> - Most of Spritz's work went into the R&D, not the actual code. Anyone can copy the end result.

conveniently ignoring the fact that most of it was not actually spritz' research. the only "extension" if you so will is that colored cursor. acereader[1] for example has been around for 10 years(or almost 10 years). go to google scholar, and search for saccadic eye movement. for example here is a paper from 1992! [2]. here's another one from 2006 [3]

> Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of text has been reported to foster higher reading rates than presentation in a continuous text (CT) format, possibly because scanning eye movements are minimized. We investigated how this might be relevant for persons with congenital nystagmus (CN).

the fact that spritz may even get credited with this is the very problem of our buzz society. i refuse to believe that creating a crossplatform sdk or "researching" the fact that using a fixed cursor to reduce said saccadic eye movement even further requires 3 million usd. don't get me wrong i'm a little happy that they created enough buzz for this to become popular. but if we really need that much money to do basic tasks, god help us.

> - Zethos ignores a lot of the science that makes Spritz work so well.

:D like what?

> - Usability (as in, how do I even run Zethos on, say, a book?) is important.

how do you run spritz? spritz is an SDK(!). it's not an ebook reader, it's not a website reader it's an sdk. it's up to you to integrate it in your app.

EDIT: this was written before parent appended SDK information to his post

> - Money raised is a horrible metric for code. Even revenue wouldn't work here.

> Think about it this way: a ton of people cloned Flappy Birds in HTML when it came out, but none of them are worth anything. I could do a decent rendition of Facebook in a few hours, but that doesn't make me Mark Zuckerberg.

your analogy is completely faulty. first of all mark zuckerberg didn't "make" facebook contrary to popular belief. second, flappy bird itself was already a clone that got popular, similar to spritz. third, no, you can't just roll your own facebook in a few hours. you can create something that looks like it, being far from functionally the same. spritz is different. create a spritz clone though? see below:

https://github.com/OnlyInAmerica/OpenSpritz-Android

the difference? it's not a library. meaning noone can really reuse the code provided in here. i doubt spritz is going to be that easy to integrate with academic pdf's. though i have a feeling that that's what they might be using their couple million funding on. i have a todo list that's at least 5 years old with a speed reader for pdf's in the list. but is it worth investing time in? sure, if you give me 3 million(i'm not actually being fully serious here, so spare me logical inconsistency analysis of my post)

[1] http://www.acereader.com/

[2] http://www.citeulike.org/group/6810/article/3309870

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16909075

EDIT: there have already been a few rsvp browser extensions for both firefox, and chrome over the last couple of years, but there never was any buzz around any of them.

http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/11/windows/internet/reasy-r...

http://youtu.be/MuszcoVL3lA