ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997              TAG: 9702040074
SECTION: BUSINESS                 PAGE: B-6  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH WEISE ASSOCIATED PRESS

FIRM CONVERTS PALMTOPS INTO CELL PHONES FOR DEAF

RADIOMAIL MADE the service cost-efficient by developing new pricing and rental scales.

A year ago, Mark Elderkin had this brainstorm:

Computers the size of a paperback book were hitting the market, able to do almost everything a laptop could - including hook up to a modem, and thus the world. Add a cellular phone connection, and you've got a portable office, capable of sending and receiving e-mail, faxes and pages, and connecting with the Internet. Everything an on-the-go executive could want.

But who else might want these things?

Elderkin's answer: the deaf.

Elderkin's brainstorm has borne splendid fruit - a cellular phone for the deaf, created and sold by RadioMail, the company where he was director of marketing. And it serves as a textbook example of how out-of-the-box thinking can lead to profit and progress.

Since the introduction of telecommunication devices for the deaf, or TDDs, in the 1970s, deaf Americans have used small keyboards with one-line digital displays to talk to each other via the phone lines. But TDDs are expensive, not portable and they can talk only to other TDDs - problems a palmtop computer-modem-cellular phone doesn't have.

Elderkin's company had first introduced nationwide wireless Internet services four years ago, plugging a modem about half the size of a cigarette package into a laptop computer.

Elderkin left RadioMail in 1996 but, before he did, he handed the idea off to marketing manager Judy Leigh, who set out to make it happen.

When she sat down and looked at the problem, she realized the technology was almost entirely in place. RadioMail users already got an account that sent and received pages, faxes and e-mail. Because the account is always ``on,'' subscribers didn't have to wait for their computers to boot up or their Internet connections to log on. In those respects, RadioMail was just like a phone.

``This is a perfect example of what universal design can do,'' said Betsy Bayha, director of technology policy at the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, Calif.

It's also a huge market. At 23 million, the deaf and hard-of-hearing make up 10 percent of the U.S. population. ``And it's only getting larger as people get older and their hearing diminishes,'' Bayha points out.

To reach that market, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company had to make it cost-efficient.

RadioMail developed new pricing based on the number of characters sent instead of the way executives are charged, which is by number of messages sent. Leigh said most of the service's deaf customers opt for the moderate plan, which bundles in the modem rental to bring the service up to about $79 a month.

``That's still cheaper than two-way paging, and much cheaper than most people pay for cellular phones,'' she said.

Add a Hewlett Packard 200LX palmtop computer, which weighs about 19 ounces and costs around $500, and the physical requirements are met.

LENGTH: Medium:   66 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. The deaf can use a Hewlett Packard Palmtop 200LX 
          with a wireless modem to convert the computer into a cellular phone.
          color.