One of our favorite methods is video. They’re brilliant fun to make (we run riot trying out different ideas, often looking silly in the process). We find they really connect with many of you – for example our YouTube channel has clocked up more than 7.6 million views.

We’ve had lots of questions about how we shot the video for our most recent major release, Say Hello To SwiftKey 4. Some of you were intrigued by the “floating phone” effect, which enabled the screen and keyboard to remain completely in focus, no matter how much the person holding the device moved around.

Filming a smartphone sounds easy right? Well if you ask anyone who has ever tried they’ll tell you otherwise. For our videographer Adam Gichie it is a fun challenge.

For a long time it frustrated Adam how limited we were with what we could do – even tiny movements by the person holding the phone can mean the screen goes out of focus and certain camera angles produce distracting moiré patterns disfiguring the screen (not ideal when you’re trying to keep the focus on the product and what it is capable of).

Adam explains: “This time I wanted to get a rock solid shot of the phone. Previously it was always shaky and difficult to see it in plain view. I wanted to make the video all about the app – front and center.”

He eventually came up with this amazing contraption. A cunning combination of brackets and a phone case that held the mobile (in this case, a Samsung Galaxy S3 and an LG Nexus 4) in a static place in relation to the camera, allowing the phone to always stay central and the screen to always remain in focus, no matter how much you move.

The only other challenge was to entice our staff to hold the contraption and to type while walking, playing table tennis and working. All the hands you see in that video belong to our own multilingual, multi-talented (and hugely obliging) coworkers.

We’re excited to see what we can conjure up next with Adam (who spends the rest of his time working on projects for Richard Branson, ELLE magazine and The Royal Navy). You can find out more about what he is up to by following imageandpicture on Facebook.

You can watch more of SwiftKey’s videos – such as our most fun shoot to date, SwiftKey Tilt – on our YouTube channel.

The post How we filmed it: SwiftKey’s secret weapon appeared first on SwiftKey.

The awards were organised by the European Commission and The Next Web. Their jury of industry experts praised the company’s goal of making device interaction faster, smarter and more personalized.

TNW described the event as a “celebration of Europe’s most influential and innovative entrepreneurs, and represents the Commission’s appreciation of the people in the Web and tech sector who can transform economies, drive innovation and change communities and industries.”

Jon — who’s 27 and started the company when he was just 22 — flew to Amsterdam to attend the ceremony and said: “I’m honored to win the award at a time when there is such huge growth in tech start-ups throughout Europe.

“My fellow co-founder and CTO Dr Ben Medlock and I are extremely proud of the team we’ve built at SwiftKey, as well as being able to fly the flag for London’s exciting technology scene,” Jon said. “We remain excited about the future potential for our technology and it’s rewarding to be recognised for what we’ve achieved so far.”

It was presented to to him by the European Commission’s Vice President Neelie Kroes, who said the awards were founded to “bring to an end the myth, the fairy tale, that all of the good ideas come from Silicon Valley.”

Kroes continued by saying: “Tech entrepreneurs are the secret ingredient to innovate Europe out of crisis. The amazing and inspiring finalists for Europioneers fill me with a lot of hope: Europe has what it takes to succeed.”

The other nominees in the Under 30s category were Daniel Ek from Spotify; Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson from GoCardless; Daniel Marhely from Deezer; and 6Wunderkinder’s Christian Reber.

Werner Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com, also gave a keynote address at the event.

As for Jon, it looks like he might be on a roll — he’s also been shortlisted for Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the London Loves Excellence awards which will be announced later this year.

Thanks to all those who voted for Jon in the Europioneers contest and who consistently support us as we continue to grow and innovate,

Ruth Barnett

The post Jon named Young Tech Entrepreneur of the Year appeared first on SwiftKey.

Ashley is one of the earliest advocates of introducing technology into the healthcare setting and appreciates the potential efficiency gains it can bring about for physicians. As an organization, Bayada Home Health Care is synonymous with cutting-edge work practices and healthcare technology and last year rolled out 4,000 Android touchscreen devices across its workforce. The aim was to improve work practices for nurses and clinicians who visited a lot of patients at home and who would often be forced to take notes out of hours to keep up with their schedule. The team’s integration of SwiftKey Healthcare on the Android tablets has helped to make clinical data entry even simpler. Employees reported that their input became much faster and more accurate and that using the software saved a significant amount of time which could be invested elsewhere.

