[Ohio-talk] new smart watch

[Cheryl Fischer]

Thanks.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ohio-talk [mailto:ohio-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of James Fetter via Ohio-talk
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 3:23 PM
To: NFB of Ohio Announcement and Discussion List
Cc: James Fetter
Subject: Re: [Ohio-talk] new smart watch

Here it is. By the way, I think that we should all take issue with the first sentence, but notwithstanding that, it is very informative.

This Korean startup is making wearables for the blind, but its ambition is much bigger Colin Moreshead Colin Moreshead
17 hours ago

I need to begin with a disclaimer: if you’re reading this sentence right now, you don’t need the product featured in this article. But trust me, it’s worth a look all the same.

Dot1

The smartwatch market has exploded over the past few years. In fact, reports show that smartwatch sales have increased an astronomical 457 percent
  in the last year alone, a figure that can be attributed to the Apple Watch. Since its release in April, Apple’s flagship wearable has captured a full three-quarters of the market, reaching about 4 million units sold to date. One thing you could safely assume about nearly every one of those customers, though – they can all see.

The World Health Organization estimates that there are
285 million people with severe visual impairment around the world, of whom 39 million are completely blind. Among them, literacy is a serious issue because access to Braille education and materials is limited. Even for the literate blind, reading is laborious – one Braille Bible comes in 40 volumes, for example – and remains largely limited to the printed word. 
Active
Braille technology, which displays changing Braille text in real time, typically cost upward of US$3,000 and haven’t changed much over the past decade.

Dot
  is a South Korean startup that believes the active Braille market is ripe for disruption. It has produced an active Braille smartwatch that’s a low-cost education and communication tool for the blind. With it, Dot hopes to return equal information access to a demographic that has been left behind in the age of real-time digital text.

A tactile experience

Dot2

The Dot smartwatch appears, at first glance, like one of the many screenless wearables on the market already. You might mistake it for a white Fitbit
  from its telltale bulge where the hardware module rests atop the wearer’s wrist. That module houses four “cells” of six active dots each – enough for four Braille characters to be displayed at once. The device can be calibrated to display new characters at speeds ranging from a glacial 1 hertz to a breakneck
100 hertz; development has yielded a battery life of 10 hours, which will give average users five days between charges, Dot says.

The device is based on haptic technology, which provides feedback or information in real time through touch. By linking to any Bluetooth device, the Dot smartwatch can pull text from applications like iMessage using voice commands. Co-founder and CEO Eric Ju Yoon Kim says that Dot gives users the chance to read text their own way.

“Until now, if you got a message on iOS from your girlfriend, for example, you had to listen to Siri read it to you in that voice, which is impersonal,”
Kim explains. “Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself and hear your girlfriend’s voice saying it in your head?”

As a wearable, Dot is still without competition. Current industry leaders produce hardware in the form of keyboards with active Braille cells that connect to computers via USB, with price tags in the thousands of dollars. Kim tells Tech in Asia that when the Dot smartwatch goes on sale in the United States this December, it will retail for less than US$300.

Going global
Part of the Dot team: lead designer Mason Joo, CEO Eric Kim, CTO Ki Sung, and software engineer Juhwan Lim.

(L-R): Lead designer Mason Joo, CEO Eric Kim, CTO Ki Sung, and software engineer Juhwan Lim.

Kim founded Dot with Titus Cheng, a classmate from the University of Washington. The team they built in Seoul includes specialists in hardware, software, and design. In its first round of seed funding, Dot raised US$100,000 from the ActnerLab accelerator and an additional $500,000 from the South Korean government’s Tech Incubator Program for Startup
  (TIPS). The company will begin its second round of seed funding in August with a goal of raising US$1 million, and it’s hoping for international investors to help promote the company’s products overseas.

Though the smartwatch will go on sale in the US and Canada first, Dot is trying out other applications for its active Braille modules in South Korea. In a push that Kim is calling “public Braille,” the company has installed modules at ATMs and in train stations. Like the smartwatch, these modules can be programmed to display information updated in real time, such as account balance information or a subway schedule.

“The Braille at ATMs currently tells you, ‘This is an ATM,’ which isn’t super helpful,” says Kim. “I think these sorts of public places, and the public sector in particular, could become our largest market in the future.”

That means expanding to other countries like Japan and China. Japan has a strong history of updating infrastructure to reflect the needs of its disabled citizens, as evidenced by the country’s ubiquitous tactile paving. China accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world’s blind population and boasts a rapidly evolving public infrastructure. Kim sees huge growth potential in both markets and says Dot’s next few hires later this year will likely reflect that.

Educating a clientele

Kim admits that part of the challenge that lies before his company is creating a broader demand for the product. Unlike Apple or Samsung, Dot has an immediate, vested interest in promoting literacy as a means of increasing its number of potential customers. By many accounts, Braille literacy has actually fallen over the past half-century; Kim attributes that to the lack of effective educational tools.

