Edmonton, Alberta — (press release excerpt) — Alta Terra Ventures Corp. today announced an agreement to purchase Univolve, a private Alberta-based software company whose major thrust is reactive keyboard and compression technology with text-prediction software that is built on a Linux platform.

Univolve's reactive keyboard and compression technology is expected to enable significantly improved functionality in embedded operating systems. This has direct implications in the wireless communications markets, where data entry is difficult or compromised — such as in PDAs, cellphones and other computing devices.

The acquisition will enhance Alta Terra's product offering for the lucrative wireless communications markets, where Alta Terra has already begun to market an Embedded Linux OS.

Devices such as handhelds, pagers and cell phones are becoming increasingly miniaturized and consequently have space limitations in terms of text entry, available memory and keyboarding. The reactive keyboard technology can predict likely text continuations on a small menu window for user acceptance, thereby facilitating speed, accuracy, and efficiency of entry without the limitations associated with a dictionary.

The Linux-based reactive keyboard technology uses sophisticated probabilistic modeling techniques to automatically extract patterns from various data streams, and uses them to predict future entries. The reactive keyboard's smart features enable it to learn from user input. It is completely language and dictionary independent, and does not require a traditional keyboard. A simplified version of it has been operating for a number of years and is being used to assist physically challenged persons.

The development of an adaptive text prediction technology has been the subject of numerous scientific publications and two books by Cambridge University Press, all co-authored by the reactive keyboard's inventor, John Darragh. Mr. Darragh developed the reactive keyboard to help people with physical impairments work with Qwerty keyboards. Increasing the productivity of each user keystroke by entering several characters with a single keystroke (amplification) and decreasing the time required to enter a keystroke by improving the selection of the next most likely characters (acceleration) are key elements of the original design. John Darragh and his brother Brian Darragh will be joining Alta Terra in the final market development of the technology.

 
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