Ashley will be in illustrious company, joining speakers from Hewlett Packard, pharma company Sanofi-Aventis and American Airlines’ VP of Airline Operations Technology. We’ll be tweeting from the event on the day and members of the SwiftKey team will be there so come and say hello if you’re in the building!

Sarah Rowley

The post SwiftKey Healthcare advocate speaking at TabTimes Conference appeared first on SwiftKey.

This award has been created by the European Commission in conjunction with The Next Web and seeks to celebrate innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe.

Jon co-founded SwiftKey in 2008 when he was just 22 years old, while working as a graduate trainee for the British government. He and co-founder Ben Medlock met at Cambridge University while Jon was studying for his Physics undergraduate degree and Ben was doing a PhD in the area of Natural Language Processing – the field that later defined a key part of SwiftKey’s innovative technology. They both shared the same vision – to make interacting with devices faster, smarter and more personalized – and as CEO, Jon has masterminded the strategic direction of the company as it has grown from two to 100 staff.

Responding to the nomination, Jon said: “It’s great to have been shortlisted for the Europioneers, not just on a personal level because I’m deeply proud of what we’ve achieved at SwiftKey, but also because this award puts the spotlight on European innovation and entrepreneurship at a really exciting time.”

While the final shortlist was chosen by a panel of judges, the public vote played a significant role, so thank you to everyone who supported us and cast a vote.

The award will be presented by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, at a ceremony on April 24 in The Netherlands.

Jon is in amazing company on the Under 30s shortlist – the other nominees are Daniel Ek from Spotify; Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson from GoCardless; Daniel Marhely from Deezer; and 6Wunderkinder’s Christian Reber.

Well done to all of them and fingers crossed for Jon!

By Ruth Barnett

The post Jon nominated for Young Tech Entrepreneur of the Year appeared first on SwiftKey.

This title means we were ranked in the top 10% of the 11,000 entries!

Last year, your votes helped us scoop the People’s Voice Webby Award for Mobile Experimental and Innovation. That was a really special moment for us as a company – we were so overwhelmed by your support that we used our five word acceptance speech to tell you that “you are all beautiful people”.

(We also owe the brilliant, unique and genuine Stephen Fry a nod of thanks for encouraging his fans and Twitter followers to support us in the final stages against Google Wallet.)

This time around, we may not be winners at the Webbys but we still feel like celebrating. It’s amazing to be recognized, particularly for our efforts to ensure our users are at the heart of all we do.

In our Webbys application for Best User Experience, we wrote:

“We’re growing fast, but some things will never change: SwiftKey is about the experience of the user. This the key to our success and what differentiates us. From the very start, we knew that the challenge we faced was fundamentally a problem about people and their language use, not about keyboards and code.”

This remains our mission – to focus on people, to enable them to express themselves and to make that process faster, easier, and more personalized.

So as Official Honorees, we’d like to once again honor you. The dialogue that exists between our userbase and the SwiftKey team has brought us to this point. Thanks for being part of this journey,

Evan (Community Manager) and the team.

The post Honored by the Webby Awards appeared first on SwiftKey.

Since starting in 2009, Jo has helped Songkick create an environment where talking to customers and potential customers is just part of what they do every day.

The lean start-up world talks a lot about customer development, which is all about “getting out of the building” and getting feedback from real customers, whereas the UCD-world talks about user research – understanding your users to inform your design. In this talk Jo told us how she brought fast and cheap user research tools into Songkick which are now part of the regular product development process, and how she learned to make user research and lean start-up speak the same language.

Getting feedback from real people doesn’t have to be intimidating or take forever. Jo told us what tools and practices she has adapted for a fast-paced, unforgiving start-up environment.

Songkick is the second-largest live music site after Live Nation. Every month, millions of users find concerts on Songkick across web, iOS, Android, and their Spotify app. Songkick’s partners include YouTube, BBC, and Deezer, and their investors include Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures.

On behalf of the whole SwiftKey team, we’d like to thank Jo for taking the time out to speak so engagingly at SwiftKey and for answering the team’s questions around the topic. This was the latest in a series of talks for SwiftKey staff, facilitating the sharing of knowledge and ideas. Previous guests include Stephen Fry, Professor Ted Briscoe and Julian Harty.

By Precious Hamilton-Brown

The post Songkick’s Jo Packer speaks at SwiftKey on User Experience appeared first on SwiftKey.

