We will be at EIE13 – Engage Invest Exploit at The Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh on May 9th. The event is Scotland’s premier annual investor event, showcasing the best companies spinning out of Scotland’s world class universities and start-ups from our wider entrepreneurial eco-system.
Try out the special EIE13 vocabulary we’ve created for all Android devices, here.
Informatics Ventures, the Edinburgh BioQuarter and the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI) have joined forces to create what will be the largest ever investor showcase in Scotland.
Touchscreens will soon be universal, from your interactive TV remote to your car to your mobile office. Their Achilles’ heel is slow text entry. Flexpansion’s world-beating Fast Forward Typing overcomes this, doubling speed and productivity with advanced word prediction and unique, powerful abbreviation expansion. Premium customers are busy, expensive professionals on the move. Trials are running in multiple sectors. The team is lean and smart, with 3 PhDs plus business and finance backgrounds. Flexpansion Ltd will help the world communicate twice as fast.
We are seeking investment and partners to market cross-sector, and if you’re coming we look forward to meeting you!
Flexpansion today announces the next evolution in word prediction, the MindTron 4-Tel™. Word Prediction was so 2012.
After years of development we are proud to launch a product that with a single keypress will not only type out the entire document you sort-of-vaguely had in mind to write, but also email it to interested parties, deal with their responses, tweet a massively-truncated witty summary of the correspondence, then engage in a protracted flame war with a previously-unnoticed follower over the correct use of hyphenation.
The same time next year we will be releasing the Authotron 4000™. Within moments of a glance in the general direction of your tablet, a masterpiece of fiction, documentary reportage, or tragic, angst-ridden-rite-of-passage memoir will appear on your screen. Rumours that Jeffrey Archer has had secret access to the software since 1996 are strenuously denied by the company.
Dr Tim Willis
1st April 2013
We’ve just released an update which allows you to resize keys any way you like, along with the primary and secondary characters.
Also we’ve made the popular typewriter sound scheme FREE.
Furthermore we’ve brightened up some of the colour schemes in the Pro version.
Tell your friends! And remember, Flexpansion has NO TIME LIMIT!
The Counting House, 36 West Nicolson Street, EH8 9DD, 0131 667 7533
As part of a Ragged University event, Flexpansion founder & CEO, Dr Tim Willis will be giving a free talk this Thursday, near the George Sq campus of Edinburgh University. Our free word prediction app is based heavily on Linguistics & Phonetics, and he will give an overview of this interesting and wide-ranging subject.
About Tim’s talk
What do all languages have in common? How do they differ? How can we analyse them? And why?! This will be a whistle-stop tour of the ways in which writing and speech can be looked at, and the next talk (maybe 2!) will go into more details of whichever areas people find most interesting.
Subjects include: meaning (semantics / pragmatics); how words are made up (morphology, e.g. ‘anti-dis-establish-ment-ar-ian-ism’); how words group together and can be moved around (syntax / grammar); Figurative vs literal; speech sounds (phonetics / phonology); computer processing of language; level of formality (“Hey buddy, whassup?” vs. “I wish you good morning”); change over time (“Good morrow”); idioms (“hit the sack”) and many others.
Practical uses include word prediction, language learning, machine translation, speech recognition / generation, spelling correction and search engines.
2nd Talk: Life by Chocolate; An Adventure Into Cacao By Ali Gower
Co-owner of The Chocolate Tree, an artisan chocolate shop
I will be talking about Cacao sourcing, preservation of biodiversity, ethical trade & chocolate making from bean to bar. The subject of cacao & chocolate is highly topical. Despite being a food that is renowned for it’s pleasure giving properties, it has a dark cultural history.
Further Info
There will be some food, some music by Paul Montague and plenty of people to meet and chat with. As always, the event will be entirely free for anyone to come along to. Please visit the website, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
www.ragged-online.com
Facebook: Ragged University
Twitter: @raggedtalks
Our new Press Pack is available here, featuring our brand new free keyboard, which we will release to co-incide with the event. We hope you like the new look as much as we do!
Our new update adds the following, which were the most-requested features in our Support Forum.
- Tap Shift then swipe to move up / down / left / right. Caps lock for multiple moves.
- Option to remove keypress popups
- Swipe down on keyboard to disable prediction, up to re-enable.
- Long-press ?123 for speech
Long-press the ?123 key for speech
We also stopped our beta Gmail learning mechanism from picking up and learning individual alphabet letters.
Have you tried out our free Festive theme yet? If you’re reading this on Dec 31st there’s still time ;-) Go to Menu > More > Settings > User Interface and select them. Sounds include fireworks, party blowers and sleigh bells.
Download the latest version on Google Play now!
Happy New Year from all at Flexpansion!
