There’s a new calculus afoot among “agile” application and software developers, especially those addressing the marketplace created by new mobile devices. It pays to “sell solutions,” especially when your solution is for a very specific, well-recognized problem.

This lesson was driven home most recently when Nuance Communications acquired Swype, Inc., a small, company whose single product is software makes it simpler and faster to use your finger (or a stylus?) to enter text on a smartphone. According to this SEC filing and this comment by my associate Greg Sterling on Internet2Go, Nuance is committing something on the order of $100 million to merge Swype into its operations, presumably to add Swype capabilities to its Flex T9 interface.

In his post, Greg questions why Nuance needs to buy Swype, even as Flex T9 already outperforms Swype in some respects. He presents a list of possible answers to his question, including what I would call “the three P’s,” patents, positioning and personnel. But I would add a fourth: “Packaging.” Swype’s market proposition was simplicity itself: “Swype is a faster and easier way to input text on any screen.” That’s it. And it won over a following.

As for Nuance, it is following its time-tested modus operandi for constant improvement and refinement through acquisition. It’s been doing to bring specific refinements to its product portfolio automated speech processing – including voice biometrics, directory assistance/auto-attendant, text-to-speech rendering, dictation, medical transcription and other domains that benefit from solving specific problems. The core T9 technology came with the acquisition of Tegic from AOL-Time Warner in 2007 for $247 million. At the time I called it part of Nuance’s “Pay It Forward” strategy of constantly improving a mobile subscriber’s ability to take control of his or her device and the services provided through it.

For Nuance, it adds to its portfolio of technologies that support highly personalized mobile services. For Swype, it provides a windfall, liquidity event that satisfies its founders and investors. For those of us into pattern recognition, this acquisition is similar to the one that brought GroupMe – a year-and-a-half old, single-product company – into Microsoft/Skype’s pantheon of products and services. A journalist at the International Business Times-Australia accurately referred to GroupMe as “a super-small, zero-revenue tech company founded only last year at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon.”

So why did GroupMe fetch a multi-million price (rumored to be between $65 and $78 million) from Microsoft? The resemblance to the Nuance/Swype deal is striking. First, GroupMe solves a known problem confronted by millions of mobile users as they try to form small groups on the fly. Or as GroupMe puts it on its Home Page: “Group Messaging from Any Phone.” Second, it’s not an “app,” it’s part of the user interface. It can be generalized across multiple modes and media. As we’ve learned with Google+ and, with some difficulty on Facebook or LinkedIn, we humans benefit from group-forming utilities. GroupMe’s core product may be the result of a mere eight hours at a TechCrunch Hackathon (using Twilio’s tools on Amazon Web Services EC2, incidentally) but it fulfilled a recognized Gap in Skype’s mobile user interface.

The acquisition enhances the Microsoft/Skype e-services genome. It’s a grand slam home run for GroupMe. From the mobile subscriber’s point of view, it improves his or her ability to take control of their device and the services it offers. See the pattern?

Categories: Articles

Tags: Microsoft, user experience, Nuance, Skype, Mergers and Acquisitions, mobile services