We wanted to let you know about an event we are participating in later this month in London. Our CTO and co-founder Ben Medlock will be speaking and taking questions at TechHub’s monthly ‘Founder’s Secrets’ event.

Ben will share the journey of SwiftKey from an idea to an exciting and globally successful business. He’ll address the challenges the company has faced, including how to turn intelligent technology into great products and how to launch a “top five” app. Ben will also give an inside view into SwiftKey’s fast-growth and tremendous success, being recently named by Fast Company as the 6th most innovative mobile company in the world.

As you know, our community of users have been a major part of our growth and success as a business so we’d love to meet as many of you as possible there. Ben will be taking questions so you can also ask him what you’ve always wanted to know about SwiftKey or the team.

We’d love you to join us at TechHub if you’re in town on April 23rd. You can find all the event details and sign up here.

Thanks,
Precious

The post Join SwiftKey for ‘Founders’ Secrets’ at TechHub appeared first on SwiftKey.

Anita – software engineer intern

I’m a Computer Science and Maths student at the University of Bath, taking a year out from my studies to intern at SwiftKey. When I heard about the opportunity to do voluntary GCSE Maths tutoring, I jumped at the chance. I’m now three weeks into the programme at Pimlico Academy, helping a group of three to four Year 10 students for an hour a week after school.

It’s definitely a challenge to fly in for an hour on a new topic each week, gauge understanding in the group, and explain clearly concepts which seem obvious to me as a maths student. However, this is what makes it so rewarding, as I can tell I’m improving my teaching and communication skills week by week. The students think it’s very cool that I work for an app company, so I’m proud to think I’m showing them that studying maths can lead to an interesting career.

Chetan – software engineer

I knew that tutoring young students would be a challenge, but the challenges weren’t those I expected. The hardest thing about tutoring young students was making them care about what you’re trying to show them: Why should they know how to solve a simultaneous equation or find the probability of something happening twice?

I learnt that making the content relevant is key to understanding it, and it’s tough to do given we only get a few hours contact time in total! I also really enjoyed playing little games at the end of the session, like the Countdown numbers game. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to inspire the next generation, even if it’s only one or two of them.

:: Find out more about life at SwiftKey and the people who work here on our About Us page.

The post Giving back: Using maths to inspire the next generation appeared first on SwiftKey.

He interviewed co-founder and CTO Ben Medlock because he wanted to find out more about the “geek behind SwiftKey”.

Watch his Google Hangout with Ben and CMO Joe Braidwood here:

Scoble, Rackspace’s Startup Liaison Officer and a familiar face on the tech scene around the world, said he’d only been using his Android smartphone a day but was already 40% faster at typing thanks to SwiftKey.

Where do you stand on Android versus iOS? Join the debate in the comments or on the SwiftKey Facebook page.

The post Scoble: SwiftKey No 1 reason I switched to Android appeared first on SwiftKey.

Co-founder and CTO Ben Medlock was at the big unveiling in New York and said: “Following our great success with the SwiftKey 4 launch last month, we are excited to confirm that Samsung has chosen SwiftKey’s innovative keyboard technology to be at the heart of its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4. This is fantastic progress for our vision of bringing the best touchscreen typing experience to as many people as possible.”

The start of 2013 has been fast-paced and exciting – we rolled out SwiftKey 4 to all our app users, introducing our gesture input method SwiftKey Flow as well as new features and support for 60 languages in context. We unveiled an iOS toolkit for SwiftKey Healthcare and our work in this area earned the company “highly commended” for best health product or service at the prestigious GMA Awards. We took members of our team to CES in Las Vegas, MWC in Barcelona, SXSWi in Austin and the HIMSS health tech conference in New Orleans to spread the word on what we’re doing and meet the industry and some of our users.

Now, we add the Galaxy S4 launch to this list as well as exciting work with a host of other SDK partners.

Be in no doubt, there’s just as much innovation and momentum on the consumer side too. The SwiftKey app will continue to evolve as we seek to make interacting with your phones and tablets even easier and more personalized. We’ll push on with developing fun new features and customizations for the millions of you who reach us through app stores such as Google Play. Last, but never least, we’ll carry on building and engaging with our community of users, including our 100,000 VIPs, who give us their time, energy and invaluable feedback.

It’s an exciting chapter in the SwiftKey story right now – thank you for being part of it with us.

The post Yes, SwiftKey software is on the Samsung Galaxy S4 appeared first on SwiftKey.