So, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining the fifth event of the seminar series from policy to practice, implementing the Marcus Treaty and making accessible books available. I'm Irene Kitzera from the Global Infrastructure sector, and I will be the moderator of this side event to the 30th SECR. We are delighted to share with you the findings of the pattern landscape report on assistive devices and technologies for visually and hearing impaired persons, which will be presented by Mr. Ed White. The report's presentation will be followed by examples of an experience with assistive technologies from our distinguished speakers and technical solutions that can facilitate access to published works and in generally positively impact and benefit persons with blindness or vision loss. Before that, let me give the floor to Mr. Yota Kagi, Assistant Director General of the Global Infrastructure sector, for the welcoming remarks. Mr. Yota Kagi, you have the floor. Thank you, Irene Kitzera. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming. A warm welcome to you all to the WIPO side event of SECR, and this is the fifth seminar in support of implementation of Marcus Treaty. We have got the news this morning, so we've got the nine countries, and we are half a through. We have to start preparing for the implementation on the technical side, this side event. I hope we'll help you understand the technology and the technological solutions on the assistive devices and technologies for visually and hearing impaired persons. Before giving the floor to Ed White, who represents the two co-authors of this publication, I'm sure you picked up a copy, this is a very thick book, 171 pages. You are not supposed to read it through. And so I'm sure that Ed will share with us key findings in a few minutes. But before doing that, let me make a few introductory remarks to respond to a couple of obvious questions that you may want to ask. What is patent landscape report? And why WIPO is doing this? And what is the value of this publication? This is not the first publication. We have published a couple of these several patent landscape reports in the past. And what did you make out of it, or what do we expect to see as the next step? So the first question is what is patent landscape report? It's just a snapshot of technologies disclosed in a number of patent applications. So Ed will subsequently explain how many patent applications his team analyzed. It's tens of thousands of patent applications were published in the past in the domain of interactive devices and technologies in relation to visually and hearing impaired persons. So if you look at each patent application, it's something like you are looking at three. If yes, you can understand that particular technology disclosed in a patent application, but you can't tell any technological trends or where do we go from here. So you have to look at forest, a number of trees, tens of thousands of trees you have to look. And you have to map out those trees in a like early map. So it's a snapshot of patent applications, but it's not only current snapshot, but also it covers all historic evolution of technologies. Some of them became obsolete, others still relevant, and waiting for commercial exploitation. But for unfortunate reasons, they are not able to find a commercial partner. Those technologies have to map out in the map. And so you have andulations and downs, and then you have mountain or lake. We are surrounded by mountains here. So mountains represent the high concentration of patent applications and high latitude altitude, I should say, or lake, there is no tree, no tree at all. So this is an area where research and development and activities are very, very few and almost non-existent. So this is presented in a visual way. But what's the use of presenting visual way to visually impaired persons? That's why we will make this publication available also in a format which is accessible by visually impaired persons as a demonstration of our firm commitment to a conclusion and signing of the charter for accessible publication in October last year. So WIPO will continue to commit to this publication in accessible format. So coming back to a question of patent landscape report, as I said, this is analytical tool. So it is very much understandable for business people, the people who are interested in making investment in technological solutions, or people who are not really familiar with technologies but very much interested in commercial exploitation, or some people that may wish to start the political debate, how those technologies, which has never been commercially exploited, should be encouraged to put down and reduce the practice by offering much more affordable devices, assistive devices to the visually impaired persons. So those debates we expect to happen could be triggered and prompted by this publication. Some inventors, individual inventors, you will see that there is a very high percentage of individual inventors who invented very good technologies and published in patent documents but waiting for commercial exploitation. They are looking for partners, business partnerships could be also encouraged and promoted by this publication. So this is a very good way of demonstrating and using the patent information and intellectual property system, which should contribute not only to the commercial interest but also the other side or the other aspect of the intellectual property contribution to the enhancement of quality of our life. So this is the dimension of the public policy objectives. So WIPO is very much keen on looking at the use of patent information and also patent landscape in that context to promote the public interest. So this is our expectation and this is what we would like to encourage the stakeholders to use this patent landscape report. And this area is very, very difficult to analyze as you will shortly hear from Ed. So we hope that these technological solutions already are suggested by a number of inventors that they should be able to define the partner or business chance to make those assistive devices and technologies available in the market. The size of the market is huge. We have 300 million visually impaired persons including the 39 million blind people and 360 million people who are suffering from hearing impairment. So there's a huge market, potential market and also here there are a number of technological solutions out there. What we need is just to find the partnerships and make these technologies available for commercial exploitation and we would see that much more affordable assistive devices to help those people. So that is my introduction and without further ado I would like to invite Ed White representing Thomson Reuters. And finally I would like to thank all those panelists, guest speakers that are for coming all the way and to contribute to this fifth seminar in support of implementation of Marrakech Treaty which we hope that they enter into force in the near future. Thank you very much. So unfortunately my colleagues are based in Melbourne and Mumbai so I couldn't be here today so I have been brought in to speak on their behalf. So first of all I'd like to point out that the authors couldn't be here today. That was a very good introduction from Mr. Takagi, I think he's covered quite a few of the points that I would say in terms of what a pattern landscape is. My presentation today is really to give you a flavour of what's inside this very big report. We are not going to cover by any means the majority of the conclusions that are in that report but what I wanted to do was give you a flavour for what you can find out from the information and also how it's structured, how this information is structured so you can delve into it at your leisure. The way I'm going to do that is by focusing in on the technical innovations that we're seeing within this space and then who the innovators are with both of which provide quite interesting information. And then at the end I'll talk about a few of the key themes that I've highlighted in my presentation. There are a lot more inside the report itself. So just to give a bit of background on the project, Thomson Reuters has a services unit called IP Analytics which I represent. I lead the IP Analytics unit for Europe. Our work is to produce this kind of information day to day primarily for corporate customers who want to do technical intelligence, competitive intelligence, benchmarking, that kind of thing, looking at pattern activity, also looking at other sources of scientific information such as scientific literature. Our work with WIPO has been focused on demonstrating how pattern landscaping can be used in some of the spaces that they're working on and in this case we're looking at the assistive area. So I should state first of all that this pattern landscape is broader than just let's say the technologies covering that would implement the Marrakesh Treaty much, much broader. We are looking at both vision and hearing impairment and then within that we're also looking at both restorative devices and innovation, enhancement technologies and assistive technologies. So everything from a speech, text-to-speech algorithm all the way up to a retinal implant or a cochlear implant and so we're quite holistic here. What we can find out from the information is really about what is being patented, what was being patented before, what is being patented now, looking at some of the changes in there, looking, finding some quite interesting nuggets of information which we'll point out. Also looking at who the active corporations are or otherwise and in fact we have a fairly major data point that I think is substantive for this audience that we want to go through. And then finally also looking at where innovation is coming from. One of the things that's unique about patents is that they are geographically distinct. A patent in Switzerland covers Swiss patents and you cannot then enforce your Swiss patents in the United States for example. You would need a US patent in order to be able to do that. That makes patents quite geographical, they are geographical indicators as well if that makes sense. And so we can look at where patents are coming from in terms of their patent offices to be able to distinguish Chinese innovators from American innovators from French innovators for example. So I'm going to go a little bit further back and say why look at patents at all? And why does Thomson Reuters run a service on this at all? Well, Thomson Reuters has a long-standing business in producing patent databases and scientific literature databases. However, our services group, if there was another data source that did what we did, we probably wouldn't worry too much about patents. I know that WIPO has a very large administrative function when it comes to the patents world. But our group, we don't really care about patents that much. We don't really care about the legal implications of patents. What we care about is the fact that they are commercial instruments. They are instruments that tie together very, very clearly the world of technology to the world of commerce. Each year there is something in the region of $3 trillion US spent on research and development. Patents are probably one of the only ways of being able to tell what that $3 trillion was spent on, which makes it a pretty unique data source. We are going to apply that data source to a very specific question today. They also cost quite a lot of money to obtain. Standard rule of thumb is that a granted US patent will cost you around $10,000 US. If you want the same invention also protected in Europe, you're talking at $20,000 to $30,000. And then more countries you add, the pricier it's going to get. That isn't an axis of investment that we're going to use today. But it means that we have multiple sort of analytical techniques to get into this data. Technology, commerce and investment. So here is patents associated with vision and hearing impairment, restoration enhancement and assistance. On your infographic it tells you that there are 35,000 