's a four letter word that begins with F, and it's free. It's almost unheard of in our world. And nobody has to buy it for you. You can go and download it all by yourself or have someone download it for you. You can install it onto your computer all by yourself. You don't have to apply for it or anything else. Now that's the software. There's a monthly subscription, like any Internet service. And that's $9.95 a month.
If you don't have Internet service, it's $21.95 a month. We're assuming of course at that point that you have a computer. If you do not have a computer, we have a couple of options there as well. Unfortunately, there's another bad word associated with those, it's a four letter word called cost. The cost on our basic unit, what we call our Freedom Box surfboard, which I will demonstrate for you in a moment, is $999.
This is a plug-in Internet device that is everything all contained in the keyboard. It looks like a big thick computer keyboard. It has all these little funky plugs on the back you probably won't have to worry about, except to plug in your power and plug in your telephone line or your cable modem, if you have one, into the back. And that's it. It's got a CD/DVD player on one side and the other side it's got a floppy drive in case you want to save stuff on floppies.
It's got a hard drive inside. That's what stores all your information and all of the different content that you listen to. What you do is you turn the unit on and it immediately comes up and you start talking to it. And you use one key to communicate with this device. And then you tell it what you want to do.
The other option we have is called The Key to Freedom. The Key to Freedom is very revolutionary, because it allows you to take the power of the Freedom Box and a little device that fits in your pocket. You can go into any coffee shop, college, dorm room, any library and just plug into a computer that's never spoken a word of synthetic speech before, plug it in and immediately have access to the Internet. Obviously that's providing that that computer has Internet access to begin with. And that product costs $199.
And just imagine the freedom of this product being able to walk in like anybody else into a coffee shop, plug in your Key to Freedom, immediately check your e-mail, check stock quotes, check the weather, listen to any kind of books you may have, chat with friends, whether it be across the country, across the city, across the world. All of these things are now available to the disenfranchised community all incorporated into one product.
The cool thing about our software as well is it works on several platforms. The platform is the operating system that the computer uses. The most common one, of course, is Windows. But there are more operating systems out there. There's an operating system called Linux, which is a free operating system, unlike Windows, which is a cost associated with it. And there's Macintosh. And we should be Macintosh compatible probably by the second quarter, early third quarter of this year.
Frankly, the Macintosh market for the disenfranchised community is not very huge. But we really want to be able to provide people full accessibility on all platforms so that they can literally use a computer anywhere.
I mean if one of my sighted colleagues walks up to a computer and it's on the Internet, he's not going to care if it's a Linux, Windows computer or Macintosh computer. It's going to look like the Internet to him. So that's my goal with the Freedom Box; that one of my blind colleagues can walk up to a computer and by simply plugging in his key or running software on this computer, he's not going to care whether it's Windows, Linux or Mac either. He's going to simply be able to have access to his personal e-mail and his information.
So before we get on the Internet, the first thing we need to do is we need to log on.
"Please wait a few minutes for authorization to complete." (Computer speaking).
Mike Calvo: Now, if I didn't know what to do, it would give me a list of choices.
"Please choose one of the following." (Computer speaking).
Mike Calvo: And the list goes on and on and on. But as you see, Earle, there's a list of numbers and they're followed by titles. And you can either press the number on the key pad or you can say the title of what you want to do. So, for example, here we want to send an e-mail. So we're simply going to say mail.
"Starting mail. Please wait."
Mike Calvo: We could have said e-mail or anything else.
"Welcome to e-mail. You have six saved messages. What would you like to do now?"
Mike Calvo: Now if I don't know what to do, again it will tell me. But I do know what to do. So I am going to go ahead and do it.
"Please wait. Do you want to choose a recipient from your address book?"
Mike Calvo: Yes.
"What's the recipient's name?"
Mike Calvo: Matt Campbell.
"Do you want to send your message to Matt Campbell?"
Mike Calvo: Yes.
"Do you want it to be a voice message or text message?"
Mike Calvo: Voice.
"Please record your message after the tone. When you are finished, turn off your microphone and press any key on the key pad."
Mike Calvo: Hey Matt, it's Mike. I'm just doing a demo here. Just wanted to say hello.
(Computer speaking).
Mike Calvo: Sure.
(Computer speaking).
Send it. All right. (Computer speaking.)
Mike Calvo: And, of course, at that point we could quit doing what we wanted to do. If we wanted to continue on to another web site, whatever we've wanted to do. We've worked very hard to create the low end of the pool if you will. Version 2.0 is being released on May 1st, offers a great deal more features that are for the more intermediate to advanced users. Of course that can be downloaded from our website, as can this version of the software absolutely free.
And the web address is www.freedombox.info. Again, that's www.freedombox.info.
Earle Harrison: What about your already Internet savvy computer users, are there any advantges of subscribing to the Freedom Box network for those folks?
Mike Calvo: Besides our thousands of hours of audio content, our thousands of radio stations, it's just ease of use. We have several different features that even the most advanced Internet user would like. Of course, the Key is a big one. I mean even if you're a Jaws for Windows or windowized user, you still don't have the flexibility of being able to just take that software, pop it onto a key that you can plug into any machine and make it work. Especially in public places.
With our technology, we can configure your Freedom Box account to even check third-party e-mail accounts. So when you're out on the road, you can literally plug into any machine you come up to and have access just like anybody else would. Also, of course, our chat features, instant messaging, we provide access to ICQ, AOL, Yahoo Messenger and MSN all through our software.
Earle Harrison: You're listening to STAR Point, a project of the Minnesota STAR program, a System of Technology to Achieve Results. My guest has been Mike Calvo of Serotek Corporation.
Mike, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be here today. Before we take off, why don't you go ahead and give all that contact information one again.
Mike Calvo: We can be reached online at www.freedombox.info. You can call us toll free at 866-202-0520. That's 866-202-0520. We are open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to midnight Eastern standard time.
>> From the depths of ingenuity to the heart and soul of assistive technology for people with disabilities, STAR is a System of Technology to Achieve Results.
>> STAR Point does not endorse or recommend any product, individual or agency. The information expressed on STAR Point is informational in nature and does not imply endorsement by STAR's funders, the National Institute of Disability Rehabilitation Research or the State of Minnesota.