Cliff Kushler is an inventor and entrepreneur who co-founded

Tegic Tegic Communications, Inc. was a predictive text company based in Seattle, Washington, United States, founded on November 18, 1996. It was acquired by AOL on December 3, 1999, and subsequently, on August 24, 2007, acquired by Nuance Communications, ...

, the company that created T9 predictive input software used on mobile devices, and

Swype Swype was a virtual keyboard for touchscreen smartphones and tablets originally developed by Swype Inc., founded in 2002, where the user enters words by sliding a finger or stylus from the first letter of a word to its last letter, lifting only be ...

, a technology for using swiping motions to type words on touch-screen keyboards. He previously founded Exbiblio and worked on a product to help people who are unable to communicate verbally. Kushler holds 14 U.S.

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s. Dr. Kushler co-founded Swype in 2002. Before founding Swype, Dr. Kushler was the VP of R&D at Tegic Communications/AOL Wireless. Tegic, which was also co-founded by Dr. Kushler, developed a very successful text input method for cell phones called "T9" and was acquired by America On-line in 1999. T9 is now licensed on hundreds of millions of cell phones each year. Dr. Kushler holds 17 US patents, numerous foreign patents, as well as a large number of pending applications. He has an MS in computer science from Michigan State University, and a PhD in engineering from the University of Tokyo. He also speaks Japanese fluently.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Businesspeople from Seattle University of Tokyo alumni {{US-engineer-stub