It was only a month ago that a small startup out of Massachusetts called Spritz released a demo of its technology that purports to help people read text twice as fast as normal. In the weeks since then, the video has gone viral, and more than 10 million people have asked the same question: “When can I use this myself?” Since Spritz is a proprietary technology, not an app on its own, the answer so far has been “Not yet.”
That should change starting today. Spritz today is shipping its free software development kit (SDK) worldwide to let developers work with Spritz’s code and incorporate it into apps and websites. The more than 25,000 developers who have signed up for Spritz’s SDK will start to receive their kits starting today. Spritz tells me that the SDK launch will be in a staged rollout, with website SDKs coming first, followed by SDKs for Android and iOS.
Spritz’s co-founder and CEO Frank Waldman stopped by TechCrunch headquarters while visiting San Francisco last week to give us a hands-on look at Spritz’s technology on various devices including an Android phone, a Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, and Google Glass. Check that out in the video embedded above.
My impressions of Spritz are that it’s great for information that you want to absorb, but not chew on — emails, text messages, instructions, news and magazine articles, business reading, and the like. More thoughtful material such as novels do not seem to be the ideal use case. Although, as Waldman mentioned in the video embedded above, Spritz could be used to take in a chapter or so of a longer book you’re reading while you’re out on the go. In this way, Spritz can augment the traditional reading experience, rather than replace it.
Spritz, which has 13 full-time staffers between its headquarters in Boston and R&D teams in Salt Lake City and Germany, has raised $3.5 million in funding.
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