patents. That's true. I think it's either just over or just under 35,000 patents. That is just under 9,000 unique inventions. And I just want to describe those two numbers for you. Because you can file the same invention in multiple territories, we have more patents than we have inventions. This study from this slide onwards is only going to deal with inventions, not patents, so just to be clear up front. Of those 9,000, there's a fairly clear trend, I think you'd say, in terms of how many are occurring each year, with around a third of those inventions having been filed in the last five years. There is an interesting data point at the end in the most recent years of data from about 2008, which is due to a very specific geographic trend. The United States is the principal source of innovation in hearing and vision impairment. And that has been the case pretty much up until this year, next year, China will be the largest source of innovation in hearing and vision impairment. If you look at those two lines on the chart, on the right, they're about to cross. China is currently third. I expect it to be second or first in the coming years, in terms of the overall number of cumulative patents. This means that Europe and the US has traditionally been the source of innovation in this space. That innovation source is diversifying quite rapidly in this field. I do want to point something out there that this is by no means unique to hearing and vision technology. This chart on the right is a chart that I create every week for any technology area that I look at, whether it be mining, whether it be industrial chemicals, whether it be mobile telephony, China has this output. And it is an interesting, difficult problem to get our head around, which is there is so many patents being filed by Chinese patent applicants that everybody in every industry is trying to work out whether it's important or whether it's not important. And I'm pretty sure exactly the same issue is occurring in the WIPO patent examiner core as they deal with the volumes coming from China. We are able to look at the patents that are being filed and figure out whether they are important or whether they are less important. And one of the ways we can do that is using that axis of money that we were talking about earlier on. The more countries you file in, the more expensive the process gets. So what we look at here is we look at the average number of countries that invention has been protected in by the source country of that invention. And we've also put the volume in there so that you can understand outlier statistics as well. So the one that I would focus on is the European Patent Office is, I think it's the third or fourth largest source of patents in this field. And on average, a patent filed first in Europe, probably from a European entity, is filed in a further two territories. Get that right, further two territories, probably the United States and probably one other. Compare that to China at the bottom, 2,688 separate inventions in here, but on average filed in 1.1 territories, which means they're filed in China and China alone. What this tells us is that commercialization of patented technologies in hearing and vision is predominantly going to come from the countries at the top of that list. It's going to come from markets that traditionally have been the source of these. It is less likely to come from the countries at the bottom of that list, Russia, China, Taiwan and Japan, which is a surprising one, I think. So now we're going to go into a bit deeper into the technologies themselves. Mr. Takagi was talking about where the peaks are in technology within our landscape. This is a visualization technique that's called concept mapping, it's actually specifically called themescaping. What it basically does is we throw 9,000 inventions at this algorithm, it reads all the text in them and it tells you where they're a common concept, common phrases occurring with the same frequency in different documents. Where that phrase occurs in lots of documents, there is a white mountain of density around that. So you can see, for example, top left-hand corner, there's a peak called implant processes. Lots of documents share that terminology and therefore it groups around it. What we've then done is we've then drawn over the top of this map to show you where the primary sort of subject matter is in terms of our analysis. We have, I've called it three major topics, it's probably six major topics. We've got hearing and vision restoration, hearing and vision enhancement and hearing and vision assistance. But those three, sorry, the six buckets then fall into sub technologies that we're going to look at in a lot more detail. So things like speech and text technology, things like ocular implants, electrical stimulation, hearing aids, mobility assistance and many others that you'll see in here, for example, tactile brow technologies. But this essentially is a way of saying, what are these 9,000 patents about that have been filed in the last 30, 35 years? So looking at the trends at a high level, what we have here is four charts that look at vision and hearing restoration in green, vision and hearing assistance in blue, enhancement in yellow-orange, and then we have a fourth bucket which is what we call additional technologies. And that is one that we're going to go into in a little bit more detail. But they're essentially technologies that could be applicable to all three or to both vision and hearing at the same time. So it's things like hardware, software, disposable devices and a couple of others. And in particular, the access to published works, subject matter that we're going to talk about. When you look at these, you can see that in assistive and enhancement technologies, the volumes we're seeing with vision and hearing are actually quite closely aligned, showing that these markets are probably relatively tied together. That relationship between hearing and vision really breaks down in terms of restoration technologies where you can see that hearing restoration, this is the bright green line in the top left, hearing restoration is at a fairly low level compared to vision restoration. And that tells us that hearing restoration has a product that's already on the market that you will see in this landscape, which is the cochlear implant. That product, not quite on the market yet for vision restoration, I'm almost certain it's on its way in the next couple of years in terms of retinal implants and intraocular devices and the like. But there is a lot of innovation going into that space right now. So it is an interesting area. But in general, fairly lockstep hearing and vision, except for that restorative area. That's the trends from 1990. Now we look at trends in the very recent period in the last five years or so. Again, we have our high level subject matter areas that we're looking at. Those that are to the left have on average declined since 2008. Those that are right have on average grown since 2008. We know that growth since 2008 has primarily been a Chinese phenomenon from our chart earlier on. And indeed that's borne out that when you look at the areas that are growing, particularly in vision assistance, which is a subject matter that is specifically interesting to this audience in terms of technologies associated with the Marrakesh Treaty, it is the fastest growing area right now across all of these fields. And more of it is coming from China than is coming from the United States. So there is some interesting changes going on in that space. And in fact, when you look at it, a quarter of that 10% growth is Chinese. Just under a quarter is US and between them they make up half of the whole field. So that's pretty interesting. Another way of looking at this information, you can see that we're combining together here tech, time and countries as a way of describing what we're looking at. Another way of looking at the information is looking at our top countries as sources of innovation across these high level subject categories. And you can see, for example, the United States has a very strong interest in vision restoration. And in fact, when you look at the US, it all appears to be mostly vision-related rather than hearing-related, which in itself is quite interesting. But when it comes to the hearing side, that is more clustered from Japan, Germany, South Korea and more generally Europe. There are a couple of things that I wanted to point out, which was that 33% in the additional related technology for the United States, the top second from right box on the table from the United States, that bucket is the area that we have for access to published works and a couple of other technologies. So we're going to look at that a bit more detail. This slide is really to introduce you to the amount of technical data that's inside the report. Those seven or eight buckets of technologies is really just the tip of the iceberg of how far down the rabbit hole we go in terms of looking at these technologies. So as an example, you can see that within enhancement, within vision, we then have things like image-concoding and display of information. These are topics that are probably really interesting to you. They are enabling technologies for things like text-to-speech and speech-to-text and so on. And you can see down in our additional technologies, we have access to published works hearing, access to published works of vision, disposable limited use, design shape, hardware software, and so on. This slide is really to tell you that this level of information is available in the report. We're going to look at a few of these in a bit more detail. The other thing that's interesting about this is that bar chart that runs down the side. If you want a quick snapshot of where most patented technology sits, it'll be the long bars. If you wanted to know where there are gaps in the current patent landscape, it is the ones with short bars. So you can run through that at your leisure. So we've been talking about technology trends and what I want to do now is show you a technique that we use in order to be able to confirm, sort of use multiple pieces of evidence in order to confirm whether a technology trend is occurring or not. The way that we do that is to look at, obviously, volumetric growth in patent output, but also to have some understanding of the commercial relevance or the quality or the level of investment of the patents that were filed. We have at Thomson Reuters, we have a measurement that we call the Invention Strength Index, which is based on how many countries has it filed in, how many times has it granted and where did it grant, how often is it cited downstream, how young is it or old is it, whether it's maintained and so on and so on and so on. All of that is wrapped up into a model called the Invention Strength Index. Then we have taken all of the patent documents in each of the technologies and found the average Invention Strength Index, which is the X-axis on this chart, that is then arrayed against the proportion of activity in each of those technologies that's occurred in the last five years. So if there are two patents in a field and one was filed in 2011 and one was filed in 2007, it would be a level of 50% filed recently. We then look at the convergence of those two factors. So we are looking specifically for high quality, strong patents that are being filed recently in these technology areas. And those technologies are now listed on the top right-hand side. All of them effectively are emerging technologies. Low volume in most cases, but we have confirmatory evidence that whoever it is that is applying for these patents is doing so in a committed manner. Some of the most interesting that we've got on here are electrical hearing stimulation. That is a field again that is very well known. There are products of the market for, there is obviously continued investment in here. Probably the most interesting one for me is the disposable technology and also biodegradable technology for hearing and vision implants. What this tells me is that the market is moving towards