BlindType has been acquired by Google
blindtype.com
blindtype.com
From the videos, they do have pretty killer technology, although they haven't even released it yet, and there are competitors aplenty. I'm curious, does anyone know what an "acquisition" like this usually amounts to in terms of money? At this scale, it's almost never talked about (ex. reMail's acquisition).
From my naive POV, it just does a couple of mappings in 2d space fitting a keyboard over the points you press, until some real words drop out. If that's all they have, it sure doesn't sound like much. Sounds more like a rainy weekends work.
Since when was life fair or work rewarded based on merit. These things are more about who you know than what you create.
I suspect the latter, but it's purely a guess. This is one area of Startup Land about which very little has been written.
"With current systems, focus on the keyboard is always needed. It is almost impossible to slide the finger on letters without paying attention on the screen. Focusing elsewhere, even for a split second makes it extremely difficult to resume the word in-progress."
This is the exact assumption they are battling with tap typing. I wish they would realize that their same system could infer tap points given a swipe path.
Let the users type how they want, whether tap or swipe, and let their algorithms figure out the rest.
They mentioned originally that they would submit to the App Store knowing that it would be rejected, but wanted to force Apple to look at what they were banning due to their conditions.
Once Apple allows it? I have no idea what would happen. Google does release a lot of iPhone apps, but those all tie into Google services. This does not. At all.
Someone can then invent QwertyType: an actual keyboard on the screen. This will be faster for these users because they won't have to guess where the software thinks they think the keys are.