Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

kannuu Developer Network open for business

analysis
Apr 22, 20082 mins

What's kannuu? Basically, it's a novel input method editor for selection, which can reduce the number of button clicks needed to pick an item from a large but finite list using nothing more than a four-way selector. It looks like it might be useful for picking items on cell phones, media players and set-top boxes, although I found it less than intuitive at first. For a canned demo with explanations, try the &quo

What’s kannuu? Basically, it’s a novel input method editor for selection, which can reduce the number of button clicks needed to pick an item from a large but finite list using nothing more than a four-way selector. It looks like it might be useful for picking items on cell phones, media players and set-top boxes, although I found it less than intuitive at first.

kannuu demo
For a canned demo with explanations, try the “view demo” link at the bottom of this page .

For an interactive demo, try this. To understand how it works, go here.

I have to admit that I’ve found searching from my own cell phone, which doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard but does have a numeric keypad and decent word completion, to be a tedious process. Will picking with 5 keys instead of 12 improve things? The kannuu demos claim yes, but on first principles I wonder.

Nevertheless, the news to consider is that the kannuu Developer Network is open for business, allowing you to download SDKs, code samples, and documentation for free. The planned platform support is extensive.

Deployment will not be free, however, and kannuu won’t say exactly what the license fees will be. “Product licensing will be based on the utilization and the scenario, on a case-by-case basis,” Sean-Michael Daley, CEO, told this reporter. “On the other hand, we want people to adopt our technology, so we plan to be very aggressive about making it affordable to deploy.”

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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