US sales success of braille ccomputer leads to takeover

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

The runaway success of BrailleNote, a computer for blind people, has prompted its Christchurch manufacturer, Pulse Data International, to take over the product's United States distributor.

Pulse Data, which specialises in technology for the blind and visually impaired, bought California-based HumanWare last month from its Dutch parent company, Tieman Group, for an undisclosed sum.

Managing director Russell Smith said Pulse Data decided to buy HumanWare, which also distributed Tieman's products, after US sales of the BrailleNote handheld PC rocketed.

"The BrailleNote product has been so successful it became the main business of HumanWare, accounting for more than 80 per cent of its turnover.

"The Dutch parent company was not that excited about the business of its subsidiary becoming [the supply of] a Pulse Data product."

"At the same time we wanted to take control of the most important outlet of the most important product of the company," said Dr Smith.

"Now HumanWare can focus entirely on our product range, which we feel is important for the future and should result in an even higher level of sales."

Since its launch in April last year, the BrailleNote, which allows blind people to use a word processor, send and receive e-mails, and surf the net, has helped Pulse Data to double turnover to more than $30 million a year, over 90 per cent of it earned overseas.

The purchase of HumanWare follows the acquisition in March of 51 per cent of AccessAbility, a San Francisco distributor of products for the visually impaired.

A third of Pulse Data's international sales are made to the US, where demand for the BrailleNote is especially high. Dr Smith said the market accounted for 80 per cent of the "hundreds" of BrailleNotes sold each month.

He attributed the strength of the American market to the fact that it was an English-speaking country "reasonably well-attuned to the technology."

The company would now turn its attention to Europe, where there was a developing market for the BrailleNote.

At the moment this was mostly centred in Britain, but Dr Smith believed the European market would eventually be as large as the US market, once the language barrier had been overcome.

Not only would the company have to develop foreign language versions of the BrailleNote's text-to-speech synthesiser, but it would also have to modify a system that translated English into raised Braille characters on the keyboard.

"That's quite a commitment," said Dr Smith, "but we will launch in four or five European countries over the next year."

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