Physical iPhone Keyboard Financed By Ryan Seacrest
You may know Ryan Seacrest, TV personality and host of the “American Idol” show; Ryan Seacrest owns an iPhone but he may not be a happy Apple customer, at least that’s what we his latest investment tells us. It seems that Ryan Seacrest is not happy with the iPhone’s built in keyboard. Last week he invested a million dollars in the Typo keyboard, a physical keyboard accessory for the iPhone. The Typo keyboard looks a lot like the keyboard built for BlackBerry devices.
Typo Products LLC, based in Los Angeles, lists Ryan Seacrest as a founder together with CEO and co founder Laurence Hallier who is also CEO of Show Media and privately held Hallier Investments. The following press release details how Ryan Seacrest became involved with Typo Products: “The back story of Seacrest’s interest in this — for many of his friends and colleagues, carrying two phones was a habit: One for typing and correspondence and an iPhone for virtually everything else. One night, Ryan and his friend Laurence Hallier, CEO of Show Media, were out to dinner and both had phones on the table. Two people, four phones!”.
Not long after that, Seacrest and Hallier decided it is time to do something about the issue and build “an easy solution to the problem, a keyboard for the iPhone”. Two years later, they came out with their solution: the Typo keyboard. EVen though Ryan Seacrest was already a very busy man, what with his remarkable hosting positions and TV production company (Ryan Seacrest Media) that is worth millions of dollars, he still managed to find time (and money) to invest in technology. Seacrest was also negotiating with Marissa Mayer (Yahoo CEO) regarding content ideas for Yahoo; however, Seacrest’s decision to invest his money into an iPhone accessory surprised a lot of people, mainly because most see it as a very risky decision. It would seem that Seacrest is going to put more than five million dollars into Typo Products developing iPhone keyboards and related products that are rumored to be in the research and development phase.
At the moment the Typo Kyeboard (which is being designed and manufactured in Utah and California) support only the iPhone 5 and the recently launched iPhone 5S, so if you own an iPhone 5C or an iPhone 4S you will have to wait if you want to use the Typo Keyboard, that is if the two iPhone models will ever be supported. The Typo Keyboard is a QWERTY keyboard that has keys for backspaces, returns, shifts, numbers and symbols. It also features a smaller “home” button found in the keyboard’s lower right corner. The Typo Keyboard for the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5S includes a 180 mAH battery, Bluetooth 3.0 and its weight is only 1.4 ounces (just under 40 grams).
On the company’s website it is said that “When we set out to design the Typo Keyboard, our goal was simple: Create a keyboard and case that would add the absolute minimum additional length and thickness to the iPhone, while still providing protection to the phone and a butter-smooth, tactile typing experience [...] The result is the Typo Keyboard, which adds just short of a ¼ inch in thickness and a less than ¾ inch in total length to the iPhone, while still providing an unrivaled typing experience. This is made possible by miniaturizing the components on our circuit board, using our patented TYPOTouch keyboard technology and one of the world’s smallest lithium-ion batteries, measuring at just 1mm in thickness“.
As mentioned above, Seacrest’s company, Typo Proucts, worked on the Typo Keyboard for two years, time which Typo Products says was spent engineering, testing and responding to feedback in order to make it the best companion and accessory for your iPhone. The reason behind the “Typo” moniker is that the goal of the physical iPhone Keyboard is to avoid the many typos that you make when using the iPhone’s built in keyboard. The Typo Keyboard is listed as being available to pre-order on the Typo Products website for $99.