“90 percent of blind people become blind after birth, and there’s nothing for them right now – they lose their access to information so suddenly,” says Kim. “Dot can be their lifeline, so they can learn Braille and access everyday information through their fingers, which is the goal of Braille literacy.”

Everyday language has some existing haptic support in the form of single-line active Braille devices, but Dot is concerned that education requiring complex text and diagrams, like mathematics, is still off-limits to the blind. 
To solve that, the company is also developing a tablet device to display multi-line text, graphs, and shapes. Native educational apps could be part of Dot’s next developmental phase.

Making waves

Dot3

Dot is starting with only 10,000 smartwatches for its release this December, but the company is poised to take advantage of an underdeveloped market. The Dot team has just welcomed Dr. Dong-Soo Kwon of KAIST, South Korea’s top science and engineering university. He adds 54 patents in haptic technology to Dot’s existing five, providing a strong head start over potential competitors for the company, founded only one year ago.

Those patents might also be a ticket to deals with larger companies. 
Smart device makers like Apple and Samsung have experimented with haptics to improve the way their models vibrate, and Kim says that Dot hopes to innovate products meant for the sighted as well.

Dot’s primary mission remains information accessibility for the blind. 
Kim has plenty of ideas for how their four-cell module can grant the blind access to things that have gone digital, like microwaves or rice cookers. He wants to bring the blind up to speed on the same advances the rest of us enjoy.

“Every time technology moves forward we see more real-time information, but for the blind, that’s a widening discrimination gap,” explains Kim. 
“We are
solving that information discrimination with the equal accessibility the Dot smartwatch provides.”

Editing by Terence Lee and J.T. Quigley
(And yes, we're serious about ethics and transparency. More information here.
)
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techinasia-8ad2f16f1cfd0d6443a089c0624042b4
Leslie
16 hours ago
This is definitely more useful than apple watch or pebble. This is what I call real innovation. Kudos

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techinasia-ed08ffe048c32cd55986623fd0aac732
Colin Moreshead
  Leslie
12 hours ago
And it uses the same module they plan to use for public Braille, meaning that large public sector orders mean lower average cost for private customers!

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techinasia-4908abf01ae104097641c7984131e9dd
Eric Ju Yoon Kim
  Colin Moreshead
7 hours ago
Thanks you Colin, here is an example of ATM dot module!

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techinasia-3295c76acbf4caaed33c36b1b5fc2cb1
Willis Wee
  Leslie
15 hours ago
Agree. I hope the market is big enough that it attracts investments from 
investors. great cause and business :)

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techinasia-4908abf01ae104097641c7984131e9dd
Eric Ju Yoon Kim
  Leslie
8 hours ago
Hello Leslie, I'm Eric from the team dot. Thanks for your compliment, we 
will do our best!

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kristiankolby
Kristian Kolby
6 hours ago
Took the liberty to advice the blind communitiy in Denmark!
I think they were exited, please make this avaliable in Europe/Scandinavia

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techinasia-4908abf01ae104097641c7984131e9dd
Eric Ju Yoon Kim
  Kristian Kolby
6 hours ago
Thank you, Kristian! I'm really glad that they were excited! :)
Of course we will make this available in Europe/Scandinavia!
For the Scandinavia, we have talked with communities in Sweden so far.
If you don't mind, would you please connect us to your connections?
Here's my mail! eric at dotincorp.com

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kristiankolby
Kristian Kolby
8 hours ago
Works with Android?

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techinasia-ed08ffe048c32cd55986623fd0aac732
Colin Moreshead
  Kristian Kolby
8 hours ago
Yes! Any device that can be connected via Bluetooth. Android and iOS are 
both supported.

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techinasia-4908abf01ae104097641c7984131e9dd
Eric Ju Yoon Kim
  Colin Moreshead
7 hours ago
Yes! Both Android and iOS :) Thanks for your kind explanation Colin!

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techinasia-ce80993289bf0e45c95ed6c95bfdd07d
David Corbin
14 hours ago
Very cool idea! I want to try it, haha. They should come to Tech in Asia 
Tokyo and exhibit!

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techinasia-4908abf01ae104097641c7984131e9dd
Eric Ju Yoon Kim
  David Corbin
7 hours ago
Thank you, David! We will let you know when our first product released!
And as you said, we are applying startup booth at Bootstrap Alley, and 
Arena now!

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techinasia-ce80993289bf0e45c95ed6c95bfdd07d
David Corbin
  Eric Ju Yoon Kim
4 hours ago
Awesome! Thanks for considering us :-)

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techinasia-63dc7ed1010d3c3b8269faf0ba7491d4
Terence Lee
16 hours ago
A rare startup that has potential to make a huge impact while making money.

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techinasia-4908abf01ae104097641c7984131e9dd
Eric Ju Yoon Kim
  Terence Lee
6 hours ago
Thank you, Terence! We will do our best to impact the world.

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