This 13-Year-Old Is So Impressive, Intel Is Investing Hundreds Of Thousands In His Startup

Braigo Labs CEO Shubham Banerjee

Shubham Banerjee, the 13-year old CEO of the Braille printer maker Braigo Labs, had no idea what Braille was until last year.

It was only when he came across a fundraising flyer for the visually impaired that he started to wonder how blind people read. So, like any other 7th grader would do, he asked his parents. His father’s response: “Go Google it.”

As he searched the web, Banerjee discovered the high cost of Braille printers, which usually cost upwards of $US2,000. He also learned more about Braille, the tactile writing system used by the visually impaired.

“When I found out the cost of a Braille printer, I was shocked,” Banerjee told Business Insider. “I just wanted to help the visually impaired. I had a Lego Robotics kit, so I asked, ‘Why not just try that?’”

Built out of Lego’s Mindstorms EV3 blocks and little pieces from Home Depot (Braigo stands for Braille and Lego), Braigo Lab’s printer turned out to function quite well. It earned Banerjee a lot of recognition too, including The Tech Awards 2014 and an invitation to the White House Maker Faire, an event that awards student entrepreneurs and innovators.

But most importantly, Banerjee believes it could solve a decades-long problem that’s been holding back so many visually impaired people around the world: the high cost of Braille printers.

Banerjee says his printer could significantly cut down the price of Braille printers to less than $US500. According to his website, there are 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and 90% of them live in developing countries. It’s not easy to drop a couple grand on a printer, even by a developed country’s standards.

“I want to tell (big company manufacturers) to stop taking advantage of blind people,” he says.

Impressed by his product and vision, Intel came calling last September and told him it would invest in his company. And last week, the investment was made official at the Intel Capital Global Summit, when Braigo Labs was mentioned as one of the 16 tech startups Intel’s investing in this year. Although the exact amount of the investment was not disclosed, it’s reported to be a few hundred thousand dollars. That makes Banerjee the youngest tech entrepreneur ever funded by a VC firm.

“I didn’t think such a big company would ever invest in my company. That was pretty amazing,” Banerjee says.

With Intel’s funding, Braigo Labs plans to build a new prototype that more resembles a regular printer, and bring it to market by next year. Banerjee says he has no plans to expand into other product categories at this point, but Braille printers seem to be just a part of a bigger dream he has in mind.

“I want to do engineering in the medical area when I grow up,” he says. “And I want to finish college.”

This is the Lego Mindstorm EV3 kit he used to build it.

YouTube

These are some of the pieces he used. He also bought some small pieces from Home Depot to build it.

This is the part that holds the main processor, or the “brain,” of the product. It comes with the Lego Mindstorm.

This is what the first prototype looks like.

Here’s a better angle.

This is the second prototype, which more resembles a regular printer. The printer that goes into mass production will look more like this one.

YouTube

He also presented at the Intel Capital Summit 2014 last week, with Intel Capital’s president Arvind Sodhani and Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson.

YouTube

Microsoft's bone-conducting headset guides the blind with audio cues

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While nothing can replace the companionship of a guide dog, technology can help make treks through busy cities a lot less stressful and more enjoyable for the visually impaired. Microsoft, for one, is currently testing a new headset (developed with help from UK charityGuide Dogs) that uses 3D soundscape technology to guide its users with audio cues along the way. That bone-conducting headset can't work alone, though: it needs to be connected to a smartphone, as well as to receive information from Bluetooth and WiFi beacons placed in intervals throughout the roads users take. For its pilot program, Microsoft attached makeshift beacons on neighborhood objects in a London suburb, where its first testers are giving it a spin. When company news writer Jennifer Warnick tried it out while blindfolded, she found herself so efficient in getting around with only sounds to guide her, that she felt like a "dry-land dolphin."

