Poway Firm’s Mini Phone Is an Earful : Communications: Owner of circuit-board business is still refining ‘bone-conductive’ microphone invention for a new type of phone headset.
Elwood Norris of Poway has an enviably solid and growing business assembling electronic circuit boards. Orders from a variety of top-drawer customers, including Kodak, Hitachi and Eli Lilly, have caused Norris’ revenues to double over the past year to an annual rate of $5.5 million.
But it is a sideline business of Poway-based Norris Communications that has been attracting all the attention lately: a line of miniature telephone headsets that use “bone-conductive” microphone technology to pick up voices through a receiver in the earpiece.
The tiny microphones inside Norris’ invention receive the voice through the bone and soft tissue of the person speaking and transmit it, eliminating the need for the “boom” microphone used to speak into on most telephone headsets. Norris believes his earpiece also is more sanitary and convenient than traditional headsets.
Although Norris says he has received numerous patents pertaining to bone-conductive technology, his company has not yet sold any of its products to consumers. Nor is there any guarantee that he will: there are considerable technical problems inherent in fitting the required technology into a small, affordable package that fits comfortably in a person’s ear.
But Norris, whose company’s shares are publicly traded on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, got a big boost in May when he signed a $228,000 deal with Bell Atlantic, the Maryland-based “Baby Bell” telephone utility.
The one-year deal with Bell Atlantic calls for Norris Communications to provide prototypes for four bone-conductive telephone products to the utility.
Bell Atlantic would not comment on Norris Communications’ technology. But the company did display an early version of Norris’ technology in a device called the Audissey earphone in June at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. The product, based on Norris’ patent, received favorable press notices and caught the eye of some foreign manufacturers.
Audissey resembles a telephone headset, except that it consists of only an earpiece connected by wire to a telephone. Norris claims that Bell Atlantic is interested in buying a large quantity of the headsets for its service operators, an interest that Bell Atlantic would not confirm.
Norris is working on a completely cordless earpiece, also with total voice and sound capability, that could be used in conjunction with cordless or cellular telephones, he said.
Norris, 48, has been an inventor for 25 years and claims to have received 100 patents. He is an electrical engineer who worked as a departmental researcher at University of Washington in Seattle for 10 years before setting up publicly owned businesses in Salt lake City and San Diego.
While in Salt Lake City, Norris’ company in 1985 introduced a transistorized AM radio that fit completely in one ear. Norris claims to have sold 250,000 of the little radios at $10 each.
Advertisements for the miniature radios caught the fancy of National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials who gave Norris a $25,000 grant to develop the earpiece voice-sound technology that is now incorporated in the Audissey product.
NASA had an Audissey-like communications system in mind for its astronauts but backed out of the project after the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986, Norris said.
Whatever the outcome of his telephone products, Norris insists that circuit board assembly will keep Norris Communications in good financial shape in the years to come, thanks in part to an investment of $3 million in capital equipment, including robotized machines. Increased demand has prompted Norris to increase the payroll to 72 employees from 20 a year ago.
On Monday, Norris Communications reported a first-quarter profit of $114,297 on sales of $915,000, contrasted with a loss of $44,000 on revenue of $596,000 over the same three-month period last year.
