Contra Costa Times Article

Last week our local newspaper ran an article about my story on the front-page, you can read the article online here: How a tragic fall turned into to an inspiring story

The journalist, Tom Barnidge, dropped by the house to interview me. He had heard I was competing in the Wildflower triathlon as a challenged athlete and had checked out my story on my blog and found it inspiring…every now and then he gets to do a human interest piece, so thought he’d write a piece about me.

I didn’t know when it was going in to print and the first I knew about it was from the Facebook updates and texts from friends saying they’d just read about me in the paper…bought a smile to my face.

Thank you from Brightworks

I was invited to visit Brightworks in San Francisco by my friend and Founder, Gever Tulley.

Back in 2005 he founded Tinkering School, a summer school for children based on the belief that they can build anything, and through building, learn anything. He’s written a book, 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) and presented at TED a couple of times. And now he’s got his own extraordinary school.

The children were exploring a theme called “By Hand” and part of this was to see what it was like if you didn’t have a hand or perhaps what it was like if you had four. The children (of all ages 6-12) were incredibly creative, taping up body parts, adding articulating limbs to different parts of their body, seeing what it was like without a hand or just a few fingers.

I got a chance to come in and talk about my experiences and show them how I had adapted and used my different prosthetics for different situations. They got to see my high-tech, bionic hand as well as my low tech body powered hook.

It was great fun and they all made a card thanking me for coming in to visit.

Brightworks blew my mind, it was so unlike any school I remember from my childhood and all the children were so engaged and happy. Makes me wish I was a kid again!

Eye Borg

A few weeks ago while I was in Toronto I connected with Rob Spence, a one-eyed film maker (see if you can notice his bionic eye in the photo) who is making a documentary on today’s cyborgs as part of a promo for the new video game Deus Ex Human Revolution.

Bionic Eye

He wanted to interview me on my experiences with my i-Limb hand and as curious as he was about my hand I was just as curious about his eye!

Rob damaged his eye in a shotgun accident as a kid and decided to have it removed a while back. Recently he worked with a couple of engineers to take a tiny wireless camera and build a bionic eye…it doesn’t connect to his optic nerve or anything, but it is really cool.

His documentary compares the cybernetics available in the video game Deus Ex, set in 2027, with state of the art prosthetics today to see how far away we are.

You can watch the video below, Rob did a great job and you’ll see a few segments of the interview he did with me.

Out on a Limb

The makers of a new documentary called OUT ON A LIMB just reached out to me through my blog.

Daria Price, an award-winning film maker, is working on finalizing the fine-cut of her latest documentary after working on it for the last couple of years and is looking for help to cover the remainder of post-production costs, which include color-correction, graphics, sound design and audio mixing. $12,000 will get the film close; more will get it over the finish line faster and ready for release in the fall of 2011.

As an amputee I think it’s time to show case just what is possible today technologically and the strength of the human mind, body & spirit to adapt and embrace adversity.

Help Daria raise $12,000 to complete this documentary.

Jay Thomas

Earlier this month I did a live radio interview on The Jay Thomas Show on Sirius 108, they had contacted me over the Christmas period and wanted me on the show to talk to Jay about my iLimb hand.

As you can hear from the recording it was light-hearted and fun (just listen to the music choices on the intros)…kind of what you’d expect for a mens show.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/3874914/inside-the-bionic-hand/

Also, here’s a video of Stuart Mead, TouchBionic’s CEO that includes a couple of my segments:

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/3874915/prosthetics-re-thought/

KRON4 Video Shoot

Last night I was on TV again, this time on Kron 4 (a local Bay Area channel), Gabriel Slate interviewed me for his Tech Report in the morning and it aired in the evening at 5:52 pm!

Gabriel did a great job, he was cameraman and interviewer and wrapped the taping up in probably 45 minutes (compared to the 8 hrs it took for my MSNBC segment). He then edited it that afternoon and it aired in the evening…amazingly quick! It also came together really well, I’m impressed with how he pulled it all together into a well-organized segment, I take my hat off to him.

Here’s the segment online:

iLimb Video Shoot

I got a call from Rich Sire from Diablo P&O the other day asking if I’d be willing to be video’d using my i-Limb hand for a TouchBionics promo video.

I’ve been working with Rich to get a socket built for my i-Limb hand. We’re now on our third prototype and getting pretty close to ironing out all the kinks, I typically use it for half a day at a time and I’m getting reasonably proficient using the hand for everyday tasks…huge step up from my normal hook.

Given how much I like the hand I was quite happy to provide a testimonial, so I headed to Rich’s office Friday for the shoot. It was similar to the MSNBC shoot I did, just on a smaller scale and it only took half a day.

They basically wanted to first shoot a normal consultation between Rich and I and then they took my testimonial for the hand followed by some action shots of me using the hand to fill my water bottle, drive my car, carry a brief case and so on. All quite fun.

They should be using the material for a big conference TouchBionics is attending in Germany, I’m hoping to get a copy of the footage so I can post it online here.

MSNBC Video Shoot

On Tuesday we had a crew in to film a segment for the MSNBC show Your Business about Kaboodle and how small companies face crises. It was sparked by my article in the San Francisco chronicle a couple of months back.

MSNBC Film Crew

It took a full day to film: setting up; interviewing myself, Manish and Chetan (my business partners); interviewing investors and filming the Kaboodle team…a full day for a two and a half-minute segment! Incredible, the time it takes, considering this was just the filming part of the process.

It was interesting to hear my adventure last year relived from a number of different perspectives: myself; Manish & Chetan, who had to make sure Kaboodle survived and our investors, (we were just in the process of closing our series A funding).

Filming in the Car

Of course, everyone expressed concern first and foremost for my own situation (one of our investors even offered to fly out to Colombia!), but after that it came down to really pulling together to ensure that Kaboodle survived. Our investors are quite a close-knit group who have invested together in the past, they still believed in the team and Kaboodle and so there was little question they would continue forward. For Manish and Chetan it came down to putting in place a backup plan to manage through my absence (which at that time was of indeterminate length). Fortunately we have such a great team that Chetan was able to work with everyone to manage my responsibilities…both of them believed I would return and resisted the need to find my replacement.

I’m looking forward to seeing the segment, it’ll air on MSNBC’s Your Business nationally on May 13th at 7:30 am (both east & west coast).