commoditized devices. If you have a throwaway hearing aid, that is very different from a hearing aid that today will cost you $4,000, $5,000. And what that does is that opens up technologies that exist today at high-end, high-cost prices to a much larger group of users later on. The fact that we can see evidence that the technical innovation in this space is moving towards disposable devices, that's probably quite an exciting idea in terms of what we're talking about. Take with that on top that trend from China, a country which knows a thing or two about mass production. This could be quite an exciting trend. And then the other one that I thought was quite interesting was on the vision enhancement side, which was about color brightness enhancement of images. And this is effectively taking visual information and probably making it in a way that would be disturbing to somebody with normal vision, but quite useful to somebody with partial vision so that they can see it more clearly. That is also one of the technologies that we're seeing. Together with a few other pieces of information, advanced software algorithms for most of the items that we're talking about here, image encoding, display of information and so on, is always guaranteed to be a field of growth. So now I'm gonna spend a little bit of time talking about the access to published works technical area. The first thing that I'm gonna say is that this is a really, really difficult area to define well in the dataset that we've put together. And there is probably a really simple reason for that. Our landscape looks at vision and hearing impairment effectively. Probably most of the technology that's used for what we're talking about here doesn't really care that much about blind, deaf individuals. It's in your mobile device already. It's just not being used for that technology. So if you think about Siri, if you think about Google text, if you think about machine translation tools, if you think about optical character recognition technologies, all of these are technologies that are relevant to what we're talking about here, but don't have a patent application that said that this is really useful for somebody with vision and hearing impairment. So that's our first sort of definition. The other thing that I can tell you that there is something wrong with the data sources that we're looking at is that there is more on the hearing side than there is on the vision side. That's pretty suspect, I think, actually. I know that there will be innovation in terms of creating audio information in a visual format for the hearing impaired, but I suspect it's not as big as what we would see for technologies for the vision impaired. However, we're gonna give it a go anyway and delve into what we can find out. And so I'm gonna not look at the hearing side because I'm suspicious about its accuracy. I'm gonna look at the vision side and go into a little bit more detail. And so what we've got here is a list of those enabling technologies, those sub-technologies that are specifically in the access to published works. So we have got a very big peak around software for the display of information, we would expect that. That's a technology area that we would want to see. A subset of that would be image encoding, so that would include text to speech. It would also include some form of audio description of diagrams or some translation of pictorial information into sound. And we have a very big peak around tactile technology, haptic technology, that would be specifically Braille. Some of the ones that are, again, we see that recency peak, very, very low level of documents, but for color brightness enhancement. So that would be more an enhancement technology than an assistance technology. The thing that is incredibly interesting about this is the entities that are patenting in this access to published works vision space. And that's the table on the right. When we look at patent information, we spend a long time cleaning up who the entity is that owns the patent today. It's a process that's actually really laborious, particularly when you look in sort of tech areas like communications, because the name that's on the front page of the patent is the name of the company as it existed the day it filed the patent. Just to give you an example of how complex this can be, Cisco Systems, as a company, used to buy 50 companies a year. So all the patents that were associated with every single one of those 50 companies now has the wrong name written on the front of it. So what we do is we go through a whole process of aggregating all that information together. And one of the ways we do that is we look at the inventor's names and see if they occur on different companies. If they don't occur with something associated with the company, we stick them in a bucket called individual inventors. So this is probably, not certainly, but probably a patent coming from somebody who did it on their own time, in their own, without the support of an employer. In the access to published works space, the top inventor is those individual inventors. And that implies that this is not a commercial field yet. It implies that this is, I've called it a cottage industry, I don't know if that's a little bit too subjective, but it implies that this is a field that big companies are not yet investing lots of money in, which may be a problem. This looks like a commercialization barrier. This looks like an issue. Where there is a top company, it's IBM with 41 patents, obviously a big software developer. IBM is also, half the company is making money out of its products and services. Half the company is effectively a primary research institution. They patent and do a lot of primary research themselves. So that's quite interesting. How I know, however, that this is some information that we can take to the bank is actually who the other applicants are. We have Hewlett Packard and Xerox. These are both imaging companies who definitely will have technologies that are applicable to this space. And the other company that's interesting in there is Freedom Scientific, which is a small company that is specifically marketing products that enable access to books and so on. So this is a sort of qualified list. This is a good list, but something weird is going on here. There isn't a company at the top of their list. There is a whole bunch of individual people who are filing for protection. Some of them are sat to my left at the moment, so it's just quite interesting. So I'm just gonna quickly go through who the innovators are. One of the things that we always look at is the proportion of patents that are coming from academia. Universities file for patents when they want to transfer technology from their research into the real world. In this case, about 8% of patents are coming from academia, which is high, normally it's around 3%, 4%. So we know that this is a field that needs academic collaboration. In terms of a potential reason why, and we're gonna validate this later on, we think that's because this is a field that requires a lot of interdisciplinarity working. You need engineers and you need biochemists and you need, et cetera, to work together in order to solve these problems. That's why academia is probably involved. One of the things that we can look at when we look at academia, universities tend to file for patents on more basic technologies, corporations on more applied technologies. The reason they work together is to make the link between basic to applied. Where we see lots of academic activity in our technology tree, we're looking at where the next gen items are coming from, where the research is needed in order to further, where the next five years' worth of technologies will be coming from, forget my words out. We've labeled those in green. What's interesting about them is that they cluster a rare vision and not around hearing, which is interesting. And when they cluster, in particular, I think there's one that's quite interesting, which is around vision electric, electronic stimulation. Those are technologies that would be related to retinal implants. So we can imagine that is still a very basic technology. There are some really cool stuff going on in that space, but it is requiring that interface between technology and medicine. And so you can imagine the number of disciplines that are involved in there require this academic level. In terms of where the countries are that most of this academic activity is coming from, those are highlighted in light blue with high proportions of the patterns from South Korea, Russia, and China coming from academic institutions, indicate potential sources of more fundamental science in this space. Bear in mind that the volumes for those different countries vary enormously, so China is quite high on this list because it's volume is much greater than that of South Korea and Russia. And then finally, we're going to start looking at the major pattern portfolios across the whole landscape. The top applicant is a pharmaceutical company, Novartis, primarily looking at intraocular devices. The thing about this list, we were talking about interdisciplinarity. This is a list of widely varying industries. We have telecommunications companies. We have medical devices companies. We have pharmaceutical companies. And we have an academic institution from Russia in the top, the top 10. The most sort of commercial portfolios we see in here, where we see convergence between the invention strength and the recency, those two rightmost columns, are Cochlear and Advanced Bionics. Those two companies go head to head in the Cochlear and Plant space. So they are, we can kind of qualify our information saying those companies are selling a viable medical device product for the restoration of hearing at the moment. Cochlear, fortunately, is a case study company for Thomson Royters, so I can talk about them. We work for them quite a lot, helping them navigate this space. So key themes. This is a really diverse field. That's partly because we looked at it quite a diverse way. It's a field that requires collaboration. It's growing very quickly, particularly in China. But when we look at the sort of commercial potential, the products are probably likely still to come from the Western market. And we look at the companies that are there, Novartis, Nuance, which is a really interesting speech processing company. Cochlear, Abbot Labs, Panasonic, Johnson & Johnson. Some of the more fundamental science however may come from Asia, that high level of Chinese academic patenting. The growth in disposable devices is really interesting, potentially looking at low cost commoditization of previously expensive devices. What that does is, of course, is quite interesting because it opens up current market in terms of high tech devices to a much wider base. But what it also does is it moves all of those companies that were producing those high cost devices into the next product development phase. They're gonna have to come up with something else because everyone's gonna sell their product at low cost. And then in terms of using academic patent activity to indicate where the next generation the technology is gonna come from, as well as combining that with our analysis of emergent technologies, the next leaps in this field that are likely to happen are advanced software for encoding visual or oral information. In particular, there was a point about enhancement for partially affected people, persons. But also the complete translation from one medium to the other, all vice versa for blind, deaf individuals. And then the second one, which is almost certainly gonna happen, is further advances in implants for the restoration of vision. The restoration of hearing, it's already there, I'm sure it will get better and better, but the retinal implant space has not yet happened in a big way, but it probably is about to happen, which is quite interesting. And that's it. I will open it up to questions and thank you for listening. Thank you, Ed. I would suggest, are there any questions related to this presentation? Because I would suggest