Microsoft Helps Launch Startup to Produce Next-gen Mobile UI

Sporting what appears to be a demo of a zooming, tiled Web browser for mobile handsets with larger displays, and borrowing a term coined by the creator of the Macintosh's user interface, a startup firm called ZenZui burst upon the scene at CTIA Wireless this morning. Driving its debut is about $12 million in venture capital secured through the direct and overt assistance of Microsoft's IP Ventures program.

As ZenZui's co-founder and vice president, John SanGiovanni, stated in his company's inaugural podcast this morning, it's been operating in deep stealth for about five months, in cooperation with Microsoft Research. "ZenZui, as a technology, was actually born in the halls of Microsoft Research," SanGiovanni remarked.

"At Microsoft, the functions of R&D are actually quite separate, so there's the development teams...and there's the research lab that's run very much like an academic computer science department, where it's very cross-disciplinary research, and it's focused on multi-year projects. This project specifically was part of a collection of mobile research projects that were focused kind of outside the Microsoft gene pool."

ZenZui, SanGiovanni states, is an independent company that spun off from Microsoft last September, and is headquartered in downtown Seattle. The basic product that the new company aims to produce is a mobile browser, although not adapted specifically to any one handset platform. The fact that Windows Mobile 6 traverses multiple handsets will probably be a welcome benefit.

SanGiovanni states in his podcast that ZenZui has already patented its concept, which in a YouTube video is demonstrated as a way for users to zoom in and out of content appearing in tiles, with the relative adjacency of tiles to one another representing the apparent similarities or relationships in that content. The system is apparently adaptable to a 12-key keypad on a portable phone, a selector key, or potentially a touch screen (a la Apple iPhone).

But what ZenZui appears to be attempting at the same time is to perform the search and retrieval function in the background, potentially as a service to which users subscribe or to which a portion of existing mobile service subscription fees are delegated.

The company calls the network of connections it generates a "ZoomSpace," which it says can be personalized to suit users' tastes. "With ZenZui, your phone screen is a portal into your own customized Zoomspace," claims the company's product description, "an information landscape of personalized, cached content in the form of Tiles that directly reflect your lifestyle. Using a single thumb, you fly in and out of your Zoomspace - two simple taps get you directly to any Tile. Through some clever engineering, we constantly refresh your Tiles in the background, so they're always fresh, available, and ready to be Zoomed."

It's that background service where ZoomSpace hopes the money is. While it could possibly receive a nice chunk of revenue from licensing of a mobile browser, the company says its business model will be based around advertising, where clients pay for relevance in the "ZenZui ecosystem."

The ZenZui user interface, here being operated in a "thumb-friendly" fashion. (Courtesy ZenZui)

"We have this 16-tile ZoomSpace that you, the user, have lovingly crafted to reflect your lifestyle," emotes SanGiovanni. "So you pick the 16 tiles that really speak to your lifestyle. And we've designed this in these very explicit 1, to 4, to 16 on the z-axis zoom levels, and as you fly into and out of your content, you can do purchase transactions, and you can get updates on sports scores, and you can glance and see what the snow is like in the two mountains that you board most often...Because you've specifically on-boarded these tiles into your ZoomSpace, that [becomes] an explicit opt-in model that really takes care of the spam issue in a totally different approach."

The theory here is that through direct user involvement in content selection, spam (unwanted content) is weeded out and lifestyle-relevant content planted in its place.

The history of the ZUI concept is actually quite rich, if not completely fleshed out. The term is credited to Jef Raskin, the late creator of the basic concepts and much of the programming behind the original Macintosh UI. Raskin continued his research into the zooming concept up until his untimely death in 2005, for the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces.

But who holds the patent on the idea? BetaNews turned up a 2004 patent for the broad concept of zooming interfaces, attributed to Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the chief technology officer of a company he co-founded called Sand Codex, later renamed Seadragon, Inc. Microsoft purchased Seadragon in January 2006, in a rather quiet deal that raised the suspicions of Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop.

Later that year, Microsoft folded the Seadragon project under its Live Labs umbrella. But now it looks like the company is willing to allow a startup to develop concepts based on Seadragon's patents, if not its outright platform, perhaps in order that the investment may culminate in a working product.

ZenZui already has a small stable of clients ready to build products for the platform, including Traffic.com, although no one at either Microsoft or ZenZui has yet explicitly attributed its products or services to Windows Mobile.