Last week at Columbia Business School, a group of InSITE Fellows met with entrepreneurs to chat and have a few beers. But it wasn’t for happy hour.
Rather, the discussion was part of a series of meetings during which a team of InSITE Fellows, made up of Grant Gillespie, Shinichiro Kaneda, Maya Mandel, and Jack Chao, worked with Rosen Research, one of the six companies currently participating in InSITE’s Company Teams Program. Throughout the semester, the InSITE Fellows provided feedback to help Rosen Research refine its business strategy and investor pitch.
Rosen Research, founded by Sarah Rosen and Joshua Fink, has developed software that works with eye-tracking hardware to follow a reader’s gaze, highlighting text as it is read. This highlighting enables a reader to mentally process more text at any single point in time. The end result is that the reader reads at least 20% faster. In more concrete terms, somebody that reads for two hours per day would save six days per year using this technology. The video below demonstrates the software in action.
Sarah and Josh presented their groundbreaking work at the November 2012 NY Tech Meetup (NYTM), and are collaborating with eye tracking technology provider Tobii to create a portable prototype for field testing. The InSITE team has been fortunate to celebrate some recent successes with Rosen Research over the past several weeks, including NYTM and key milestones towards a working prototype, and looks forward to celebrating many more as Rosen Research sets out to revolutionize the way we read.
This post was written by Jack Chao, Columbia Business School MBA Class of 2014.