According to her detailed report on the experiment, the beacons would constantly send audio cues that sound like the galloping coconut noise from Monty Python to ensure her she's taking the right way. She also reported hearing other sounds, such as sonar pings to warn her if she's veering too close to curbs, as well as turn-by-turn voice directions, telling her how far she still has to walk to certain establishments, or if the bus she's waiting for is approaching. It'll obviously take a ton of effort bringing the headset to market, seeing as more permanent beacons will need to be installed everywhere. Hopefully, the company finds a way to bring the system to other places, for the sake of all the blind folks who'd love to be more independent.

This Ring Scans Text And Reads It Aloud For Visually Impaired People

SEXPAND

No braille? No problem! This FingerReader by the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab is a high-tech way to help visually impaired people read; it actually scans printed text and narrates it aloud.

This short vid shows how it works from a few different angles, but basically: as a fingertip follows along in a book (or Kindle), a camera in the oversized ring records and analyzes the words, which are then said in a Stephen Hawking-like voice. Haptic clues—like vibrations—are given to the user when she nears the end of a line and to note where a new one begins, as well as if she begins to drift off track.

Plus, apparently it's also a freaking translator! Imagine just running your hand along a page written in another language and being able to understand the whole thing.

Of course, it seems like a headphone jack might be a solid addition, so the sounds don't get lost in a noisy room (or bug others in a quiet setting), and it might be tough to take in a whole novel like this, but it seems like it's got awesome potential.

Double Robotics

  Double by Double Robotics - Pre-order Now from Double Robotics on Vimeo.
Double is the simplest, most elegant way to be somewhere else in the world without flying there. The minimalist design and intuitive touchscreen controls allow you to freely move around without inconveniencing others. You can stay at eye level, whether sitting or standing, by adjusting your height remotely, which makes conversations fluid and real. Retractable kickstands will automatically deploy to conserve power when you are not moving around. Efficient motors and lightweight design give Double the ability to last all day without recharging the battery.

What is it for?

• Offices with multiple locations use Double to communicate with remote teams. Remote workers feel more connected with their colleagues and have more independence around the office.
• School campuses place a Double in each building, enabling potential students to walk the halls and talk to professors. College recruiters use Double to attract new students to their school by offering tours when travel is not possible.
• Retail stores use Double as a mobile kiosk, giving customers more information about the products. Brands offer personal sales representatives and support from remote specialists in a central location.

• Manufacturing facilities offer Double as a service to clients and partners to improve communication and streamline production.
• Families use Double to stay more in touch with relatives across the country.

• Museums and galleries can offer remote tours on Double, so patrons can experience world-renowned exhibits from anywhere in the world.
• What do you want to use Double for?ideas@doublerobotics.com

Why is it better than existing teleconferencing systems?

Modern teleconferencing would be perfect if every important conversation happened in the conference room. Double allows you to move around and join people in any location, so you can participate in the conversations that happen in the lunch room or at the water fountain. Because Double simply improves upon existing teleconferencing, you can use it in all the same places as those old systems too.

6 Best Back-to-School Tablets

Summer's coming to an end, but don't let that get you down — instead, take advantage of back-to-school season and upgrade to a tablet that you truly love.

We've rounded up the best tablets on the market today, including the classically beautifuliPad with retina display, the light-as-a-feather Nexus 7, the media-rich Kindle Fire HD and more.

1. iPad With Retina Display

 

Image: Apple

 

This iPad is easily one of the most beautiful tablets on the market today. With over 3 million pixels, the retina display on this tablet makes for a stunning visual experience. It has a sharp camera and a new A6X chip, which makes it twice as fast as previous iterations.

Price: $499 (16GB), $599 (32GB), $699 (64GB), $799 (128GB)

2. iPad Mini

 

Image: Apple

 

The iPad mini is enjoyably small, weighing in at about 308 grams. It fits nicely in one hand, and is small enough that you can carry it in your bag alongside your other books without breaking your back. The device has a 5-megapixel camera and 1080p HD video recording. With so many different data package options, you'll be able to enjoy the Apple store's 275,000 apps, take class notes and store your music, all on this miniature device.