We’ve now added autocorrect to Flexpansion. To put this into context, we now not only check your input against every possible word for which it could be an abbreviation, in Flexpansion’s built-in dictionary plus all the words you’ve added, but we also now check for ‘nearby’ words that it could be a typo for. For instance type ‘tgr’ and as well as words like ‘tiger’ and ‘together’, you’ll also be offered ‘the’, ‘they’, ‘there’ etc. – words that start with letters similar to (or the same as) your input, with auto-completion thrown in.
This was the most-requested feature, and as you’ll appreciate, with the only available fully flexible abbreviation expansion app available anywhere (as far as we know), the complexity of getting this to work on a mobile device took a lot ingenuity, so we’re very proud.
Also our programmers tightened up performance at the same time, fixing various bugs including one that bizarrely placed numbers at the end of a sentence in speech recognition.
We’re encouraging users to try out our free Festive theme right now – sleigh bells, decorations and fireworks! Season’s Greetings!
We’re very proud to announce that after months of work, we have now released a major update, a big enough leap forward to call the next generation of Flexpansion. Here’s what’s new:
● Installation has been improved to make each step much clearer, and we now bypass the Google Play store to download language packs directly from our server, simplifying it. We’ve had a total of 3 reports of problems with the server after many, many hundreds of downloads, so these seem to have been isolated and as far as we can fathom were down to connection issues at the users’ end – please get in touch if you have any problems.
● Prediction is now much better – try it and you’ll notice how much more closely it now gets to know your style.
● We have also released a beta of our gmail learning mechanism, which trains on your personal Sent emails. This is still a little buggy but we wanted to let you try it out. Known bugs include picking up individual letters and typos, but we’re working on this. We hope you’ll love how well it predicts once it’s trained, even with the bugs.
● Fuller Help feature. We found people weren’t aware of many of our features, indeed some people were asking us to add ones that were already there, so we’ve added more details. Access Help any time by tapping Menu, More, and then the first item, ‘How To Use’.
● Lots more bug fixes
Coming soon: Autocorrect and more.
Download the new version FREE here!
We’ve also updated our logo, our banner image on Google Play, and the icons for our Free and Pro versions. Our new theme is Fast Forward Typing, reflected in the logo with its double right-angle-brackets, to emphasise our unique ability to expand any abbreviation, the only such system in the world for mobiles and tablets.
Flexpansion new company logo
Flexpansion Free new icon
Flexpansion Pro new icon
We will be retiring our old language packs from the store once enough people have upgraded, but we’re leaving them visible for now so that they’ll see that they need to.
Please get in touch and tell us what you think of the new version. Thanks for reading,
Tim
Dr Tim Willis, CEO & Founder, Flexpansion
We have just released our major new update for Flexpansion – improved prediction, Gmail learning, bug fixes and, we hoped, smoother installation. However we’ve had a couple of reports of people having problems installing our new vocabulary packs. These are downloaded directly from our website, bypassing the need to manually install them from Google Play. It is literally two reports, but we’re not sure if there is a wider problem. Sometimes the initial connection takes as much as 20 seconds or so, and we will be adding a notification to make this clear, so that might have been the issue, but we have also asked our hosting company to look into it.
If you are having any problems with the new vocabularies, please contact us and we can fix things. We are doing our best to establish firstly whether this has affected more than a couple of people, and secondly how best to address it.
Thanks for your help.
Tim
Dr Tim Willis, CEO & Founder
p.s. Since I wrote this, we had a third report – no others. And we located a cause for the download problems – hopefully all solved now – which was down to one of the carriers scrambling the vocabulary file during downloading. An amazing piece of detective work by our programmers, since two identical devices on different carriers would act completely differently. We now have a different mechanism which bypasses the problem.
My talk at the Ragged University event on the 10th Oct went really well, many thanks to all who came. It’s an excellent open learning project where everyone presents free talks on their expert subjects.
I talked on the challenges and opportunities in setting up a tech business, from my own experiences setting up Flexpansion, from the initial proof-of-concept for an advanced word prediction system, through raising funding, getting the product built and launched, dealing with competition, branding and marketing, then up to the situation now, where we’re seeking companies to try out our bespoke versions for their businesses, to make them more productive.
My slides are here, complete with notes: Starting a Technology Business – Flexpansion advanced word prediction. I hope I’ll get time eventually to present them as a slideshow or video, which means recording the notes as a voiceover. Unfortunately the talk itself wasn’t filmed as the man with the camera was ill that evening.
The next event in Edinburgh will be on 29th Nov in the Counting House, near Edinburgh University’s George Square, on “Unravelling the Mysteries of Humpback Whale Behaviour” by Dr Alison Craig, and “Greening Up Your City” by Kate Gilliam
