Topic:  Decuma Graffiti for the Next Generation?
Date:
22/08/2003
 

Decuma Graffiti for the Next Generation?

Clie Connections

Unless you've been living in a cave (with your PDA of course…) you are probably aware by now of the replacement of Graffiti in newer model Palm OS organizers. This was due to a law suite brought against Palm for the similarities between Graffiti and other handwriting recognition software. (Full details can be found in The Death of Graffiti…)

One of the new pieces of software available on new PDAs is called Decuma. Currently the product is available for Chinese, Japanese, and Latin (such as English letters) characters. What sets Decuma apart from many of the other graffiti replacements is its ability to interpret characters and symbols (including spaces) written side by side (much like your own natural handwriting) into text and insert it into the text field that you are editing.

Decuma

Recently it was my pleasure to interview Anders Berglund, Chief marketing Officer with Decuma. He was gracious in his responses and provides us some insight into Decuma and their plans for the future:

1) First, Where does the name Decuma come from? Does it have a meaning?

Quick background, Decuma was a Roman goddess of Fate who determined the length of the thread of life. Originally from Greek mythology with the counterpart Lachesis. The three founders chose the name since the term Decuma also was used in ancient Rome as a term in surveying. The research field of computer vision has borrowed techniques from surveying and thus the connection:-)

2) Tell us a little about your company and its history.

- Decuma was founded in 1999 but in reality operations was started in the spring 2000. The company was founded by three mathematicians who carried out research in the field of computer vision at Lund University in Sweden. They happened to realize that some of their research results could be applied also on the handwriting recognition problem. They patented their invention and went on to start Decuma.

However, rather soon we realized that developing and selling algorithms was not enough. We needed to be able to deliver a complete solution. This required increased linguistically knowledge, interaction design know how and the ability to localize the products. We managed to acquire those skills and today we are a company consisting of linguists, interaction designers, mathematicians and computer scientists with different nationalities from countries such as Sweden, Japan and China. We do believe that we are unique in not only focusing on handwriting recognition as a mathematical problem. Instead we emphasis the importance of the user interface and that it should be intuitive and easy to use.

Today Decuma's head office resides in Lund Sweden, and we have representative offices in Tokyo, Japan and Beijing, China. We have several well known companies as our official customer such as Sony, HP, Casio, NTT DoCoMo etc. We have initially focused on Japan as a market to reach out to the world from through their big household electronics manufacturers.

3) How long have you worked for them and what are your responsibilities?

I am responsible for all marketing and sales within Decuma. My title is Chief Marketing Officer. I have work with the company since May 2000 (officially since August 2000. I have seen the company develop from having an algorithm in "Matlab" to a sold and fully implemented product on the Sony Clié. It has required several trips to Japan, basically once a month for several years. It has consumed a lot of energy but it has been worth while. Gradually we managed to adopt the products to their needs and obtain enough credibility. When I first went to Japan in May 2001 we did not have a Japanese product. In March 2002 HP released our Japanese product on the Japanese market and it was a direct hit. We have now managed to build a strong brand name in Japan.

4) How did the company get started in this niche market of PDA input software?

- Initially we thought mobile phones would be the most interesting market for us. It still might be, but we soon realized that the PDA was already their with all the hardware that handwriting recognition requires (touch screen and stylus). Now we believe that the PDA market offers us a very interesting opportunity and that it will just increase as the devices becomes more and more wireless and thus requiring more and more data traffic.

5) You are obviously very pleased with the inclusion of Decuma in newer model Sony Clié models. Which models currently Decuma? How about the new UX models?

-This is a tricky question for me to answer. Currently we are present in the NX73(Japan, Europe and the US) and the NX80 (Japan and the US). I am quite sure you will hear more from us in the near future.

6) Do you currently use a PDA and, if so, which one?

- Yes I do, at the moment I use an iPAQ and a Sony Clié NX70

7) Do you personally find yourself using Decuma more than Graffiti?

- Definitely, I do not want to brag but I exclusively use the Decuma input on my PDA.

8) Are there any advancements planned for Decuma - such as the ability to change the letter size (to allow you to write more per line) or change the color of the background to match your launcher background?

- I don't believe for a moment that we can stop developing our products. So we will of course continue to do so. I will not go into details about what will happen and when (It takes time to implement new features and to verify them in usability tests). You mention some things that can be of interest there are a lot of other interesting possibilities as well.

9) What PDA web sites do you tend to visit on a regular basis?

Clié Source, PDA News (of course), Pen Computing, Handango, Palm Gear

10) Are there any other products under development that you want to mention?

- We are focusing on handwriting recognition solutions for PDAs and Smart phones.

11) Are there plans to release Decuma to the public for use on other Clié models?

- Sony are already offering Decuma Japanese to their older Clié customers for the Palm OS5. The software can be purchased on Sony's Japanese website. Regarding the US and the European markets I would have to ask you to ask Sony. In Decuma the strategy has been to target the device manufacturers (the OEMs). We are a small company (16 employees) with limited resources. Distributing our software directly to the end consumers has been regarded to costly. We do like to be able to provide all PDA users with our software of course.

I'd like to thank Mr. Berglund for taking the time from his busy schedule to share with all of us a little more about Decuma and their product. Be sure to stay tuned to PDA News 24 for a full review of Decuma…. which has now been posted!

 
Category: Clie Connections