Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock

Microsoft snaps up SwiftKey for £170 million

swiftkey keyboard

Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock
Jon Reynolds and Dr Ben Medlock

Microsoft buys London based AI firm SwiftKey the maker of the popular predictive smartphone keyboard for  £170 million ($£250million). According to Microsoft “the development for both IOS and Android platforms will continue, in addition, they will explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the entire range of products and services.”

SwiftKey is one of the most popular keyboard apps available used by 300 million devices utilising its functionalities and Android support for over 100 languages that is powered by artificial intelligence. The company also developed a special language model to assist physicist Stephen Hawking. Over the last year Microsoft picked up Acompli, Wunderlist and Sunrise, the first two of which has been relaunched as the new Outlook. Softkey’s founders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock, who launched the company in 2008 when both were in their 20s will each make £20.4million ($30m). The UK is producing thousands of expert innovators who are building on products powered by new technological excellence of AI software.

Microsoft the world’s most profitable corporation, headquartered in Redmon, Washington, USA, established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, but rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s closely followed by the Microsoft Windows Operating systems, including office suite, and in the video game industry Xbox, Xbox360, Xbox One and in the digital services market with Zune, MSN and Windows Phone OS. The company’s first acquisition was Forethought on Jun29 1987,a presentation program which was later integrated as Microsoft PowerPoint, and on December 31, 1997 they acquired Hotmail, a free webmail service founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1996, which had over 8.5 million subscribers for $500million. In January 2000, Microsoft acquired Visio Corporation, specialising in diagramming application software. On July 12, 2002, Microsoft bought Navision, which develop the technology for Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise resource Painting software. Microsoft also purchased aQuantive an advertising company, on August 13, 2007, and May 10 2011 Microsoft acquired Skype technologies creator of VoIP service Skype for 8.5billion, on September 2, 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire mobile hardware division of Nokia.

In 2014, Google paid £400m for DeepMind, which then acquired Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory spinouts from the University of Oxford. Last year Apple acquired VocalIQ, a Cambridge based start-up whose AI software helps computers and people to converse more naturally.

In 2012, Amazon, the ecommerce group acquired EVi Technologies another Cambridge-based company which specialises in “natural language” system such as voice recognition.