to move forward with the next presentations to then... Oh, please. Patent tickets, sorry. Did you say patent tickets? Yeah, that's what I asked. For example, in the area of green technology, one of the questions that people often ask... Yeah, I'm sorry. I was saying that in the area of green technology, people will try and sort of look at the patent landscape in different kinds of technology, like batteries, for example, or in some other areas, and try and figure out if there are areas where the patents create a problem in terms of the competitive supply of something, whether they have to think about patent exceptions. And in the assistive technology, I've never seen anybody kind of look at it. I know that my mother is a coal or implant user. And I know that there's a lot of people who have been concerned about the pricing. I know South Africa, for example, the World Health Assembly really had a lot of concerns about the pricing of coal or implants. It seemed odd to me because it was basically an invention that first came out a really, really long time ago. And I'm surprised that the prices are as high as they are for something like that. And so basically inaccessible in developing countries. And as you know, that's a remarkable technology for people who are deaf. But just in general, I just wonder if you ran it across any of these, if you were able to answer any questions about the relative relationship between the patent landscape on assistive technology and whether or not there are any sort of monopoly type problems in that area or patent thicket problems. Yeah, sure. So one of the analysis, I'm fairly certain it's in the report. One of the analysis we do look at is that long list of technologies we've got by company. So you'll be able to see, for example, whether Novartis has taken a really strong position in a specific space. You will be able to see it. That's not to say that the thicket's any good. But we have other metrics in there that will tell you that. It is possible to use the information that we have published because all of the scores are there, all of the technologies are there, all of the companies are there to be able to understand that, for example, within cochlear implants does advanced Bionics have a specific set of patents around power supplies, for example, where that would cause the issue. Yes, you can see that information within it. Have we identified them? I think we've shown them. I don't know, we've talked about them that much. But that information is there. So is there a point when you're gonna be able to talk about them? Because when you say you showed them, I mean, some of this is a bit hard for it. It's like getting information like a fire hose, in terms of the amount of data that you presented. So if you could just find some time to kind of talk about what you've shown in that particular niche would be cool. Exchange business cards will have a conversation about it, no problem. Well, again, we should distinguish the patent portfolio to the tickets because it is an indicator, but it's not approved. So I think this one should really look into the various parameters before jumping into this conclusion. So thank you very much, Ed, for a very informative presentation. And since the seminar series is pretty much related to the practical implementation of America's treaty, let us now move to concrete examples or not. Yeah, the number that you quoted that you found surprising about private inventors on vision enhancing technologies is not so surprising. The blind community has long embraced by themselves as what you said, it's a cottage industry of that has embraced since the last 20 years sort of the self-help idea or possibilities of computer technologies. And the additional reason for that, that there are so many inventors is that being a blind person doesn't really make it easy for you to find a job. So these people took matters in their own hands. It's a very good point. In students, students like to make their master thesis. I will actually say, in terms of medical devices in general as well, you get a lot of doctors who file patents in their own name as well. So it occurs in a couple of different medical device fields as well, so yeah, it's interesting. So let us now see some of the examples of the technical categories that Ed mentioned before that were identified in the report. And let us start with Mr. Alvin Cook. Alvin is the International Sales Director at HIMS International Corporation and is based in South Korea. Alvin will talk to us about HIMS solution for facilitating access to published works and also some HIMS initiatives to assist with making accessible books available. Alvin, you have the floor. Thank you. And today I present HIMS International, a manufacturer and developer of assist technology product for the visual impaired. Today I'll show you how assist technology product can assist the visual impaired to access books and informations and to, in alternative formats and to perform professional work. Before I move to our main topic today, I want to briefly introduce our company first. We were originally developing a military program for Minister of Defense in Korea. And one day, by chance, we were asked by a teacher from School for the Blind to develop a note taker for his blind student. And as you can see, there were no such device available at the time. As this our motivation, we started developing our first presence note taker, which actually took almost five years to get the first actual commercial sample. And today we have been introducing new technology and new ideas to the market and to the industry for the last 15 years. The first blind student who used our first presence note takers ordered now and they are actively engaged in many field. Our company goal is to provide a visual impaired with equal access to the same information as their classmates or coworkers and to help them to achieve their academic and professional goals. There are many different kind of solutions and product for the visual impaired that our company is focused on and specialized in brain note taker and brain display for the blind. And portable desktop and handle the magnifiers but for the low vision and was their multimedia player for both. One of the biggest obstacle for the blind student and professionals is to obtaining equal information, the same information as their sighted classmate and coworkers. This success two part. First, the material must be in a format that is accessible to the blind. That means they should be able to both read and navigate it easily. The second, the blind must have the devices available to them for reading and navigating. The material is kept in its specialized and accessible format. As you know very well, the organizers like WIPO and agreement like Marrake's Treaty, they are largely responsible for ensuring the legal availability of accessible materials. And the organizations like ABC, Accessible Book Consortium and Electric Libraries all around the world are cheaply responsible for producing, distributing books, newspapers, and other published works in accessible formats in various languages. And accessible formats, including the daiji or electronic braille or emerging formats like E-POP3. The goal of our product is to make access to this information simple and efficient. Whether the user is a student in a classroom or a professional in the workplace or somebody trying to read a book on vacation or under elder people who can no longer read printed books or newspapers. This page shows how the materials and information originally produced for the sighted people should be changed to accessible format for the blind using technology. Among those, I will introduce two of our product as examples. First, this is a daiji player. There are a range of devices for obtaining reading accessible training materials. This player, like our blaze, as you can see on the screen, is a simple undergo solution for non-technical users that allow the playback of audio material or reading an immigration of text-based material via text-to-speech engine. These devices open targeted toward a newly blind or senior population with simple and tactile buttons. Most of those devices has built-in Wi-Fi capability and thus are in direct search and download from accessible, electronic libraries. For example, Blaze EJ lets the user search, download, and read material from Bookshare or LNDH library and other libraries, such as National Library Service in the USA and Nota libraries in the map. Download is quick and very simple, even for the non-technical user. Please watch the video to actually know how actually it works. So I'm placed on my Bookshare download application in the library services menu on my Blaze EJ. So I'll just press Select to open it. Bookshare ID, jackslawone.gmail.com. And my login information is already entered, so I'll arrow up. Login. And I'll press Select to log in. Log in success, search mode, book. Now I have three search modes I can search for books. Periodical. Periodicals. History. Or history. And I'll just arrow down. Results? 14th deadly send 1 of 12. And it gives me the list of books in my history or rather the list of books that I have downloaded in the last 30 days. This is a very easy way for someone to actually make something easily available for someone else, for example, an elderly person's daughter or son could put this in their history and then the person could easily log in with their Blaze EJ and just download it. So I'll press Select here. Detail dialogue. Download book. And I have two options. I can download the book. Book information. Or I can get book information. I'll arrow back to the left. Download book. And press Select on download. And it's that easy. The book was downloaded, extracted, and the book reader automatically opened so the person can automatically start reading. So you can see on the screen that there are several buttons. Each button is dedicated for each future. So if you want to listen to music, you press just one button. So it's very easy to use. And this is the device for the elderly and non-technical user. Unlike this, with this player, we also have a Braille note taker. Braille note taker is a tablet-like device for the blind. Instead of utilizing a touch screen, these devices use Braille or quad keyboard for input and provide output in speech and Braille. They originally contain a full suite of a Braille-based application for document creation, organization of contact and appointment, and social networking, media, and entertainment, web searching and browsing, GPS and navigation, and of course, accessible book search and download. Not like a previous in-audage player. Note taker is for students and professionals because with this Braille. As opposed to speech-only, this Braille contributes to literacy by giving students a pitch card, active method for making any information, and allowing them to view spelling, formatting, and et cetera. And also one of the good things to have Braille is you can read very silently in the classroom or during the lecture. Which means they can completely participate more efficiently in those activities. This seems Braille-sense and just like our Braille, also has access to bookshelves, online days, and other electronic library services. You just can then use our Braille-sense to read books a lot, or scroll text-based material in Braille. Actually, I also want to show you how, you know, the blind person. I'm now in the extras menu of my Braille-sense YouTube mini, and I'm placed on the Bookshare download application, so I'll press enter to open it. Now it's connecting. And it's going to go ahead and log me in. My login information is saved, so it'll automatically do that for me. Select search mode, books, combo box. And again, I can select books. Herioticals, history, combo box. Herioticals or history. This time I'll do a quick search. Herioticals, select search method, search word. I can actually search word. Category search, combo box. Or I can do a category search. I'll search for a word, so I'm going to move back. Search word, enter title, author or ISNN, edit box. And