Price: $329 (16GB), $429 (32GB) and $529 (64GB)

3. Google Nexus 7

 

Image: Google

 

Unlike previous Nexus devices, Google's seven-inch tablet is designed by Asus. It's much thinner than previous iterations (2 millimeters thinner and 50 grams lighter than its predecessor), and boasts a high-definition LCD display. It also has a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, Bluetooth 4.0, and a micro USB 2.0 port. The Nexus 7 tablet clocks in as exceptional across the board: The UI is smooth, it weighs very little and it's cheaper than a lot of its competitors.

Its the first to ship with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 8064 processor rated at 1.5GHz. There is also a 4G LTE version, priced at $349.

Price: $229.99 (16GB) and $299 (32GB)

4. Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7

 

Image: Amazon

 

This tablet features a sharp visual display, an extensive media library, and it offers a smart and streamlined UI. With an 8.9-inch display, it's bigger than some of its competitors. The Kindle Fire gives you access to more than just books — you can check out Amazon's films, music apps and games. It has a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, but does not have a camera on the back.

Price: $159.99 (16 GB), $189 (32GB)

5. Nook HD

 

Image: Barnes & Noble

 

The Nook HD is competitively priced, but it doesn't offer the same sleek user experience as some of its competitors. It's light, weighing just 315 grams, so it's easy to transport to class. However, some argue that the lightweight plastic makes the device feel cheap and detracts from the overall experience. This tablet doesn't have a camera, but it does have dual speakers on the bottom. It also has a microSD card slot.

Price: $129 (8GB), $149 (16GB)

6. Samsung Galaxy Note 10

 

Image: Samsung

 

The quad-core processor makes the Galaxy Note 10 exceptionally fast. With a stylus pen, it's great for taking handwritten class notes without having to carry heavy binders and notebooks. The Galaxy Note 10 also has functional multitasking, so you can have multiple apps running at once — perfect for updating your Facebook during the boring parts of class.

Price: $449 (16 GB) and $499 (32 GB)

Image: Flickr, Rares M. Dutu

This Dorm Was Tailor-Made For the Deaf Students Who Helped Designed It

Architects are bound by law to design buildings that are accessible to the disabled, but the deaf often get left out of the equation. A group of designers and deaf students are now trying to change that—and their first building, a dormitory at predominantly deaf college Gallaudet University, is their manifesto.

The building is a collaboration between a group of design firms led by New York firm LTL and an unusual stakeholder: DeafSpace, a group of students led by Gallaudet’s campus architect,Hansel Bauman. DeafSpace began as a campus initiative to develop principles that put the unique needs of deaf students first. But it has since blossomed into its own design movement, including a design class taught by Bauman, defined by a set of specific spatial guidelines available on its website.

But back to the dorm. In Metropolis this month, Linda Hales details the process of designing a $18.5 million mixed-use dorm that’s uniquely suited to deaf students. There’s more to it than you might think. For example, stopped to open a door can interrupt a good conversation, since sign language is all about the hands—so LTL specified sliding ones. The same goes for the width of hallways. When your conversation with a professor depends on keeping your eyes on their hands, a narrow corridor, unexpected steps, or a sudden turn can kill the flow, so the dorm's hallways are almost twelve feet wide.

Visibility is another huge issue. The interiors are painted colors that dull problematic glare, and there's plenty of daylighting—which reduces the eyestrain that comes with communicating in ASL. And what about lectures? If your view of a professor’s hands is blocked, you’re in trouble—so LTL and DeafSpace designed an amphitheater that’s optimized for perfect sight lines from any spot. Unexpectedly, acoustics also play a role: For students that use hearing aids, ambient noise is a major issue—so special acoustic panels and carpets dampen the junk noise.

