VentureBeat

Kannuu, a service specializing in lookup technology, has a new iPhone software development kit (SDK). These tools will give developers a different way to use search within their apps beyond the default methods Apple supplies.

The key part of Kannuu’s functionality is that it doesn’t require users to use the iPhone keyboard when searching for something. Say you have a contact list in your application; you input the first letter of a person’s name and immediately an overlap will appear giving your four options for the next letter. These letters are in the up, down, left and right positions. This method gives you a huge click zone to hit the letter you want rather than having to hit a small key on the iPhone keyboard. Clicking the center button will give you more options.

Better still is that Kannuu can utilize the accelerometer for input. This means that if the letter you want to select is on the left hand side, you simply tilt the device to the left to select it.

The technology runs an algorithm in the background to determine the most likely letters you are looking for. It can be very accurate because it only searches the database for the application you are in, so you cannot mistype for an entry that doesn’t exist.

Obviously this technology would be ideal in a situation where you don’t have a lot of time to stare at the iPhone’s screen — such as when you’re in a car.

Kannuu’s technology works with other devices as well, as we’ve written about in the past. One recent example beyond a phone is Coby Electronics using kannuu to handle user interaction with its new music players.

The Kannuu iPhone SDK is very flexible in terms of how developers can use it. It can be built in as part of an application and reside of the device, it can sit server-side (handy if the app you’re building is just a web app), or a combination of the two.

The SDK is available to developers for free. Once an app is commercialized, developers will either pay a small royalty if the app is sold through the App Store or pay a charge based on how its used if it’s a web app.

Kannuu has only taken angel funding to date. It is in the early stages of discussions about doing a proper funding round now.

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When I saw Kannuu’s user interface for text navigation last year, it seemed wonderfully simple. Now the company has landed its first commercial licensee: Coby Electronics will use Kannuu’s user interface on a couple of new music players.

The Kannuu interface feels as elegant as haiku. It makes it easy to spell out a bunch of words or phrase using only your thumb, helping you navigate on devices that can’t accommodate a keyboard. The company claims that you could find a song or artist three times faster with the Kannuu interface than you could on an Apple iPod, with its scroll wheel.

You can use the Kannuu interface to spell words using just your thumb, pointing “up, down, left, right or center.” On any given one of those buttons, letters of the alphabet appear. You scroll through different letters by applying pressure in one direction.

Once you select a letter, the predictive-text function of Kannuu (dubbed “partial word completion”) initializes and presents another set of five different letters, all based on what you might be trying to spell and what is in the relevant database at hand. If you were trying to spell “Stairway to Heaven,” you could do it this way in just a few keystrokes.

The Coby devices are hitting the market later this quarter. More licensees are on the way. Dallas-based Kannuu makes money through royalties on the Coby deal, said Sean-Michael Daley, chief executive.

The company started in 2002 in Australia. It spent a long time getting the interface right and securing patents for the technology. It moved to Dallas and then launched at the DEMOfall show in October of last year. It has 10 employees and has raised an undisclosed amount of angel money. At some point, Daley plans to raise a new round.

The smart part about the Kannuu interface is that it is context aware. The letters or numbers for each of the five directional buttons depends on what the user is trying to do. The prediction is good because it is limited to whatever the user is trying to do. If you’re looking up a music artist and you type “L-E-D,” you can bet pretty fast that the next word is going to be Zeppelin.

Daley said that the limited nature of the predictions is what makes it seem more accurate than predictive text that you use on cell phone text messaging systems. That is what has helped the company win some awards at mobile conferences and from Nokia. Kannuu has set up a developer group so that customers can more easily set up their applications using Kannuu. The company believes the interface can be used across a wide swath of applications, including mobile applications where you need to do things such as enter the name of a hotel at a mobile version of a web site such as Hotels.com.

As for more deals, Daley said, “There are others coming behind this.”

Kannuu is a data-entry technology that could replace some forms of mobile texting, such as quickly searching for the name of a city in Google Maps.

Kannuu’s interface providers four choices on a simple, four-direction keypad, based on the letters they are most likely to choose. The software combines an intuitive interface with database indexing to simplify searches. For example, to find find and choose the city Cupertino, only four quick choices need to be made.

The software works by recalculating each time users enter a letter, offering the choices most likely to be needed next. In the search for Cupertino, Calif., for example, the letters C, L, S and N are the most likely beginnings.

In case the search is for a different city and none of the choices apply, the user can scroll progressively through more choices. Letters not likely to ever begin a city name (X and Z, for example) will be located near the end.

A similar selection method is in use in current GPS units, which narrow down choices as users enter letters on a full keyboard. By changing the interface to a simple directional pad and narrowing the possible choices to five, Kanuu reduces the time and thought needed to choose the next letter.

Although comparisons can also be drawn to T9 predictive text entry, which is part of most SMS applications on mobile phones, Kannuu is not meant for lengthy messages. It’s great for searching searching through databases, though.

Continuing the Cupertino example, on the second choice, the letter U is not presented, so the “More Options” button is selected. After U is chosen, few options remain, so the software can suggest Cupertino (see example).

Therein lies the other innovative part of Kannuu: Its ability to speedily search through possible choices and present them to the user. Sean-Michael Daley, the company’s CEO, told us that they’ve tested on databases ranging from “a file on your phone to all of Wikipedia,” without experiencing any slowdown in the software’s speed.

Other possible applications include searching through songs in an online music store, shopping for items on eBay, and replacing entry on devices like the TiVo, as well as nearly every form of data entry on mobile phones.

The company is in talks with both mobile carriers and internet services to license the service, and says it should have announcements of its first applications within a few weeks. It has so far only taken angel funding.