15 December 2009

Swype Raises $5.6M From New Investors
Samsung Ventures And Nokia Growth?

Swype, new patented interface that enables users to create words with one continuous finger motion across an on-screen keyboard has raised $5.6 million in a second round of funding and has shown further momentum in getting its new text-entry technology off the ground.

The round was led by Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners and returning investor Benaroya Capital. The company will use the money to get its technology into more mobile phones and other devices.

The company raised $1.3 million back in April, and just this month released its first product, on the Samsung Omnia II smartphone.

The significance of the new funding, which the company hopes is the last round it will need, is that Swype now has two of the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers supporting its technology—and could be poised for mass-market adoption.

Mike McSherry, Swype’s CEO, confirmed that Swype is launching on a number of new devices and platforms: “The level of confidence shown by investors in our Series B, especially coming from two of the largest device manufacturers in the world and a returning investor, demonstrates the viability of our product and the known added value it can bring to mobile devices.”

With the 12-key numeric keypad appearing on 95% of all handsets shipped, it is easy to take input interface technologies on the mobile phones for granted but popularity of new keyless handset signals that mobile phones as we know them may soon be a thing of the past?

As the touch-sensitive screens are becoming ever more popular in the high-end market and as the handsets feature-set continues to expand, and the number and variety of applications on phones grows, the mechanisms for interacting and controlling them are put under ever-greater strain and the user demand for ease of use has never been greater!

Interfaces, such as motion sensing, haptics, multitouch, advanced voice recognition capabilities and evolutions to predictive text functionality are set to boost data entry efficiencies and introduce a level of multimodality never before experienced on a mobile phones!

T9 technology has set the bar for mobile usability, creating mobile user experiences that help drive consumer demand for and use of mobile communications devices and services but now we need something similar for the touchscreen based phones.

Cliff Kushler, the co-inventor of the T9 predictive text input which is used on most of the today’s phones is back in game with ‘Swype’ a new alphanumeric entry technology for touch-screen devices.

Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 50 words per minute.

The application is designed to work across a variety of devices such as phones, tablets, game consoles, kiosks, televisions, virtual screens and more.

Swype is faster than existing text entry methods because it has built-in intelligence that does not require users to hit each letter accurately. Also, tracing a smooth, continuous path is much faster than “target-tap-lift-target-tap...”. Even novice users can quickly achieve sustained data entry speeds of over 40 words per minute.

The word 'quick' was generated from tracing the path shown above in a fraction of a second, by roughly aiming to pass through the letters of the word. A key advantage to Swype is that there is no need to be very accurate, enabling very rapid text entry.