The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may not receive many robocalls, but
it gets more than 200,000 complaints about the buggers every month. It
finally decided last fall to issue a challenge to the public to see who
could come up with a way to stop the marketing calls before they reach
your ringer. The Robocall Challenge
winners, announced April 2, 2013, were not the most inventive
invectives, but the most likely-to-be-effective technologies
invented separately by software developer Aaron Foss and computer engineer Serdar Danis.
When you hear about or see designs that can really help people lead fuller lives, you want them available - now! That's how MIT's FingerReader
hit me. Well, I said, to no one in particular, if you can prototype it,
get it done, roll it out, let people who are blind or visually impaired
have access to it - right now! The FingerReader is something they will want.
