Whenever I think of speed-reading, memories of late-night television info-mercials come to mind with promises of being able to read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in hours.
This perception will be one of the major challenges facing Toronto-based Spreed, which just launched a mobile application called Spreed News that increases how fast you can read content on wireless devices such as the iPhone. Spreed’s approach is it organizes words in groupings so they can be quickly and, as important, effectively comprehended.
Spreed is the brain-child of Anthony Novac, who has been thinking about speed-reading for more than a decade. After selling his online gambling company last year, Novac and his parter, Suhail Mirza turned their attention to Spreed.
Over the past year or so, Anthony has shown me the technology in action. There’s no doubt you can read faster. However, the technology always struck me as a solution looking for a problem.
With the launch of the iPhone application – and soon versions for Windows Mobile and the Blackberry – Spreed may have found its calling. The iPhone application is pretty cool, featuring a small group of default blogs (Alas, Mark Evans Tech isn’t one of them!), and the ability to easily customize it to meet your content needs.
As Spreed pushes forward, it has two major hurdles to overcome. One, it has to aggressively market its services so people, who will consume more content as wireless devices with fast online access become popular, know Spreed exists. At the same, Spreed must educate consumers about the technology, how it works, and why they should give speed-reading a whirl.
One of the things about Spreed is you need to train your brain to get the most out of it. At first, reading at 300 words/minute seems awfully fast, but your brain quickly adapts to the point where 300 words is a snap. Keep in mind, Spreed is a different experience from regular reading because you to have to focus. I can’t see using Spreed for long documents but there’s easily a market for people who want to read blogs and news stories while on the go.
For more, check out Mathew Ingram and Tech Vibes, which suggests Spreed News “Brings 3G Speeds to Your Eyeballs’.
Technorati Tags: spreed, speed-reading, iPhone
4 Comments
Great post Mark. Very informative and you definitely hit the nail on the head when it comes to the hurdles that lay ahead of us.
We are actively pursuing a number of cross-promotional initiaives which should increase general awareness of our app (obviously having it in the iTunes App store helps … it hitting the store at the end of the week).
Education is also going to be very important and something that may be hard to tackle on the limited space provided by the iPhone. None the less, we must make an effort to let everyone know how to use the app (dont focus on each word, focus on taking in the full group of text).
BTW, your openning line reminds me of a great quote by the legendary Woody Allen, “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” In that regard, one of the items that we have really focused on at Spreed is creating an application that not only lets you read faster, but also increases comprehension. The more you use Spreed, the more you will find this to be true.
Once again thanks for the post and I look forward to rolling back the curtains on some of the new features and future products we have to offer.
Dave
Sorry for a follow up comment, but had to share this given your points on education. Here is an independent speed reading experts run through on how to use spreed effectively:
http://www.michaelonspeedreading.com/yy_uploaded_videos/01_spreednews_review/
As matthew points out, Spreed is a joke. He said it more politely than I.
Every once in awhile you stumble upon an extremely stupid idea. Spreed is one of them. Trust me. I’m friends with Anthony. I totally believe that this is Anthony’s dumb idea.
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