Chinese Startup CooTek Wins Patent Litigation Against Nuance

The U.S International Trade Commission (ITC) handed CooTek, a Chinese keyboard app developer, a significant victory recently, issuing a summary determination that the company’s TouchPal Keyboard V5.5 and V5.6 series did not infringe the three patents of Nuance.

Nuance, a multinational speech and imaging application provider, filed in last December an ITC 337 complaint against CooTek accusing patent infringement. After the summary determination, Nuance withdrew all the patent infringement lawsuits against CooTek in both ITC and U.S. district courts.

All three patents related to this case came from companies Nuance acquired, Swype and ShapeWriter.

The ruling carries symbolic and strategic value in Chinese company’s endeavors to establish their status as true innovators.

Founded in 2008, CooTek is a startup software developer dedicated to improving the usability and functionality of mobile devices. The company’s product portfolio contains TouchPal Keyboard and TouchPal Contacts.

The startup has recently released a new generation of mobile keyboard TouchPal X. It introduced a brand new way of text input by sliding the whole sentence.

TouchPal Wave

As the winner of Mobile Innovation Global Award in 2009, the company claimed it has over 100 million users from more than 100 countries worldwide. CooTek reportedly accounts for 20% of the Android market and established cooperation with several mainstream handset makers, including Samsung, HTC, ZTE, and Huawei.

 image credit: CooTek