we'll just search for Harry Potter. Everybody knows Harry Potter. Harry. And I'll press enter. Bookshelves 184, list item. And again, I can just move through my list. Harry Potter collectors, end book to 84. List item, Harry Potter and philosophy 384, list item. And I'll press enter just to download it. Preparate download. And it's going to go ahead and download it. Download it, so download started. Five second download done. Harry Potter and philosophy 384, list item. And it placed me back in my book list. If I had used my tab key or my F3 key, I could have gone through various items such as getting book information and also setting options. I can set it to auto and zip. I can set where I want it stored. And then I can use the daisy player to actually read the book. What's really great about that is that a student can also use the buttons here on the front to control a daisy textbook and take notes with the keyboard on the top in the word processor. Okay. So as I have demonstrated, there are tools to access the information and there's a legal ground through treaties like Marrakezi and through Accessible Literary Libraries. So in the perfect world, the blind people should be able to access any material, any books or a newspaper, any information easily as we showed during the video. But in the real world, actually the blind usually do not have easy accessibility to reading materials in forms they can use. So many of the barriers still remain and they are mainly related to formats, organization, infrastructure and cost. As a provider of assistive technology product, we often find ourselves faced with the challenges of supporting variety of unfamiliar and proprietary formats. Open each library also as its own individual protection system as well. Communication with the international provider can also be a challenge for us. And in many more countries, there are simply are not accessible electronic libraries in existence. First, there must be an organization who is charged with or has the motivation to do the work of developing the electric library system. This may include digitalizing information previously created in other format. As a rest, this kind of organization should provide new material as well. These organizations must also create and maintain a centralized electric book and regulate access to only those with the legal necessity of using accessible format. And next, the infrastructure. There should be infrastructure within the country to allow available and affordable internet access for the blind users. And finally, the cost. Normally, the assist technology product is more expensive than the ordinary people can afford. So if there's no governmental or organizational funding to assist them to purchase this technology, probably they don't have any other way to obtaining and acquiring information. HIMS is committed to support access to books, news and information for users on the globe. So as you can see, our product currently support all accessible electronic library in many countries, and including the bookshare, which is available in more than 52 countries. We are also in discussion with organizations with other countries encouraging their approach to secure regulations for accessible materials in their countries, electronic library development, and of course, user access to accessible technology. So if any of you are aware of any online library service, which we are not supporting, or that are currently under construction, or any organization which may be interested in working with us to provide accessible reading devices to blind or visually impaired, please feel free to let us know. Thanks for your attention. And sorry for the inner trouble within your video. Thank you so much, Alvin. So let us now take a look at a technical solution that comes from India, and Mr. Sumit Dagar. Sumit is an awarded designer, inventor and entrepreneur who will share with his experience with us and the challenges that an individual inventor, like we saw in the results before, is facing when moving from patenting or developing a prototype to commercialization. Thank you, Sumit. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Sumit Dagar. As I mentioned, I'm the founder at Kriyate. Basically, we take a design and technology-led approach towards creating accessible solutions. Primarily, we have been working for visually impaired till date, but the vision is to help other disabilities as well with innovative, technologically innovative products which are designed in a user-centric way. Since we are talking about our products of visually impaired, I'll go back to this chart. This was sort of like our inspiration for starting work in this field. This is basically a comparison of features that are provided for visually impaired since mobile phones have started coming in. So when mobile phones came in as a keypad base phones with really less features, they were almost equally accessible for sighted and for non-sighted. And as we started advancing with mobile phone technologies, they first became smart phones with keypads. So they were also like in the mid-zone. They were also accessible since they had keypads and they were primarily OS-based phones, not app-based phones. And then towards the end, when we reached the iPhone era, it was more of a touch-based devices that these phones were. And they were third-party apps on these devices. So what happened at this point was the accessibility of mobile phone went really low because all the interface was based on visual feedback and all the input was based on touch. So there's not really any direct feedback apart from speech. So this is the area where we try to concentrate on. We try to provide accessible solutions on mobile platform for visually impaired. I'll just run through some of our works which are more commercial, more out in the market, then cover one of our concept products. This is an app called Simpli. It's a custom design, personal assistant app. It is basically, it provides all the features of a feature phone on a smartphone in a very accessible way, on a touchscreen-based phone, in a very, very accessible, very, very simple way. It works using gestures and provides almost all the typical features of smartphone. The other app, it's called Seven Braille. It's a typing keypad keyboard for, again, touch devices. So instead of a QWERTY keyboard that we usually have for any typing scenario, this keyboard allows a visually impaired person to use Braille and type almost as fast as sighted people can on touch screens, which is sort of a big leap, big revolutionary leap for them. The concentration of my today's talk is the Braille phone project where we basically started Kriyate with. It was a tactile smartphone for visually impaired. It's supposed to be like an ideal device for visually impaired. It basically works on a technology which pops up images, pops up data from a touchscreen. So it's basically a grid of pixels with each pixel which can move in the third dimension basically up and down. So in a grid of such pixels, it can form patterns which a non-sighted person can touch and feel. So basically they can feel shapes, they can feel text, they can feel textures and stuff like that. So this was the primary basic technology that we based it on. And then it had a lot of features, all based on feeling the interface rather than seeing the interface. So features such as music or games or keyboard or navigation maps and translate, it captures something in the camera and converts that textual information into Braille information and anybody can, any non-sighted person can read that on the interface. And does the similar thing for images or videos basically like a height map of anything that's visual. So as we started working on this in more detail in terms of implementation, we zeroed it on version one product which just did the textual part of it, not a continuous grid, but rather, this is called Refreshable Braille Display, rather a grid of characters which can show Braille information. So we went through quite a lot of iterations with this in terms of prototypes, both design prototypes which was more of ergonomics and technical prototypes which was more of electronics and feasibility of such product and did a number of user studies with users to understand their experience part of it in terms of does it really make it easy for them to do the tasks that we imagine them to do and also in terms of features, that does it give the same level of superpowers as sighted people get through smartphones. This, these were the prototypes we ended up with. The front two are the electronic versions which are working versions, which work as a smartphone and on the top, the white area is the Refreshable Braille Display, so that displays all the information in Braille. There's obviously voice feedback as well, but that was like the primary source of display. So we, unfortunately, this was like the end of this project. By this time, we realized that it's, first of all, it comes out as a cost-free device and secondly, the market is not mature enough to understand the potential of such device to like organizations to support such sort of research, semi-research, semi-commercial product. So this was sort of the end of the project as such. Our learnings from this was, first of all, this, I was talking to Ed as well, there's not enough market research in the field. We know the holistic numbers that these many Braille, these many visually impaired people are there, even geographically, the distribution, but not a refined market research in terms of what's the literacy level, what's the economic background, what's the technical acceptance of these people. So it's hard to get more stakeholders who have a direct interest in any particular, subsection of the field, apart from government as such, which is more, more generic. It is, secondly, it is also very nascent market. I think Ed was saying the same thing. There's not enough commercial products in this, I say this in terms of context of mobile solutions. It's not enough products which we can benchmark it, develop some sort of standard, some sort of understanding which makes it easier to provide standard solutions and then enhance the experience. Thirdly, we realize mobile has a lot of potential. We say mobile can be a new desktop, but the idea is that as it has turned out to be for sighted people as well, it provides so much flexibility in terms of features it provides and the portability it provides. Same thing can be implemented for visually impaired, but again, I mean, it's not yet there. Scale is the primary goal. Again, this is sort of common for anything social, to create impact, you actually have to reach a scale, but the positive part of it is if you are creating something that can reach a scale, if it is scalable, then stakeholders come in more easily because they realize if they support, then it can actually help at a global stage. So instead of, say, distributing X amount of devices in a particular geography, if I'm rather creating like a software solution or a product which can scale around the globe, it becomes, it is more readily acceptable from various stakeholders. This room for collaborative work across the globe, I think as we see, we work in our own silos. Anyways, we have a few in numbers, but there's definitely room for collaborative work. Accessing text and typing text, we realize this is sort of the bigger problems that our users identified with in terms of, again, mobile platforms. It's not the most readily available solution that exists in the world, and navigation is obviously one of the biggest ones. So that goes our work, thank you. Thank you very much, Sumit. Are there any questions to Sumit's presentation? In this case, we're moving to our last, but not the speaker. So our last speaker for today is Boas Silberman. Boas is the co-founder and CEO of Project Ray in Israel, and to quote him, a veteran in high-tech technologies. So I'm sure we can benefit from his experience today. Boas will talk about Ray, an end-to-end solution for online audiobooks and periodical services for the visually impaired. Boas, you