Five years ago, Jason Curry sat down with his father, David, over breakfast at a local diner. It should’ve been a typical father-son breakfast, where work-week stories, sage advice, and maybe a few jokes are swapped over omelets and buttered toast.
But for the Currys, this breakfast was a tipping point.
Jason is deaf, and although his father knows limited sign language, the simple breakfast chat was too slow and frustrating for them both. Jason’s father stopped the conversation, signing that he had an idea. Back at home, he grabbed a black marker and drew what would become the UbiDuo.
“The minute I saw it” says Jason. “I knew it would change the world.”
A Six-Pound Revolution
Picture two keyboards with imbedded screens. Together, they are the UbiDuo, portable, wireless, weighing only about six pounds and as easy to use as a simultaneous chat screen. To start a conversation, you simply pull out the UbiDuo, select the type of conversation you want, and type. The UbiDuo lets you communicate with another UbiDuo through a Blackberry, Sidekick, or cell phone; puts you in a face to face, real-time conversation, without an interpreter; or sends a call to other UbiDuos within a range of 4,000 feet. But unlike instant messaging, the conversation is immediate: messages can be read as they’re typed and thoughts can be interjected.
Now picture what this could mean for roughly 27 million Americans whose inability to keep up with spoken conversation has held them back, professionally and personally.
“They can go anywhere, anyplace, and have a face to face conversation with their doctors, their bosses—their families. All without interpreters or scraps of paper. The UbiDuo really gives them a new sense of freedom and independence.”
With that revelation, Jason and his father immediately formed sComm, Inc., and started making plans to bring the UbiDuo to the market.
From Drawing to Drawing Board
Just one month after they turned a breakfast into a business, Jason and David met with Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. Providing leading edge clinical care and research on childhood deafness, visual impairment, and related communication disorders, Boys Town helps approximately 30,000 children each year. For nine years of his own childhood, Jason was one of those children. Boys Town, then, was a logical place to tease out a plan.
With their help, Jason and David further developed the concept behind UbiDuo and applied for a patent in 2001, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded in December 2005.
But they realized that if their dream was to become more than a patent, they needed a solid financial backbone and a sound business plan.
Turning Technology into a Business Reality
Jason went to the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. There, he found a wealth of business development services to help him secure funding and develop a business plan, including the Small Business and Technology Development Center (SBTDC).
UMKC’s Small Business and Technology Development Center is an outgrowth the U.S. Small Business Association’s Small Business Development Centers (SBDC). Nearly every state houses an SBDC, but only four states—Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Missouri—have earned the accreditation necessary to put the T in their SBDCs.
Jason started there with Suman Saripalli, regional director/program specialist for Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants. With Saripalli’s and Boys Town National Research Hospital’s help, Jason applied for an SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health, one of thousands of R &D grants the federal government awards to technology companies to perform innovative research.
In 2003, Jason won a Phase I SBIR grant that gave him $100,000 for testing. Before he could cash the check, however, Jason needed to learn how to build a prototype—and a business.
Saripalli then introduced Jason to the rest of the SBTDC team, including Larry Lee, associate director of special projects at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Carmen DeHart, assistant director of UMKC’s SBTDC.
“For other businesses there are models. You want to open a pizzeria; we can show you a model. But no technology business is the same,” says Lee.
“With a new tech, you can’t get bank financing, find equity investors. There’s a whole different set of circumstances to make that business happen, and that’s what we try to walk our clients through—to help them understand the barriers of starting a technology business and maneuver through them.”
For Jason, and entrepreneurs like him, that guidance included how to legally form a corporation in Missouri, set up bookkeeping and talk to an accountant, write a business plan, set up an office, and find the right partner to build the prototypes.
Jason and David found that partnership in Pivot International in Lenexa, Kansas. They tested the first UbiDuo prototypes with 30 deaf people to see the effects of face-to-face communication.
The results, and the attention, were overwhelming.
Still working an 8-to-5 job, Jason enlisted the help of his mother, Emma, to compile data and write the proposal for the next leg of the grant. In 2005, he was awarded a Phase II SBIR grant, $1.3 million to develop and build prototypes of the UbiDuo.
Today, Jason works for sComm full-time and the UbiDuo is in production. The first 500 units will hit the streets in October 2006. And already, Jason is amazed by the stacks of interest that are piled on his desk—and humbled by the difference he will make to so many people’s lives.
“I’m really inspired by the millions of deaf people who are suffering from being cut out the conversation. They have to carry this burden, but they keep moving on with their lives, making the best of it.”
Along the way, sComm has been recognized for its technology and its efforts to help bring a new level of communication to so many people. In 2005, sComm received the MoFast Economic Development award at the University of Missouri’s’ Client Showcase and Legislative Breakfast; in April 2006, sComm took second place in UMKC’s New Business Venture Competition; and in September 2006, sComm will receive the Governor’s Technology Company of the Year Award.
That level of recognition, says Jason, “gives me a renewed level of pride in what I’m doing.”
But the real rewards come in the small moments that so many hearing people don’t even notice.
“I’m really shocked at what kind of freedom hearing people have in just simply holding a conversation,” Jason says.
At his wife’s class reunion last spring, Jason sat down with a drink and a cigar and had his first one-on-one conversation, without depending on Missy to translate. During his conversation, he turned around and saw something he had never seen before. “Missy was across the room, talking on her own, without having to worry about me,” says Jason. “That’s priceless."
Source - Gloria Zamora
See all of Kokonut Pundits blogs on UbiDuo and sComm, Inc
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