So today, to give you more choice and respond to your feedback, we’re rolling out a new update, SwiftKey 4.1. It includes three more brilliant themes and a host of bug fixes. What’s more, we’re having a half-price sale to celebrate! For a limited time only, SwiftKey and SwiftKey Tablet will be just $1.99/£1.49/€1.99 – if your friends and family have not downloaded SwiftKey yet, now is a great time to share this with them.

When you update your app, you’ll find these brilliant new themes. First, there’s Dusk, a rich, deep blue accompanied by a bright yellow Flow trail. Then Regal, a striking purple accompanied by a contrasting yellow Flow. Both of these have distinctive rounded corners to the central candidates – a modern, fresh twist on our usual key design.

Then last but not least, there’s Pitch. Black, with minimalist white edging, we believe Pitch will have extra appeal for AMOLED phone users. With fewer pixels turned on, these users may find this helps preserve battery power for longer. We know this matters to you – in our 2012 survey, 96% of respondents said battery life was either essential or quite important. Pitch comes with a bright pink Flow trail for contrast.

Here’s a list of the bug fixes also included in SwiftKey 4.1:

• Fixed some issues with Facebook personalization
• Fixed problem reaching ? on punctuation slider
• Fixed crash when rotating screen in Settings
• Improved functionality with Opera
• Improved backspace in password fields and with smileys
• Fixed crash when pressing empty predictions
• Fixed issue with .com key in Chrome URL bar

We learn what needs work from your invaluable feedback so thank you to all our users who contribute their ideas and suggestions on our feedback forums. Users reporting bugs on our bugs forum help us to identify the issues that are affecting the most people, and to track them down quickly and efficiently.

Here at SwiftKey we hope you like this latest update, but we know there are more colors, more features, more languages, more innovations that you’re eager to get your hands on – there are some fantastic developments coming up, watch this space!

Enjoy,

Ruth

The post Three new themes – and a sale to celebrate! appeared first on SwiftKey.

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.

When Fast Company recently named SwiftKey as one of the World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Mobile Companies, this added to a collection of awards we’ve received on this theme; ‘Most Innovative App’ at the GMAs (2012), a Guardian Digital Innovation Award for ‘Best Startup’ (2012), and a People’s Voice Webby Award for ‘Mobile Experimentation and Innovation’ (2012). We were also shortlisted for a Lovie Award in the category ‘Experimental & Innovation’. These sit among other awards we’ve won that, though they don’t explicitly reference innovation in the title, embody this quality.

In an internal study (read ‘sticky-note survey’), we found that ‘innovation’ was the word SwiftKey staff most associated with the company, by a significant margin. So, we wanted to bring this ‘innovation’ into sharper focus, and take a look at what this means in practice for us.

SwiftKey’s technology represents more than just an advancement on what already exists; it’s a fundamental leap forward. Since we started out in 2008, we’ve been intentional about maintaining a forward-looking approach. This has allowed us to create technology that pushes boundaries. As our CMO, Joe Braidwood, emphasized in a recent article for Forbes, SwiftKey is part of the evolution towards devices functioning as ‘butlers’ rather than ‘concierges’, intelligently anticipating our needs ahead of time. Harnessing years of research into Natural Language Processing and Machine learning, we’ve invented the first ‘intelligent’ keyboard.

SwiftKey has achieved many ‘firsts’, including: the first touchscreen keyboard with next-word prediction, with context-based learning, with personalization and adaptive learning over time, with truly multi-lingual capabilities, or to have a simple three-prediction user interface. However, the beauty of our technology is its relevance to real people’s everyday lives. Our stats show that we’ve saved our users a total of over 300 billion keystrokes. Also, our users have typed over one trillion characters with the SwiftKey app; printed out in a 10 point font these would wrap around the earth 300 times! There’s no avoiding the fact that the tech powering SwiftKey is highly advanced (the writing on the whiteboard walls of our HQ is enough to make any head spin), but the result is human-shaped and easy to use, and that’s a key reason our tech is here to stay. This was further confirmed by our recent selection as Official Honorees of the Webby Awards in the category of ‘Best User Experience’.

‘Innovation’ is not just a descriptor of our technology, but a deliberate approach that permeates our culture. We continue to think carefully about creating an environment that best enables our staff to be most happy and therefore productive. Life at SwiftKey is structured in a way that values each individual in the team; this includes our self-directed environment with flexible working hours and the freedom to work from home on Mondays, Thursday and Fridays. There’s also a wide range of staff benefits including (among other things) free food and ping-pong, regular internal and external talks, Special Effort Awards and £100 Productivity Vouchers for all staff. Our culture is one that values creative risk, complemented by the freedom and opportunity staff have to share their ideas in a meaningful way. Further, supporting our non-hierarchical structure of small teams, we ensure that the staff we recruit in the first place are passionate about their role in contributing to what we’re building here.

Whilst we’ve found innovation has to be an intentional focus, we balance that with the caveat that (by definition) it cannot be predictably ‘planned’. Subsequently, a sense of discovery, intrigue and fun is encouraged, not stifled, at SwiftKey. Every month we hold an Innovation Day where staff are free to pursue their own personal projects or hobbies, alone or in groups. This space for open-ended creativity has ended up producing some of our key innovations, which we most likely wouldn’t have dreamt up in a meeting room. A great example of this was our recent Aprils Fools joke, ‘SwiftKey Tilt’. What we loved about SwiftKey Tilt, was that although it was a joke, we were still able to deliver a clever and tangible feature for you to play with. This was the result of one of our dev’s playful work on an Innovation Day. You can see our follow-up blog with some of our Tilt users’ reactions here.

So what’s ahead for us? Well, rest assured that while we have one eye on all that we’re currently achieving, we’ve got the other firmly placed on the horizon of what’s possible for us. We’re enjoying massive success with our award-winning consumer app (SwiftKey), our first enterprise product (SwiftKey Healthcare), and our deals with top handset manufacturers (it was recently announced that our tech is powering the Samsung S4′s keyboard)… but that’s all just setting the scene for what’s ahead. If you’ve followed our progress at all, hopefully you got the message that we’re an ambitious bunch who are far from done. We’re around 100 staff now, all working hard on various areas of the company. SwiftKey’s technology understands language – this is a meeting point for the interaction between humans and the technology that is increasingly shaping our daily landscape. The growing number of language-based challenges our digital world presents are opportunities for our intelligent technology to bridge the communication gap.

We’ve shown that when we see an opportunity to use our technology to improve the world around us, we jump at it.

The SwiftKey Team

The post Bringing SwiftKey’s innovation into focus appeared first on SwiftKey.

Starting with size, the USA is the country with the most SwiftKey users – Google Play tells us that 42% of our users are in the States. But neighboring Mexico has the most productive typists, each entering 2,650 characters per day, compared to an average of 1,794. That’s enough to fill 19 tweets.

Denmark is the country with the most efficient typists – the average efficiency there is 37%, compared to 34% overall. Perhaps this is because Danish users love to use SwiftKey predictions – one in 15 of their words is chosen without typing a single letter (6.7%, vs 4.3% on average).

Who likes to go with the Flow? India has the highest percentage of users with SwiftKey Flow turned on at 84% (vs 74% overall). Polish users flow nearly a third of their text (as opposed to tapping it or choosing predictions), 31% compared to a worldwide average of 24%. And Canadians flow the longest distance, at 6.4m/day (vs 5.1m overall).

What about themes? Users in Mexico, as well as doing the most typing, are also most likely to change theme, with 73% choosing one other than the default ‘Cobalt’. Norwegians are the opposite – 60% stay with Cobalt. Overall 53% of users change theme and 47% stick with the default. What theme have you chosen? If you use Cobalt is it because you think it’s the most beautiful theme, or have you not looked at the others?

Users in Indonesia are the most colorful – they are the top users for the Neon theme (24% vs 13% overall) and also for Pumpkin (12% vs 6.0%), Dark (11% vs 4.4% overall), and Berry (8.0% vs 3.5%)

Russian users are the biggest fans of Holo (18% vs 14%), modeled on the Android design guidelines and voted for by our VIPs. Folks in Vietnam like Light (11% vs 5.4%), users in Turkey are most likely to want to turn their keyboard Sky blue (9.1% vs 4.2%), and Irish SwiftKey users are the biggest fans of the pink theme Fuchsia (5.8% vs 2.4%).

Greek SwiftKey users have two distinctions – they are the most likely to have two or more languages enabled (60% vs 21% overall) and also the sloppiest typists – SwiftKey corrects 10% of all characters typed by users in Greece, compared to 8% overall. The country with the most tri-lingual users is Switzerland, where 14% of users have three languages enabled (vs 4.3% overall) – not surprising given its proximity to France, Germany and Italy.

And finally, users in Vietnam are most likely to hit the “share” button on their stats. Why not join them and share your stats with us?

Looking forward to seeing your stats,
Charlie

PS You may want to ask: how do we know this? SwiftKey periodically sends us statistics, like those on your stats page, in order to help us to understand how people use SwiftKey and how we can make it better. This is totally anonymous and does not include any information on what you have been typing. SwiftKey users’ privacy is very important to us and you can read our privacy policy in full here.

The post The world according to SwiftKey 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.

The preparations were underway weeks in advance. Many staff broke up their working days by rehearsing with instruments in our ‘breakout area’ downstairs and spontaneously forming bands with teammates.

For the night itself, the organizers (Sarah and Helen) put an amazing effort into transforming the breakout area into what could have been a super-cool live music bar in the city; even manually blacking-out all of the windows with bin-bags and sticky tape to achieve the optimum lighting in spite of clocks going forwards for daylight savings. Tables were covered in platters of delicious food and the drink was flowing freely. It was great having a few staff from United Learning, who occupy our 3rd floor, also join us for the merriment.

The atmosphere was ideal for the performers to try out new songs or play live for the first time, all in a friendly environment. The audience was treated to music from a range of genres and instruments including guitar, piano, violin, electronic looping machine and mandolin. Performers spanned all of the SwiftKey departments, with even our CTO making his Music Night debut.

Some unusual performances included an improvised saxophone solo piece by Richard L, inspired by words shouted out by members of the audience (‘twilight’, ‘sea’, ‘badger’ and ‘mushroom’), and also a singalong SwiftKey rendition of ‘House of the rising sun’, courtesy of Doug. We’ll leave you with the lyrics:

“There is a place near London Bridge
They call the SwiftKey Towers
And it’s been the workplace of many a poor boy [and girl]
For oh-so many hours

My Founder a civil servant
He dreamed of better typing
He will not cease his endless search
His travels or his skyping

The other was an expert
in things to do with text
He thinks of tricks to save you time
And ways to predict your next

But mentors tell your mentees
Don’t sign up for missus Doyle
She’ll keep you bobbing up and down
In a wash of tea and toil.”

By Precious Hamilton-Brown

The post A musical night at SwiftKey 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.