Three delayed keyboards (or four future keyboards)

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Anyone who has been involved with crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, and particularly those who have backed hardware products, know all about product delays. I've written before about how crowdfunding sites are invigorating the hardware startup market, allowing hardware products to reach the market that would never have done so in the past. The flip side is of course that not all the hardware products that receive crowdfunding do in fact reach the market. Many crowdfunded products have famously failed, such as the Eyez by ZionEyez HD video recording glasses whose principles seemed to simply disappear off the face of the planet without delivering any products (and it's unclear if they ever worked on their product at all). That case was covered by Forbes and Network World, although it only raises about $350,000. More recently Kickstarter has made it harder for pie-in-the-sky hardware ideas to make it onto the site. One interesting case was the Skarp Laser Razor, which raised over $4 Million on Kickstarter before the site suspended their campaign. The company quickly switched to IndieGoGo and raised over $450,000. Whether Kickstarter was right and the project ultimately fails remains to be seen. A product doesn't need to be crowdfunded to be…

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How I would re-design the Kinesis Advantage keyboard

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Read more about the article How I would re-design the Kinesis Advantage keyboard
Kinesis Advantage Pro

I'm a fan of the Kinesis Advantage keyboard, but it's definitely long-in-the-tooth these days. The keyboard's basic design reaches back over twenty years. The current USB version was introduced in 2002, and I don't think there have been any significant changes in the past twelve years. I've seen rumors of a re-vamped version, but nothing has been released. As you can tell from my previous posts, I believe there is a big difference between convenience features (such as wireless, backlit keys, etc.) and ergonomic features in keyboards. On the ergonomics side I don't think Kinesis needs to make many changes to what is a popular design. There are some changes that could be made, such as perhaps splitting the left and right sides, or making the keyboard more adjustable. On the convenience side, however, I think there are a lot of changes Kinesis could make to the keyboard. Here are my suggestions for the next generation of the Kinesis Advantage: Cut the cord When I originally wrote the heading above I was thinking wireless (see below) but the truth is, the one thing that has annoyed me the most over the years about the Advantage is that the USB cable…

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Why haven’t there been any keyboard innovations in decades?

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Read more about the article Why haven’t there been any keyboard innovations in decades?
Early Maltron Keyboard

This might seem surprising coming from someone whose first job was for a speech recognition company more than 20 years ago, and whose current company also develops speech recognition software. I'm extremely annoyed at the lack of innovation in keyboards. It's not surprising that attention to keyboard design has lagged in recent years, when production of laptops long ago overtook the production of desktop machines, and tablets will soon overtake the combined production of both laptops and desktops. Take a look at this chart from IDC: If you count cell phones in the mix, the production of desktop computers is a tiny percentage of overall computing devices. Sure, some people use external keyboards with laptops, but overall the need for external keyboards in dwindling. Unfortunately, laptop keyboards have different design goals than external keyboards. While innovation in external keyboards usually has to do with comfort over long periods of typing, reduction in repetitive stress injuries, etc. laptop keyboards are usually focused on simply fitting into a very narrow space. Other considerations are of course secondary. The only real innovation in laptop keyboards that I can remember was IBM's introduction of its butterfly keyboard in the ThinkPad 701 laptop in 1995.…

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