Spotlight
William Richardson
Touch the Future Inc.
Invented touch screen technology used in many hardware parts such as keyboards, kiosks and screen monitors.
Richardson's technology used for business computers.
Short Biography
Born: August 24, 1976
Company NetWorth: 30.2 Million
Other Information
"Bill's ability to think beyond what has already been established in a very competitive business world, has made him a valuable asset to the world of technology."
"Our company has been using this touch-screen technology for years now. Our bank kiosks have benefitted from this technology immensly. Our customers continue to return to our bank ATMS and use our systems because they are interactive and easy to use. We also have had little to no failures with this technology, so it definitly does the job very very well."
- Bob Stevenson
Chief Technical Officer, SecureBank
Products or Businesses using Touch Screen Technology
Banks
Museum Kiosks
Election Polls
Science Labs
Design Studios - used for drawing art, identities and more.
Library Information Centers
School Educational Labs
If you or your company is interested in learning more on touch screen technology or other
products created by Touch The Future Inc. you can find more at their website.
Thanks to Touch The Future Labs for allowing us to visit their labs last month.
Many businesses can thank one man and his vision for creating the technology for touch screens, touch keyboards or keypads and many other gadgets that share the touch screen features. With basic programming knowledge and electrical skill, William was able to establish a company of engineers and software programmers. This elite group of people using, at the time, limited resources were able to invent one of the first thumbprint recognition devices used for security. Using this initial product as a test product, Richardson's company, Touch the Future was able to go from recognizing a person's thumprint to where a user pointed on the screen. This fundamentally changed electronic devices for many years to come.
Thinking that they could not top what they had already invented, Richardson's next vision was to build computer input devices, such as keyboards and tablets, that integrated his touch technology.
Currently, Richardson's company is researching and testing new prototype projects. Early last month, our team was able to get a sneak peek of these new technologies. During our visit we were able to test out a new prototype for a touch screen keyboard. This project has been dubbed "TouchKey", which I'm sure will change in the future. One of the coolest features we saw, and tested, was the ability to "create keys." This idea is you start with the default keyboard, and you can move keys around, create new keys based off shortcuts in your computer, delete keys and then re-arrange keys to fit your comfort. This is a great new step in technology as users can now adjust their keyboards to where their fingers naturally place on the board. Obviously, there will be some standards for arranging keys, but the developers were saying you can pretty much drag and drop almost everwhere. One of the ideas we didn't see, and thought might be a good idea, would be to create saved presets for the touch keyboards. We didn't get any hints or assurance that this would be in the final product, but we can only hope that they consider or already considering it.
With these new projects, specifically the "TouchKey" project, Richardson's company has once again continues to stay ahead of competitors and is always thinking beyond the norm.
