Goodbye, Hedge Fund; Hello, Touch Revolution

In the middle of San Francisco’s financial district sits Touch Revolution, a start-up that just hit the scene this year. As the name suggests, Touch Revolution specializes in making touch-screen technology for a wide range of computing devices.

Or, as the company’s chief executive Mark Hamblin puts it, “We sell the touch experience.”

Touch Revolution calls the 42nd floor of a 48-story office building home. A hedge fund used to occupy the space but bailed out as Wall Street’s collapse, um, affected its business model. And so, a line of trading desks packed with power to fuel monitors and computers has been turned into a workbench covered in motherboards, testing equipment and touch displays.

(Apparently, the hedge fund left a few mementos behind, including one white board outlining the condition of foreign markets and another detailing where the company went right and where it went wrong. The “where it went wrong” list was much longer, I was told.)

Mr. Hamblin cut his touch chops at Apple, where he worked on the iPhone’s touch technology, which managed to do little more than revolutionize the cellphone market.

Inspired by the success of the iPhone, Mr. Hamblin set out to create his own company that would build touch devices around Google’s Android software. At present, it’s working on building touch-screen home phones and touch-screen products aimed at specific markets like medical devices.

Touch Revolution resembles an O.D.M., or original design manufacturer, more than a new consumer electronics company trying to make a big name for itself.

O.D.M.’s lurk in the shadows, manufacturing the products that other companies eventually plaster with their brands. A host of Taiwanese companies, for example, produce the laptops, music players and phones sold by the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple.

Touch Revolution designs its products here and then has them built in Malaysia. It has a business partnership with a company that specializes in making touch-screen displays, although Mr. Hamblin has declined to reveal the name of the partner.

The Touch Revolution products rely on projected capacitive touch technology, which is similar to what’s used on the iPhone. There’s basically a grid of tiny wires that sit between two layers of glass and sense your finger’s movement.

This approach allows you to move objects on the screen without pressing hard or needing to dig in a fingernail, as is often required with the other leading touch technology known as resistive capacitive.

Projected capacitive technology costs more money, but Mr. Hamblin argues that the better touch experience is worth the higher price.

Touch Revolution looks to create a circuit board tuned to run Android that can be adapted quickly to a variety of markets in which companies hope to add touch technology to their products. So far, the company has focused on constructing devices for phone companies that would let people make calls, store their contacts and surf the Web.

By using Android, Touch Revolution hopes to capitalize on broad software developer interest to add some pizazz to its hardware. For example, there’s an Android application that presents recipes to people along with step-by-step guides for making a meal and videos. So, you could have a Touch Revolution phone sitting in the kitchen and use it for help making dinner.

Quite the updated take on this gem from the Neiman Marcus catalog in 1969.

Touch Revolution also expects medical device companies to jump on touch technology early and home appliances makers to follow.

The presence of consumer electronics-focused companies in downtown San Francisco is starting to look downright commonplace.

Pure Digital produced the Flip video recorder at its office on Union Square above the Gump’s department store. Cisco Systems bought Pure Digital for $590 million in March.

Touch Revolution expects its first products to start appearing later this year, and said that consumers should expect to see a host of new home phones early next year.

By Ashlee Vance