have the floor. Okay, thank you everybody. Again, Boas, I'm from Israel, and Project Ray is another startup, technology startup, and we look at us as a technology startup, not exactly a company addressing the blind and visually impaired people, although this is a major emphasis of our activity. And in my presentation, I will probably walk you through the ourselves and the driving force behind building a startup company, especially in this very neglected world of the space in the world, something that is socially in nature, but require a lot of technology and advanced technology in order to provide something significant. So for us, the mobile device is actually a group of sensors that using wisely enable us to provide in software a lot of the capabilities that blind people are looking for, basically the compensation for the lack of sensors that they suffer from. And this is what actually attract us as technology people when we approach this project and when we have started the work. And today, Ray is a mobile device that is basically, is hosted on a regular Android phone. This is an example for it. I'm sure it pressing the power key. I actually switch the mode from regular Android into our way of working without vision. See, the concept of the idea is to really create a new user interface that is working on high free concept. You don't have to look at the screen. Everything is talking and the relative movement of my... Library. You see, I put my finger and move and if I will put my finger in here, I'll move to the same direction. It will be the same thing, lifting it up and I go into this. So this is the interface that I created on top of the regular Android and this serves the blind users very easily to do navigation, communication, social interaction, WhatsApp, Facebook and so on. Visual identification of object basically my two predecessors talked about building a special hardware that provides one capability. We are doing it in software on top of the shell device in software and provide all of the capabilities to the users. And one of the most important aspect that we push in it is remote systems. Basically the ability to help the blind person from remote over the internet over 3G connectivity and basically not to leave the person helpless on his own. The beginning of it was starting by the Israeli library for the blind. The Israeli library for the blind is an organization dated about 60 years ago and it become a very prominent establishment in Israel. For some reasons, nobody can tell but basically today everybody in Israel knows about it. I would say that any news broadcaster, TV anchor and so on feel an obligation to contribute a few hours a day or a few hours a week to volunteer and to read books to blind people. I think that part of it is because any elderly person in Israel is a liable to get those recording and audio books and use it so it becomes something very big in Israel. The running six state-of-the-art studios, they record over the round the clock with hundreds of books, periodicals, magazines in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and so on for the population. Now looking at it, the problem of the library, they have two problems. One of them was digital right management, how to ensure that the digital content is not going to spread around to the general population, copyright. And the second are costs. It become a very costly to actually deliver the books over CD-ROMs to users. It was done by postage and delivery, very expensive, it become a real burden on the budget of this organization. Assuming that in 2006 they actually integrate their production from cassette tape into CD-ROMs. So you know it's become very expensive and they looked around and they looked for solution for digital distribution. And at that time they approached my partner that approached me and approached another guy. Three of us have been a very prominent technology people from the mobile space. And by definition we have been pushed into doing what they are looking for on mobile devices. Now at that time I was managing a startup company named Fring that was probably one of the biggest mobile voice-over APN messaging. In 2010 we have been at about 100 million users active on our network, very prominent startup company that when we have started in 2006, people from the blind community approached me asking me to better create an accessible version of the application for some reason I have done it. And since 2006 I was able to actually follow up how the community is using general purpose smartphone with our very general purpose application. And this was the reason that I was one of the people that was called into action to help the library. And basically in terms of technology it was very easy to create a mobile distribution of DRM contact everybody is doing it today. You send file, picture, music, everything from everywhere to anywhere. This was not a problem. The problem that we discovered is the digital divide between the end user and the technology. Basically the use of smartphone by blind people is extremely problematic. And the digital divide is the aspect that we have tried to solve and we try to find the solution. And through exploration, using the data that I gather from our people use free as application on their mobile phone, a personal interviews and so on, we came up with this patented technology of user interface that is eye free. Behind it is also very simple. Basically this is a menu we have in it only two other screens, how to identify an item from a list and then how to perform an action on this item through those three elements we managed to do again navigation, communication, messaging, email. Very simple and very easy to learn user interface. That today with a few thousand customers we identify that it is working. Now it is working with the majority of the population and here I would like to actually put something that is extremely important in this market of accessibility. Basically out of the blind person, 80% of the blinds are elderly people that lost their vision at age of 60 years and above.  They don't have a sensory compensation. Bright is something that they don't know how to read. It's very difficult to identify the letters in bright especially if you need to read something rapidly. They don't have the passion to learn. They are basically pushed back. They are discouraged by new technology. They end up sitting up in the couch looking at the TV or basically listening to the TV. This is the reality. And this is 80% of the community. They are not able to actually work with the product from EMS or from Cura, it is not for them. And this is where we decided that we are going to focus and like any startup, one of the reasons for us to exist is to break the rules. So this was the first rule that we break. We are going to actually target the people that nobody tried to address. And fortunately enough, after the idea, the other most important criteria or things that drive startup is founding. So we are lucky enough to be able to get the funding for the project. We got it from two major players. One of them is the Israeli chief scientist that is basically an incubation system by the Israeli government that encourage the development of new technology. Probably one of the reason that there is such a dynamic startup atmosphere in Israel. And the other company is Qualcomm, which is a major company in the mobile space, probably the biggest player in the mobile space that contribute funding for the project. We also got some help from Microsoft, from Google.  But the library service is still an important service capability in there. So what do we have in terms of libraries? Today, we basically build a complete set of library related services that is driven and the end user will see it with our device or with a mobile, with a web version of it. But it basically consists of a player running on the device. It consists of a cloud service that actually can host audio books. It consists of many different layer of software that convert the many different protocols and let's say encryption services that are actually spread around this industry, which is very wide. And it's enable people to get access to online books, to read description of it, to get the book to market as favorite for future download, to download it onto the device, to play it on the device with various speed change to listen to it, to mark items on the application and so on. It's also enable a book publisher to put books on the cloud and to provide it. Today, we support, of course, the Israel Library for the Blind. We build a special library for Arabic books. We have a special library for Russian books, again, because in Israel, there are a lot of Russian immigrants. We are integrated into LibriVox, which is the biggest US-based public domain library of books for which the IP has expired. So you can find their Gulliver and the Duck of Man Cristo and so on. But there are hundreds and thousands of books, quite good reading. And we work with Chris Radio, which is a US-based radio station devoted for the blind that read periodicals and so on. And the Library of Congress for the US, which is a library for blind in the US. We support books, we support periodicals. One of the nice thing about periodicals that you can subscribe to it and the moment that we identify that there is a new volume of National Geographic, you immediately get it to your device and the paper on your doorstep every day or every month. It is working over there. The system is encrypted or non-encrypted. Access depends on the different requirement of the library that you work with. It can be through user credential or it can be encrypted and DRM protected and marked and so on. It's a complete end-to-end solution that is available today and is part of our system. One of the lessons that we learned through this process is that today, because the digital technology in this little drone-back market is a layer of history and development. Nobody has the money to actually do a full conversion of one technology to another. It's a mirage of many protocols, many capabilities, many different conventions. And for this reason, we build a concept of Lego or middleware that enable us to basically, relatively easy to move and serve any type of infrastructure that is available for there and we can relatively easy can actually go and provide a full system for any library or any language that is required. And this is the call for action. We are looking for partners. We can do it in the US and Europe but we know that most of the requirement and the biggest impact of such technology will be in the development country, in small countries in which there is not enough language supported material and we are there. We have the technology and we connect. Thank you. Thank you very much, boss. I would like to thank all the excellent speakers that came here today and shared their expertise and experiences with us. So we have heard from individual inventors, from startups, from companies, their experience and the challenges and opportunities that exist that are related for instance to the overlaps of the technology for the sighted and the aging population with the technologies that could facilitate lives of visually impaired persons. Then we have seen the trends through the findings of the landscape reports, which by the way is also accessible in a word format with enhanced accessibility aspects in online. You can find the link on the infographic we have shared with you. We have also seen the challenges related to the cost and affordability of assistive devices and technologies but also the opportunities for collaboration foremost with academia that seems to be quite active in the area of assistive devices and technologies and we hope that this event was very informative and useful for you. We're happy to continue working in this field and we would like to further promote practical aspects of the implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty and we hope that the report we shared and all the expertise and experiences can contribute towards that. Thank you very much.


I read in your article that Exxon is against electric vehicles because the ads that I see they're championing all these alternative fuel sources and your article says that they're against electric vehicles? In the United Kingdom at least they have lobbied pretty hard against electric vehicles there and in their SEC reports here they've noted that alternative fuels are a threat to their business. So their ads, they're not telling the truth in their ads. Surprise. One of the things I do, I'm probably going to get kicked off Twitter, I keep getting these promoted tweets from Exxon on my feed so I tweet back to them, you know, you're destroying our planet, you're pathological liars, the only government building Rex Spillerson should be invited into as a prison cell. I have a feeling Twitter's good, I have not been successful on Twitter, I've been more successful on Facebook. Hey, I've turned this conversation, it's all about me, not the planet, it's my Twitter followers, my number of Twitter followers. You're listening to highlights from the David Feldman show, heard nationwide on Pacifica Radio or as a podcast on iTunes, Stitcher and now YouTube, please subscribe to this channel, for more information go to davidfeldmanshow.com, thank you for listening.


Hey there, Chad Bond, you're here for High University Libraries. I have several hundred business students who are currently doing a feasibility analysis of opening a fitness center or a fitness club in Indianapolis, Indiana. In order to really do a good job with this project, they're going to need to understand how good the local industry is there. And so they can use a database called BizMiner to get things like industry financial ratios, they can get things like startup risk, they can get a competitive market analysis report and stuff like that, and get data that looks just like this. Now this video is going to show you how to use BizMiner to find industry analysis and information for the local market in Indianapolis. What you learn here can also be applied to other industries throughout the U.S. as well. So here you go. So when we first get to BizMiner, we need to find the industry that we're looking to study. And we can do that a couple of different ways. We can actually go over here and type in our industry so we can type in fitness there. Or we can click on industry search here and actually use either type in the NAICS code here. Or we can choose to browse by the broad industry category. So I want to do the hard way to just kind of show you the types of content you actually have within the category here. So we're going to go Arts and Entertainment Recreation here. And you can see here is 7139, Other Amusement and Recreation Industries. And then here is the Fitness Recreation Sports Centers. We'll keep going. And so here we have either Fitness Recreation and Recreational Sports Centers or Physical Fitness Clubs and Centers. So I'm going to do that one there and click Show Industry Reports. So the next page, we have lots of different ways to choose our content. I'm going to focus primarily on the industry financial profiles, the industry market reports and the competitive market analyzer. And since we're using this for a particular location, we're going to choose Indianapolis, Indiana. And there it is in our list. And we'll do five year.  Okay, it's going to ask us for a sales class before we do that. We've got to wait for the thing to load there. And it's going to ask us for a sales classification based upon the local information that's available there. And since we're just starting out with our business, we're going to choose the smallest sales class we have there. It looks like most of the bulk of the firms are in that sales classification anyway. Let me click Access Now here. And so it's going to load us up. Here's our industry financial ratios here. I want to go and actually do the same search for these sorts of things before we actually look at the report here. So I'm going to go back real quick. And if we wanted to, we can look at the industry market reports as well. And again, we would choose Indianapolis, Indiana. All right, and that finds us 180 operations in the Indianapolis metro area. And you can also drill down by county or zip code as well and click Access Now to get your report. Likewise, you can also do the competitive market analyzer. So if you click there, it's going to ask you for the location. And we will do Indianapolis again.  And in this case, it's going to ask us what sales classification we want to compare our group against. We're going to compare it against other firms the same size. And these are national firms now. So it's going to compare it against those firms. You'll click Next there. And then I'm just going to choose Small Businesses as well. And then do Next again. And then it's going to ask you to review that. We can click Access Now. And it's going to put that information within the same place in my reports here in BizMiner. So now we're going to look at each individual report to kind of show you what you can find in them for your purposes of analyzing opening a franchise of a fitness center in Indianapolis, Indiana, or another location. So this is the first report we looked at. This was the Industry Financial Report. And basically what it gives, it's a way to kind of benchmark your company based upon income and expense, profit and loss, and things like that against other industry averages of like size companies in the area there. So you can kind of see, look at trends and how the different companies are doing altogether at average together, and things like that. So we can see basically looking at your profit and loss percentages. And then we get down and look at things like, if we scroll on down here, your balance sheet, and things like that. So it's a great way to kind of benchmark your company against other companies industry averages in the area. The second report is the Industry Market Report. And what this basically looks at, it looks at things like failure rates, it looks at industry vitality, and things like that. So in 10 pages, you basically get a nice discussion of how healthy the industry is, how likely it is for a startup to succeed, and things like that. So here we have industry startup trends and things like that within this report as well. Almost all the way down to the very bottom of this report, you can see that there is an industry entrepreneurship performance. And it kind of rates how likely a business that starts up is going to succeed in the area, and it kind of gives you an idea. So here we have, looks like in this particular area in Indianapolis in this industry, there's a startup firm failure rate of 50% based upon the data they've collected. So you can be the judge about whether it's going to be successful or not, or you can kind of outline what it's going to take to be successful based upon some of the information in this report. The final report we're looking at here is the competitive market analysis, and basically what this goes through and looks at all these different areas. So we're looking at economic background, regional trends, things like that. So they're taking lots of information here and put into a nice, easily digestible format here. So it covers things like the general business and consumer environment, and lots of other information as well. Of particular interest might be the competitive market concentrations and vitality section here that gives you an idea for market penetration and industry vitality. So here it says that basically it looks like the physical fitness clubs and centers industry capture $86 in sales per personal income earning unit within the market area, and that's below the national average of $105. So you'd be the judge about whether it's going to be a healthy market for you to move into in this area. So a good way to kind of get good information to figure out the vitality of your particular market and your industry. Hope for this video helped you better understand how to use the database and how to better understand the fitness center market. Should you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog. We'll be glad to help anyway. I can't take care and have a great day.


Hey there business talk with Tom and Brett and our little coffee.  Are you shuffling and that's the big thing when you think about that, right Tom? Yeah, there's there's this overselling of it You got to be seven figures eight figures whatever that number is But honestly you've watched companies and if you pay attention to the news You'll go how to company that was doing 20 million dollars a year go out of business or 50 million dollars a year I've worked for those companies. I know exactly how they go out of business and it really comes down to they weren't making money They were shuffling money and this is just a misconception in business. I see a lot It's also not to get too off topic Well when someone starts raging about a company and not paying taxes on some reason It's because there's a lot of nuance to the way business works and I'm gonna specifically address it how it works in America But it really comes down to your profit margins, right? And you have all the money that comes in you can have 20 million dollars a year coming in But if you're spending 21 million dollars a year, this is how sometimes companies will say we had a loss You're like but you somehow seem to be selling a lot of your product or services But how do you have a loss and it really comes down to the money going out now? The way the tax system here in the United States generally speaking without getting overly detailed in it They've taxed you on what's left over on your profit, but that's the part. We really want to talk about though is are you? Profitable, right? Absolutely. Yeah, this is the part that really what it comes down to I've seen so many people start bragging or say Oh, you're only doing this much here. I'm like, but I'm doing it on this margin And that's really what you have to focus on if you run a lot of hardware through your company You can make the company look really big This is where we fall a little bit in between and we're talking about this and maybe this is a future topic Where we discuss why we don't bother trying to run every piece of hardware through our company We work a lot with clients who just decide they're going to hey I'm just gonna buy it myself. We're finding that we actually offer both scenarios for our clients We have clients that are like, hey, I don't want to deal with any of this I'm gonna pay you to deal with it right at the bottom or we have clients that say, you know what? I'm gonna buy the hardware myself because I know exactly what Dell server I want I know exactly which laptop I want I know which exact model and part number to buy and we are perfectly fine in both of these scenarios But yeah, we are this makes a huge difference when it comes to what your revenues look like and if you're focused only on Getting that annual revenue up and this was kind of a sad story I had a friend who that's pretty much was locked in his head. He wanted to get a pseudo friend Really get that revenue number up all the time and that was his bragging point I'm at two million three million four million a year He did this pretty quickly with his company only a couple years and he was bankrupt by year five because he was still Losing almost a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars a year He started with some initial seed money and you know, they sometimes refer to it as your burn rate If every year you lose a little what's your burn rate? Well, you keep burning until you hopefully hit a point where you start making money But one of the things that we take the time to do here me and Fred have talked a lot about process is document all the money Ingress and transaction processing and things like that and you know It's always something you need to keep your eye on and then focus on it One of the things as we've dropped some of the people and we've won some big contracts I've talked about this before where someone says I'm gonna buy the hardware Well, my people that were bidding against me the other competing IT firms wouldn't do that So in some ways I ended up making substantially more than them because we focused on the margin for it We focused on leveraging our Skill set and leveraging our knowledge for money because that's just a better way to do it If you are trying to just leverage making margin on product one you can end up You know looking like a bigger company But in the end that's always a race to the bottom because people figure out the prices And I know some places will speak channel partner only but they will cut out your margins and things like that It's kind of pain but my point in all of this is really keeping your eye on the ball in terms of your profitability If you're not thinking about it that way You're just churning money and that is something that I've run into so many people that they just are trying to get to these Higher revenue numbers without really taking a concise look at do you make money at what you do? Because if you don't start with that those higher revenue numbers are completely irrelevant because you're just bleeding money all the time Well, yeah, it's about I think it's about efficiencies, right? We got to become efficient in how we do things people we we bid out projects every day and Most those projects we win because we come in at a competitive rate, but are we losing money? Absolutely not and and we we because we become efficient in how we do things from our contractors to the to the Products that we we are supplying to to every little aspect of a project We're efficient so we can come in at a better rate We give them higher level service higher quality product at a better rate and still continue to make money We're not trying to sell pie in the sky, but what we're doing is we're selling efficiencies Yes, and but I'll admit and there's definitely a couple of things we well I'm not say we didn't even bid on and this was a funny one that Brett took a phone call for that What they wanted because we do like a co-managed it services offering and basically someone was reselling You know we have tools that we buy there's minimum buy into these tools and so smaller companies may want to buy them from us Because they can't meet the minimum survive directness is fine We'll work on different things that we provide value But what we won't do is mark them up almost zero percent just to get those numbers up And it turns out they were working with an IT company that we knew we know what these products cost And we're like they're selling to you basically at the cost. There's no point. We're not we're not money shufflers Undoubtedly the other IT company was doing it just to get their numbers up And of course, why are they calling us because when there's no margin in something you're selling? They're like, yeah, they don't answer the phone. They don't like talking to us They don't like doing anything other than sending us the bill for the tools we buy from but there's no help at all and configure You know, I'm like, well, you're they're giving to you everything at cost to get their numbers up or their goal is I don't know the other IT companies internal goals for this But I do know that selling things at no margin is something we said we're not gonna do and I said well We don't really want to put margin on I said then great You can call us for consulting if you need to and keep the product from the other guy I because we're not selling to you at that price because that is just basically, you know Cost plus 1% is what they were doing 1% any responses. I remember that that was that was boggled my mind how this company was able to do that and and and that client was was frustrated with the level of service, but Ultimately stayed with them to because but yeah, they still continue to call us and ask us questions when the real You know rubber meets the road Yeah, you talked a lot about Pricing for the future and you say that you I think we talked about that in a couple videos previous about Pricing for the future and that's what we've done because we're not here to just have the staff We have we're here to grow the staff We have and to be able to assist and help more people we have the price for the future for that our margin accounts for that Yeah, and this is something you have to really take into consideration You're doing a disservice by it's this weird concept that people have I need to give them the cheapest option My business plan was just to do it cheaper than the other person And I'm like no at some point you're doing a disservice because you're burning yourself out You're just shuffling the money to try to build up this big revenue number But if you didn't build it at margin you're not thinking about the margins you build on each one of those at some point You're not gonna be able to service the client You're not gonna be able to hire that next technician You're not gonna be hired for more technicians to put in place You're not going to mentally want to give that client could service because you're gonna go What do you mean you want more service out of me? I gave you the cheapest deal I'm making like 1% on you at some point I don't like servicing it and it's one of those things I mean generally speaking even as a business owner myself you'd outside of tech services, which obviously we perform other services I need I'm not looking necessarily for the lowest bidder. I'm looking for the best value I'm looking for something to be responsive and this goes directly to a construction project. I'm working on right now. I Said hey, I'm not looking for the cheapest. I already know the cheapest guy may or may not show up I need someone who's going to show up I need someone who's going to do the work properly. That's the part that's mattered for each step of the way for my new studio build Absolutely, we've had fun with that one too, haven't we? Yep. Yep, but yeah, that's just our thoughts for today Think about your margin Don't just think and look at how do you get to some number always think of do you get to that number? Profitably because you write ten million dollars a year and still go out of business next year because you are spending ten million point One or even twelve million a year because you had two million in seed money and boom after year one you burn through all of the seed money or capital you had to start the business and Unless you have the fairy godmother of venture capitals is dropping money on you For a bad idea, which is weird. That's a silicon Bailey thing. Don't it does happen sometimes Point though there it has to stop you go Can this be a profitable venture and if you're thinking about that the very beginning You're in a better position later before you're deep deep in a hole of I'm turning all this money and moving all these Parts and working 70 hours a week, but I could have made more money in the private sector Yes, you didn't think about margins. So those are my thoughts for today being Brett because by the way We're making money. We did our P and L and turns out we're profitable We lost some money last month. We made money this month and that's the ups and downs of it But the overall for the years looking really good. It's here in our final year-end. We're thinking about it And that little chart I made leave some comments down below if you'd like to see me do a video on how I process Money in and out of the company. I can definitely share that if someone's interested. Let me know Alright, it's time to make money not just shuffle it, right? Yep. Absolutely. So all right. Thank you And thank you for listening to my rant and Let me know what else you guys want to hear on this topics. Have a good one


And what do you think is, what makes you the proudest about your show that you give to people? Oh my, when someone contact me and tell me that watching a segment, something we said, you know, changed our life, gave them the courage to do something.  Yeah. And it was coming to me via email, social media, phone calls, texts, so changing lives.