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| ZenZui Brings Zooming UI To Mobile Phones |
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posted by Editor
on Monday April 02, @06:46PM
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The startup ZenZui is introducing a zooming user interface to facilitate web browsing on mobile phones. The company is commercializing technology that it licensed from Microsoft, in particular the AppLens and LaunchTile interfaces developed by some of ZenZui's founders while they were at Microsoft Research (see paper - PDF). The ZenZui interface is based on a Zoomspace, which is an information landscape of personalized content in the form of "Tiles" reflecting areas of interest to the user. The Zoomspace can be navigated using just a thumb, which can control the virtual motion in and out of the space, and any particular Tile can instantly be accessed with two taps (performance is accelerated through adaptive caching). The company is also promoting a new business ecosystem for its interface, in which Tiles can be sponsored by commercial third parties, which subsidize the cost of ZenZui services in exchange for displaying their ads (see diagram). Microsoft is one of ZenZui's investors, but according to this TechRepublic article, ZenZui plans to support not only Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, but also Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), which has a far larger footprint in the market with 1.2 billion devices worldwide. Apparently, Microsoft considers ZenZui to be a sufficiently disruptive technology that it would be best served by a separate business, which can exploit its full potential without direct interference from Microsoft's notoriously Windows-centric internal culture.
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