Black Ink
Sentence-parsing software turns a profit for an emerging Bloomington firm.
It’s taken 10 years, but a pair of Minnesota doctors, Randall and Stanley Walker, have finally found success with a product that is quite unlike anything else on the market these days. Their company, Walker Reading Technologies Inc. of Bloomington, Minn., has created Live Ink, a software program that breaks words into “cascading poetry” to make online reading easier. Better still, it now has customers and is turning a profit.
A decade ago, Randall, the company’s president and founder, labored through an article noting that smart people may be slow readers—as he describes himself. He and Stanley, a Minnetonka ophthalmologist, began studying how people read. They discovered that reading linear text doesn’t exploit a person’s abilities at pattern recognition and shape integration—“forcing the visual-processing system to do something it doesn’t otherwise do,” says Randall, who is a Mayo Clinic specialist in transplants and infectious diseases, and assistant professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.
The brothers hired software developers to build a tool that parses sentences line by line into meaningful groups. Instead of long lines of text, the result is short, three- to six-line combinations of words. “Your eyes float right down it,” says Michael Moore, director of the Norris Institute at University of St. Thomas, noting that research on Live Ink revealed that it can help users from grade school to college become better readers. In 1999, the institute invested $50,000 and provided office space.
Live Ink, however, initially proved to be a tough sell. “It looks weird,” admits Adam Gordon, Walker Reading Technologies’ vice president of sales and marketing. Nevertheless, the operation has been gaining momentum. Four textbook publishers and others are now paying to use the company’s software and services. Its first revenue came in 2002, and the company turned a profit in 2005. And the firm now has patent protection in numerous countries around the globe.