Palo Alto nonprofit Benetech wins a $42.5M Dept. of Education grant, a nod to founder Jim Fruchterman’s quest to help the blind
Summary
Bookshare followed this model to the T, starting with foundation grants to deliver reading tools — by instantaneous, digital means — for the blind and dyslexic who formerly depended on physical products like Braille books and the U.S. mail. “I started from single-enterprise entrepreneur, to portfolio-of-enterprises ringleader, to guy who wants to help the entire Silicon Valley software and data ecosystem transform the world of disadvantaged communities and the social sector that serves them.” hirty-six years ago, the young Caltech graduate was no less ambitious, though his main interest then was rockets, or maybe winning a Nobel. “What we did was gather several million examples of characters, compared them all, clustered them, then built an algorithm that would say, ‘This looks like an A,’ even though it had never seen that font before.” Through his first seven years at Calera, Fruchterman kept thinking about how the OCR tech could help blind people. He wondered how technology could have prevented such a travesty, and he took long walks with a friend on the Stanford dish trail — where many Silicon Valley ideas take shape — to brainstorm highly improbable high-tech solutions, including force fields to protect vulnerable communities. Martus represented the kind of tool that Fruchterman thought might have helped human rights investigators break the El Mozote story sooner and perhaps bring the Salvadoran civil war to a faster conclusion.
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