Swiftkey, a predictive keyboard software designed for smartphones, has been bought by Microsoft for £174m. Set up in 2008 by two Cambridge graduates, Swiftkey uses algorithms to detect users typing patterns on a smartphone and is now used on more than 300 million devices worldwide. Commenting on the acquisition, Microsoft’s executive vice president of technology and research, Harry Shum, said, “We believe that together we can achieve orders of magnitude greater scale than either of us could have achieved independently.”
