This is not anything new - the "wow" factor is that of speed reading.
This is basically a method to teach people speed reading, and that's why it seems amazing - but the top Google hit for programs to learn speed reading is spreeder (mentioned above), which has been around since at least 2006 (
http://lifehacker.com/196245/teach-your ... h-spreeder ).
Is it new that it's an SDK? Perhaps, but it's a bit sad that something so basic is being sold as a library - maybe I should sell a scrolly text SDK.
What is new is more marketing - but I find that it annoying that they gain a market by basically being deceptive: not telling people about speed reading, but making people think that the improvement in reading is through their method alone. Presenting it as some revolutionary idea even though both speed reading and the method to learn it are not new. And then presenting it in time to take advantage of new technology like watches and glass.
It claims:
"Reading is inherently time consuming because your eyes have to move from word to word and line to line."
I don't think this is true at all - for most people, the bottleneck isn't how fast you can move your eyes. It's because they don't speed read at all (e.g., reading each word at a time, thinking the word aloud in their head), or are limited by comprehension rate. Indeed, the rate that the demo showed words was not faster than I could move my eyes over the same text. The key part to how it works is that it forces you to speed read, prevents you from rereading, and forces a constant rate.
Once you've learned to speed read, you can do it just as well or better with traditional text, and you don't need an annoying popup to move to a faster rate (or slower, for more difficult to comprehend material).
It does take up less space on the page, but if I'm reading, I'm happy to devote the screen space to it, even if I had a small feature phone. It might be useful to display messages in say a game, but they've been doing that for years in various ways, including the way presented here.
The reason why this isn't done as a standard way for display text is it's annoying to force this onto people. Except on watches or glass, where it becomes the obvious natural way to do it (either that, or continuous scrolling).
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