San Francisco — Google Inc., committed to keeping its promise of buying one company a month and now having more than 20 acquisitions this year, has once again in a low-profile move acquired a new startup. This time, the lucky company is San Francisco, California-based BlindType — the creators of an application based around touchscreen input.
BlindType, a startup with technology that seemingly magically intuits what a user is typing, no keyboard required. BlindType employs an application to correct “sloppy” typing, the San Francisco-based company said on its website.
“We are thrilled to announce that BlindType has been acquired by Google” the company said in a blog post.
“We want to express our gratitude to everyone for their overwhelming support and positive feedback. We know that typing on your mobile device can be a frustrating experience, which is why we have worked hard to make touch typing easier and faster than ever – the way it should be.”
Neither company unveiled the terms of the deal or the intentions.
BlindType however, suggested that it would keep working on “mobile innovation” and implied that Android was the focus as a result.
The company had been operating on a namesake app that automatically compensates for typing by evaluating the intended key independently of where the actual keyboard might be. The method, which had both Android and iPhone implementations until the Google buyout, let users type much more accurately and without having to look directly at the screen.
Mobile-device typing has changed dramatically with the iPhone’s functional touch-screen keyboard, Android’s adequately advanced word-prediction system, and Swype’s technology for smoothly moving fingers over letters. As the name suggests, BlindType supposedly works without a user even seeing the keypad, intuiting what a user types from the proportional distance between the points at which his or her fingers touch the screen.
BlindType believes it has got a better method for matching the letters people actually typed with the ones they meant to type. “BlindType is a revolutionary system that…allows for super sloppy typing largely without looking at the screen…[It] constantly adjusts to the user’s ‘perceived’ keyboard and typing style.”
BlindType’s technology shown on an Android phone. (Credit: BlindType)
“We are excited to welcome the BlindType team to Google,” said Aaron Zamost, a spokesman for Google, which runs the world’s most popular Internet search engine. “With their help, we hope to make touch typing on your mobile device easier and faster than ever.”
The deal promotes Google’s expansion into wireless devices. The company is selling more mobile advertising, and its Android operating system is overtaking Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry and Apple Inc.’s iPhone, according to NPD Group. During the second quarter, Android accounted for 33% of all smartphones purchased in the U.S., topping the BlackBerry’s 28% and the iPhone’s 22%.
Google is apparently intending upon improving the default Android keyboard in future versions of the OS. The current design supports multi-touch and other tricks to speed up typing but is still considered slower than the stock iPhone keyboard due to auto-correction and responsiveness.
BlindType was just founded a few months ago by Kostas Eleftheriou and Panos Petropoulos. The company was not even able to release its applications.
Check out a couple of demos by BlindType below: