Paddling Around With Kannuu

Kannuu was selected as one of the winners of the 2008 Nokia Mobile Rules contest, an annual contest for business plans and applications in the mobile environment. Kannuu was the winner for the best Multimedia Technology Innovation, and I wanted to know more, so I got in touch with them and discovered an intriguing new way to interact with your data - specifically with lists.

Kannuu's goal is to make text input on mobile devices as simple as possible, using only the d-pad. It looks a bit hokey, to be honest, but after some use, I found that their system is incredibly easy to pick up and use, and does indeed make it much quicker and easier to get to what you're looking for. Kannuu is not an application, but rather a new form of text entry, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the technology make its way to a Nokia handset soon, given their award.

When you need to enter text, Kannuu will popup, and offers 5 options, laid out like your d-pad (4 plus the center button). When you press a direction to choose a character, the four change again and help you dig deeper. For example, when used to navigate your contacts, you're presented with 4 letters, usually the ones that you use the most. You press left to choose 'J', and the next group of letters is O, A, I, and E. Click left again to pick O, and the next letter is - you guessed it - H. As soon as possible, also, Kannuu will start offering whole solutions. You may click J-O and then be offered Jonathan, John, Joanne, and Jordan.

You're wondering how this is different from T9, right? Well, for starters, you're only looking at 5 keys, instead of 12, and each key only has 1 option, instead of 3-4. Also, Kannuu only offers suggestions that actually exist. So you're truly 'searching' through the existing options in your list. If there's no one named Joanne in your list, it won't offer it as an option, if that makes sense.

So where is this useful? Mainly, on the mobile. This eliminates the problem of cramped keypads, clicky keys, and trying to teach people how to use T9. If you can use a d-pad, you can use Kannuu. A great example is on the mobile web, completing text entry forms. Let's say you're trying to search for a location. Rather than attempt to type out 'New York City, New York', you could use Kannuu and your d-pad to navigate through the list of states first, then the cities within that state. Very easy, and you wouldn't get suggestions that aren't real, like Newsies or something silly.

Another great use-scenario is in your phone's music player. With mobile storage growing by the Gigabyte, we're starting to carry around thousands upon thousands of songs. Imagine you want to listen to a song by the Mouseketeers, which you just listened to yesterday. You would normally have to pull up the Artist list, and either scroll down to the M's, and then down to the M-o's, and so on. With Kannuu, since you just listened to it yesterday, the M would be one of the first four options, and then O would be in the next set, and then it would offer the Mouseketeers as a final completion. Very quick and easy.

I was able to test this both in my contacts and music player with a development copy, and can really see the potential. Kannuu is currently in talks with Nokia and other handset manufacturers to get their technology into future devices, and I can't wait to see it.