There are plenty more subtle details at work, too. One point that stands out, though, is that sign language is inherently spatial. It deals with the three-dimensional movement of objects through space. "Deaf culture centers around the language," said Bauman a few years ago. "The language has all the elements of architecture-the spatial kinesthetic of sign language, the desire of deaf people for the visual access that open space affords-lends itself to express the deaf way of being."

So it makes sense that space itself should be tailored around those unique lexical properties. And thanks to DeafSpace, those properties are poised to become common knowledge amongst mainstream architects. [Metropolis]

The Secret Powers Hidden in Your iPhone's Accessibility Options

Unless you're constantly messing around with your iPhone's settings, most people don't dig into the Accessibility features in iOS unless they need to solve a specific problem. That said, there's actually a few great features hidden in those options that everyone can make use of, even if you don't need them.

The iPhone's accessibility options are pretty fantastic and cover a lot of ground. They're also easy for anyone to enable and play around with under Settings > General >Accessibility. With that in mind, here are a few cool things you might not realize you're iPhone can do.

Read Any Text Out Loud with VoiceOver or Speak Selection

If you don't mind being read to in the robotic voice of Siri, you can set up your iPhone to read any text you want aloud to you. Turning it on is incredibly easy:

1. Head into Settings > General > Accessibility
2. Turn on Speak Selection

Now, when you select a block of text you'll get the option to speak it out loud. That's not all though, as IT World points out, if you select the first line of a block of text and then swipe down with two fingers your iPhone will read everything on that page out loud to you.

Get LED Flashes for Notifications

For whatever reason, the iPhone doesn't have a good system for providing a visual alert other than the screen turning on. If you want an alert that draws a bit more attention than just the screen, the LED notifications are pretty handy.

Just head into Settings > General > Accessibility, and tap the "LED Flash for Alerts" button to enable it. Now, when you get a call or other notification, the LED flash on the backside of your phone will light up.

Enable Custom Gestures with AssistiveTouch

The AssistiveTouch option in iOS is one that few of us bother messing around with. The point of AssistiveTouch is to help people who have problems with the touch screen, and subsequently you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it, including creating your own set of gestures:

1. Turn on AssistiveTouch in Settings > General Accessibility > AssistiveTouch
2. Tap the new icon in the top left corner of your screen
3. Tap the "Favorites" button
4. Tap the "+" to create a new gesture.

Here you can enable you own gestures. This is useful in all kinds of ways. The blog Here's the Thing has a few examples, including making scrolling super easy:

For example, to scroll up on a lengthy web page without actually swiping, you could just call up the AssistiveTouch menu, tap “Favorites,” and then the icon for your new “swipe down” gesture.

Now tap the screen, and it’ll obediently scroll down just as if you’d swiped it.

The AssistiveTouch setting is actually incredibly helpful for all kinds of things, including taking screenshots without having to tap the power button and home button at the same time, and using your phone's home button when it's broken.

Enable Different Vibration Patterns for Different Contacts

The custom vibration setting has moved out of the Accessibility options in iOS 6, but since that's where it started in iOS 5 we're still happy to include it here. Essentially, it makes it so you can set up custom vibration alerts for your contacts so you know who's trying to get a hold of you without ever looking at your phone.

In iOS 6, just click on a contact, select "Vibration" and then "Create New Vibration." Now tap out whatever vibration you want. If you're still on iOS 5, you can find the setting under Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibrations.

Enable Guided Access to Lock Off Apps When You Hand Your Phone to Kids (or Strangers)

Guided Access was introduced in iOS 6 as a means to make it easy for pretty much anyone to use an iPhone without messing anything up. Guided Access can restrict your iPhone to just one app, disable parts of the screen, or turn off any of the hardware buttons. As Cult of Mac points out that makes it great for when you need to hand your phone over to a friend or child.

To enable it, head into Settings > General > Accessibility > Guided Access. To enable it when you're in an app, just triple-click the home button, pick the settings you want, and hand it over to the person who wants to borrow your phone. I've found this especially helpful in those awkward situations when someone asks to borrow your phone to make a call.