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Howard Gutowitz, Chief Executive Officer of Eatoni, who recently visited Dublin to meet potential Irish investors, said the company would also complete licensing deals for its software with a number mobile manufacturers both in Europe and world-wide within the next two months.
Eatoni's products make it faster for people to type messages on mobile phones. The products suggest which letter or word the user will type next, based on the patterns of language, and Eatoni claims the technology cuts the number of taps per letter from 2.2, for non assisted typing, to 1.18 taps per letter.
"This will bring typing a message on a mobile phone to within 18 percent of the efficiency of a normal computer keyboard," Gutowitz said.
One of the biggest barriers to a growth in SMS text messaging is simply that mobile phone keyboards are designed for typing numbers not words and Eatoni Ergonomics claims to have the solution to this problem with its predictive system based on the statistical patterns of language.
"We believe the system has the potential to double the amount of SMS traffic world-wide," he said. Globally an average of twenty billion messages are being sent every month at an average of USD0.20 a message which earns operators a cool USD4 billion per month.
European users sent three billion SMS messages in December last year. In May of this year, they tapped eight billion messages, and for the month of December, analysts expect over 20 billion messages to be sent.
Eatoni's two products, Letterwise and Wordwise, take up only 3K and 30K of memory. This, according to Gutowitz, makes Eatoni's software very attractive for manufacturers and carriers both because of the high cost of memory, and the fact that using less memory leaves more capacity for other functions on the phone.
The Wordwise system uses less memory because of the fact it is not dictionary-based -- unlike, for instance, the Tegic software, which Gutowitz said relies on a 60,000-word dictionary. Wordwise instead works on the statistical patterns of language.
The large increase in the speed of typing for the user is also connected with the fact that the Eatoni system will see a shift key being created which will be used in conjunction with the normal keys to select a certain letter.
For example on the 1 or ABC key one could use the shift key and 1 to get the letter C. This means that the user gets the letter required straight away rather than tapping the key a number of times.
Gutowitz said this key would ideally be located on the side of the phone near where volume buttons currently exist for ease of use.
The Wordwise system also has the advantage of being able to go back automatically and correct misspellings so for example if a user meaning to type "queen" instead types "rueen" the system based on the letters which arrive after will go back and correct it.
In addition in contrast to the AOL system Eatoni wants to build a usage-based model, like the I-mode model in Japan, which would see users paying for the service on a monthly basis.
However, Gutowitz admitted that this may not necessarily be possible immediately because the company may have to sign a deal with a set licence fee per phone just to get the phone manufacturers to adopt it as standard.
Gutowitz said that the predictive system can also be applied to the consumer electronics sector for TV set top boxes, remote controls and hi-fi systems.
The company is working on developing software which would operate on Sony's 400 CD changer, which would anticipate and find the album or song the user is looking for quickly.
Gutowitz said the company would be profitable within a year. The company is also planning to expand into Europe by opening a European office and will expand its staff from 15 to 50 within a year.
More information from http://www.eatoni.com
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