MediaFile

Elderly, hearing impaired people are the new cool generation as a largely untapped business opportunity.

The market is growing each year as people live longer and phone penetration among senior citizens is nowhere near 100 percent.

Companies like Fujitsu want to change that and are tackling the main obstacles that have kept seniors from becoming technophiles — tiny keypads, sound quality and people just speaking too darn fast.

Emporia Telecom from Austria is one company that has started to design phones for the elderly with larger keypads and simplified usage but Fujitsu promises to go to the heart of the matter, the spoken word, by using a new software in phones that slows down the speed of speech by up to 20 percent — spreading the sound digitally over longer periods, and filling the breathing gaps.

If you want to take a bite out of Apple’s piece of the staggeringly huge (but difficult to quantify in $$$ terms) smartphone market pie, you’d better either have the magical new “thing” or be willing to spend to buy it.

As Anupreeta Das reports, Palm – one of the stalwart originals in the mobile handset space -- has remade itself into a terrific target with the success of its Pre. Palm’s stock got a jolt this week on talk that Nokia could be considering a bid. But as she explains, Palm may prove to be too pricey a purchase, even for those with deep pockets.

Since introducing the Pre, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia and Motorola have been mentioned as possible suitors. If one of these cash-rich companies was to bid for Palm today, it would be targeting a stock that has quadrupled this year. Complicating matters, “details on how many units it has sold are skimpy, making it difficult to value the success of Palm's turnaround story,” she reports.