minuum

Definitely! We're signed up already :)

The best thing about being a one-line keyboard is that you can curve more nicely than a full keyboard can. Alternatively, because we're so thin, we could nicely fit along the center of the circle display and have room for content both above and below the keyboard.

One of our ideas for a rounded watch display, depending on the hardware, would be to actually rotate the bezel from left to right to choose letters (so no touchscreen required). Kind of like the interface on the Nest... which we'd also love to type on.

-Will

In the end, it was quite simple: we emailed a couple of tech journalists, and TechCrunch wrote an article about us within 3 hours of launching - from there, the internet exploded with media coverage, and the single biggest contributor to our million YouTube views was someone's Reddit post of our video, which hit the front page.

My opinion is generally that our success was entirely dependent upon the shareability of that video.

It's actually quite funny how we had a detailed plan for the whole month of the crowdfunding campaign, which we never ended up following - we heard that it was important to hit 20% of your funding goal within the first two days, so we had carefully prepared emails ready to send to everyone we knew. We also had a long list of events that we planned to attend to promote Minuum in. In the end, we never had a chance to do any of this because we were inundated with media inquiries for the next few weeks.

-Will

Thanks!

What have you implemented which you were initially really against?

Our original beta testers (who supported us on Indiegogo) got to experience the first ever version of the keyboard with no full-sized keyboard mode. We resisted the concept of having a full-sized keyboard because we were worried it would detract from the concept of the smaller keyboard.

Since announcing Minuum 2.0 last week, we've heard even more requests from people who actually want to use Minuum for its full keyboard mode, because they only occasionally need to switch to the smaller version. While this initially seemed quite strange to us, we ended up building in a bunch of new full-keyboard-specific customizable settings for the 2.1 release this morning.

We've come around to accepting people's desire for a full keyboard once in a while; I feel that giving people access to the full keyboard through a quick gesture shortcut might actually help to reinforce the direct visual+functional connection between the full/compact modes. That's why the little keyboard works, after all - because it's so similar to the big one!

How does the language model algorithm differ for US English and the yet to implemented UK English?

The algorithm doesn't change there; it's all about getting the right dataset to build the language models from. We've built our current English language model as a hybrid between the two (US and UK) until we obtain enough UK-specific data to build a separate module.

will we ever see Emoji without needing to use the horrid bottom panel? :) I should think so - Emoji functionality is something that we've been treating as very much experimental, to gauge people's responses to it. We've been rapidly iterating with its functionality, and have a few major changes planned already.

We've been thinking of our bottom panel as a means of providing additional benefit to people who don't care enough about their screen space, and would rather us provide additional functionality instead. We're actually curious about the literary implications of having Emoji characters always present; i.e. how does the structure of the input method inform how people choose to communicate?

What do you find so horrid about the panel, and what would you prefer? An emoji mode that can be selected analogous to the switch to numbers mode?

-Will

precisely :)

[Edit: well, except for the whole knob-in-the-middle part]

-Will

Yup - Android Wear seems to be Google's logical extension of the Glass project, which we've already been thinking about

-Will