
Nuance To Acquire Swype For $100+ Million - aaronbrethorst
http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/06/nuance-to-acquire-swype-for-100-million/
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jerrya
Having used Swype, Flex T9, and Dragon Natural Speaking, this buyout bothers
me.

And that's because while Swype really seems to get what customer support is
all about, Nuance itself is still into customer support circa 1998. Email
support with automated wizards. A terrible "knowledge base". Seemingly no
phone support. No forums. No wiki.

It's honestly shocking how terrible and corporate focused Nuance's customer
support is, given the nature of many of the customers of Dragon Naturally
Speaking.

I wish the folks at Swype the best, once I started using it, I became unable
to use tap tap touchscreen keyboards.

On the other hand, I do find a comment from a Verizon salesman I was speaking
to interesting. And it matches my own experience. Really fast typers or
texters want a physical keyboard. The problem I have with Swype is that after
Swyping a sentence or two, I have to look at what is being input because salad
cookies wrong easily diction mumble bad. Elephant.

I picked up Flex T9 because I got an Android tablet not supported by Swype,
and Flex T9 is very good at swyping. But it is not nearly as good as Swype and
it is basically impossible to talk to Nuance about the problems. And unlike
Swype, there have been no updates.

So this could be a terrific marriage, especially if Siri technology trickles
into Swype and Nuance pulls its head out of its butt and figures out what
customer support is circa 2012.

But boy, their support website is so awful, it's hard to imagine.

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mcpherrinm
My understanding from having talked to Nuance employees is that they're really
a series of basically independent companies. Hopefully Swype can keep things
together: I'm a fan of their product.

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Adaptive
I have used swype to text with my non dominant hand, swaying back and forth in
the subway with full accuracy. Without it I honestly feel like I don't have a
keyboard installed.

I keep waiting for it to exit beta and show up in the market. This
acquisition, while good for Swype, makes me feel like that is just not going
to happen. I expect licenses and bundling with phones. I hope I'm wrong.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Nuance already sells a Swype like keyboard in the Market as FlexT9, bundling
is not their only business model.

PS: what you describe is precisely Swype's business model.

~~~
Adaptive
It is one part of their business model but there is also a pretty extensive
consumer direct beta program that I'm still part of.

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dergachev
Nuance bought ShapeWriter a year ago, and took it off Android market. A few
months later they started selling it as FlexT9, but a year later it's still
blocked outside the USA. I'm almost ready to flash Cyanogenmod on my Nexus
just so I can use Market Enabler to buy it in Canada. I'm not exactly
optimistic about this development.

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hrq
How is this worth $100m+ ?

~~~
callahad
T9 is/was a feature of nearly every feature phone available after its
introduction.

Swype has the potential to be T9 for touchscreens. There's a lot of money to
be made licensing that technology.

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mscarborough
FTA: "Congratulations to the founders and executives (Mike McSherry, Cliff
Kushler, Aaron Sheedy, Loreen Milbrath and Mark Illing), employees and
investors (the company has raised just $14 million)."

That they raised only $14 M is the most surprising part of this. Nice work.

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gcb
no other product tried so hard to drive me away as swype.

first version i tried, perfect, easy to change languages, just no non-english
dict.

second version, i was downloading updates like a madman. not so easy to change
languages. still no dict for non-english. harder to type in symbols i use
often.

tird version. same problems. plus a change of settings to auto correct words
that i had to find out how to turn off.

fourth... i don't really remember what they changed on the 4th update, maybe
they made numbers as hard as the symbols now... all i know is that i'm back to
the stock keyboard and after adding words like crazy to my personal dict, i
don't miss swype the slightest. good riddance.

edit: remembered what they changed last... it was a mindfuck way of handling
punctuation/backspace/space with the feature that delete the word right after
it's typed.

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robert_nsu
Wow. For a second there, I thought that said Skype.

