Benetech :: About Benetech :: President's Update Archives

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

June 2002

Benetech burst onto the press pages around the world during early 2002. Our simultaneous announcement of Bookshare.org and Benetech was very successful and resulted in a tremendous response to Benetech. Users, nonprofits, high technology companies, foundations, philanthropists and volunteers have all expressed strong interest in working with Benetech. The challenge of the rest of this year is converting this energy into sustainability!

Highlights of the past few months:

Bookshare.org, our on-line digital book library, went live on February 21, 2002, to great reviews from people with disabilities and with extensive press coverage.
Martus, our software project for the human rights community, is now code complete and entered alpha tests last month. Our senior advisor on the project, Dr. Patrick Ball, just returned from The Hague, where he was the lead expert witness for the prosecution in the genocide trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
We successfully demonstrated Sonorus, our talking handheld iPAQ, at the largest disability technology conference of the year, as well as at JavaOne.
We have a newly funded project, Libre, which is directed at the needs of nonprofit groups worldwide for usable Open Source desktop software.
We have expanded the list of key technology leaders supporting Benetech, providing us with increased technology assistance, contacts and of course, funding.

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Bookshare.org

Bookshare.org, our new on-line library for the disabled, is now operational. Bookshare.org delivers accessible digital books to people with disabilities. Acting as sort of an accessible Amazon.com, people with visual, learning and physical disabilities that affect reading can now download digital books that are then spoken aloud on their PCs or can be accessed with Braille.

Just three months after launch, our revenues are already approaching ten percent of what we need to break-even, which is projected for two years after launch. One of the unique aspects of Bookshare.org is the opportunity it provides to be a "virtual volunteer" - anybody with a computer can volunteer from home to help bring greater access to literacy to the disabled community. Our donated Fujitsu scanners are humming as volunteers process an Alibris donation of a pallet of used books, using QuickScan Pro software donated by Pixel Translations.

We are already discussing many exciting extensions of Bookshare.org, from better literacy for students with learning disabilities to low-cost libraries of digital e-books for villages in the developing world. Imagine a twenty thousand ebook library on a stack of twenty CDs with a game machine and TV: it could bring visual and talking ebooks to the literate, the illiterate and the disabled for under $500 per village. Bookshare.org makes books truly accessible for those who cannot afford or read printed books.

We have also received the honor of having a paper "The Soundproof Book" published in FirstMonday, the peer-reviewed Internet journal this month. The Soundproof Book was written by George Kerscher, the Chair of the Open eBook Forum, and me. It discusses the rights and technical issues that have kept the disabled from accessing commercial eBooks.

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The Martus Project

Martus is Benetech's effort to bring usable information technology tools to grassroots human rights groups around the world. We want groups with the skill level to use electronic mail to be able to create, organize, secure, backup and web publish bulletins about human rights violations. The challenge is making the technology extremely easy to use, robust and secure. The demand from the social justice community for Martus software has been tremendous - from Sri Lanka to Russia, from traditional international human rights groups to groups handling such diverse social justice issues as environmental protection, domestic violence, lesbian and gay rights and even initial discussions with personnel supporting the creation of the new International Criminal Court.

Just last month, Martus was introduced to our first testing partner, the International Rescue Committee's San Francisco office. We have also installed the software at a domestic violence coalition in Arizona. The last few months have been consumed with completing our cryptography design which enables us to deliver secure storage and backup for the most important asset of any human rights group: confidential information about human rights abuse. The next six months will be an extensive testing period in Asia, Central American and Eastern Europe and Russia.

We have also continued to benefit from the efforts of many individuals, nonprofit groups and foundations, especially the Information Program of the Open Society Institute who provided major funding for Martus.

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Sonorus, the Talking iPAQ

Sonorus, a talking wireless handheld computer, has gone from concept to working demonstration in just five months. Supported financially and technically by Sun Microsystems, we were able to show off this prototype at two major conferences in March. Benetech believes that handheld computers and powerful cell phones will become the platform for information access for people with disabilities, people who are illiterate and for people who are poor. Our dream is that a used handheld computer will cost $10 in the market in Africa or Asia in the second half of this decade. These devices will have the processing power to speak for those who cannot speak, read for those who cannot read, see for those who cannot see, listen for those who cannot hear and remember for those who cannot remember.

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Libre

With the cost of computers still too high for most of the world, there is strong demand in the developing world and nonprofit sector for affordable, legal technology solutions. Currently, almost all nonprofits in the developing world are using pirated Microsoft software. As this becomes steadily more difficult (both technically and legally), there is a need for a usable Linux solution. Already, several countries and major nonprofit organizations have made significant commitments to move to Open Source platforms, but the sad fact today is that Linux desktop solutions are still more difficult to use than Windows.

Thanks to funding from a technology company that prefers to remain anonymous, Benetech has started a market research and planning process to assess the needs of the nonprofit sector and the poor worldwide. We are expecting that this will lead to a major project named Libre (the Spanish word for "free" in the sense of freedom) that will adapt existing Open Source applications and build new ones in an effort to create a viable low cost Linux solution for the people who need it most. The problem is not that the technology doesn't exist: it's just too hard for almost everyone to use!

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Supporters

We are delighted to acknowledge the following partial list of new supporters*:

Paul Klingenstein of Aberdare Partners
David Ross, CEO of RAF Technology, Inc.
Michael Brown, CEO of Quantum
Alibris for pallet-sized donations of books for Bookshare.org

*Corporate affiliations listed for identification purposes only

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Conclusion

The Benetech team is energized by the reaction to our latest advances in technology that serves humanity. Projects such as the Landmine Detector Project and Literacy Link continue to make progress as incubating ventures. Great new ideas from the technology sector are streaming in, and we're playing an increasingly significant role in encouraging the technical community to consider models that fall between charity and enterprises that can deliver venture capital returns. The more time we spend with the nonprofit sector, the clearer it is that Benetech is onto something big: leveraging the power of technology to address major challenges facing society.

Your continuing support is invaluable. Thanks for everything you've done to help advance the Benetech mission!

Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
Email: [email protected]