FingerWorks

Many years ago, I’m guessing it was early 2000’s, I was hired to produce a video for a start-up called FingerWorks.

I knew the company was out of Newark, DE and involved two guys that were either faculty or students at the University of Delaware and that they had invented a revolutionary ‘touch pad’ for Macintosh computers that could replace the traditional mouse.

They sent me to Philadelphia, and a little recording studio, to interview a user who would give us a demonstration and talk about how it helped his work flow and his health.

I remember thinking it was some kind of VooDoo as the recording engineer swiped across the pad and pages of data flew by on the screen. He could not only swipe, but he could copy, cut and paste with just a few commands.

He was a keyboard player and he had customized some shortcuts on his touch pad. He’d “play” a C chord and it would copy, an F Chord and it would paste, and crazy stuff like that.

I remember being blown away by this technology, and then I never heard anything more about it.

FingerWorks went silent.

No more video projects, and they took their website down.

Later I learned why.

In early 2005, Wayne Westerman (a UD PhD student) and John G. Elias (a University of Delaware professor) sold FingerWorks’ assets (intellectual property, patents, and the founders’ engineering talent) to Apple. And two years later, their multitouch gestures were incorporated into the first ever iPhone.

A quick search says Westerman is still working for Apple, and Elias is affiliated with both Apple and the University of Delaware. They both show up on several Apple related patents.

The purchase price was never disclosed but several private, but unconfirmed, reports put the price tag for FingerWorks at between $20 and $30-million.

If you use an iPhone, iPad, iPod or a Mac trackpad, you’re using technology partially developed by two brilliant engineers and entrepreneurs from Newark, Delaware.

You can watch the short FingerWorks video that I produced over 20 years ago here: