Have you ever wished that your smartphone keyboard was smarter and easier to type on? Well Jon Reynolds did and he made his own unique solution, SwiftKey, a replacement for the stock keyboard on Android phones and recently even iPhones. SwiftKey analyzes your writing style and can predict what you are going to say next before you can even type it. The keyboard also lets you slide your fingers between letters so you don’t even have to lift your finger up. As stated online, SwiftKey accurately predicts what you are going to say next a third of the time, and 80% of the time, users do not have to type in more than 2 letters before SwiftKey correctly guesses the word.

SwiftKey was created in 2008 when Reynolds witnessed a friend struggle to use his blackberry keyboard. Reynolds saw that mobile phones were the next big thing and that innovating the keyboard was an untapped market. SwiftKey was the bestselling app on google play for two years straight and is now estimated to be installed on more than 200 million devices. This past year Apple announced that soon iPhones would be able to get replacement keyboards, opening a huge market for SwiftKey. Jon Reynolds is a great entrepreneur because he found a way to solve a major problem that no one had found a perfect solution for yet. Reynolds has truly innovated the smartphone keyboard market.

As a freshman at Babson College, John Goscha, an Economics and Entrepreneurship major, would hang sheets of white paper on his dorm room walls to sketch out his product ideas. The hassle of continuously hanging and taking down sheets of white paper became too much, and one of Goscha’s friends had the thought “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just paint the walls and write on them?” This got Goscha thinking about solving this problem and he would spend hours of his free time at the Babson chemistry labs trying to create a paint that acted like a dry erase board. He enlisted the help of two other teams to help him reach his objective, but with a year of research and hard work, they were unable to find the proper formula to create this paint. They thought it was impossible, when suddenly a lab from Michigan told Goscha some great news, they figured it out. With the proper formula Goscha was finally able to pursue his dream. At the young age of 25, Goscha had a potentially profitable product.

           After graduation, Goscha asked two of his closer friends, Jeff Avallon and Morgan Newman to join him in shaping his company. They were young, and inexperienced, but with the hardest process out of the way they could start building their product and company. In order to have a company, you need to have a name. That was the birth of IdeaPaint. Goscha and his team had created a clear paint that allowed buyers to change any smooth surface into dry erase board. The release of IdeaPaint was at a 2008 NeoCon Trade Fair. At NeoCon they won two awards in the “innovation” and “wall covering” categories. After they had released their product, they realized that they had opened a new door of creativity. People were no longer confined to small spaces to write and could express their ideas with almost no limitation, it was as if there was a new way of thinking. IdeaPaint has mainly focused on selling their product to colleges, businesses that requires group thinking, and some schools. Some well-known companies that use IdeaPaint are Apple, Google, and NASA. IdeaPaint is starting to advance into more office spaces and they hope to one day be found in many people’s homes.

Being a young entrepreneur myself I found these three men to be extremely inspiring. Goscha was a man who had almost all odds against him, but being driven by motivation he introduced a new way of thinking. He wanted people to be able to plan, write, and express their ideas in a simpler way. This idea of a paint that acts like a dry erase board was a complicated process, yet he was the one who thought that it could be a successful product and decided to take initiative. Due to the high cost of the products in the paint, IdeaPaint is mostly in larger companies. Maybe one day the cost will become affordable for the middle-class family and children will be able to draw on the walls with no fear of being yelled at by their parents.

Attached is a link to a video explaining a little bit more about IdeaPaint.  http://youtu.be/lo2HFA6T20U