Footbridge Interactive

SOME OF THE best ideas for new innovations come when personal experience of a gap in the market prompts someone to fill it. Reading Bridges, a game- based reading system aimed at children struggling with reading fluency, is exactly such a product.

When former animation and children’s TV executive Linda O’Sullivan couldn’t find an online product to help her young son overcome reading problems due to dyslexia, she decided to design her own. Now, 24 months later, version two of the product is going through its final appraisal before launch in September.

“We launched the first version in 2011 and based on the feedback from users and education experts have reworked it to make it a lot more structured,” O’Sullivan says.

“It has been a steep learning curve. I had no experience starting a business or indeed of developing a cloud hosted gaming product so it has been a challenge to cross traditional reading with a complex multimedia environment.”

Reading Bridges is based around a modern-day adaptation of the Granuaile story complete with pirates and time travel.

It is aimed at six- to 12-year- olds struggling with reading fluency and/or with the motivation to read. The idea of the game format is to make the learning process different to the classroom thereby overcoming resistance to “more school”.

The typical buyers of the product are parents who want to give their child some extra support with their reading.

The company is now looking at finalising its business model and O’Sullivan says both B2C and B2B channels will be explored. “With a B2C channel, it takes a long time and a lot of money to build up a customer base and this is a problem for a start-up company,” she says. “A B2B model would allow us to partner with companies already in the education space.”

O’Sullivan says there are other products out there that help with reading but none that offer her particular type of game-based supported learning. The product will be sold into all English speaking marketplaces with appropriate idiom and vocabulary tweaks.

In June 2010, O’Sullivan was accepted on to the LEAP incubation programme at the Limerick Institute of Technology. Her company, which has also been supported by Enterprise Ireland, subsequently won the top prize in the LEAP awards which saw it receive €5,000 from LIT and €50,000 in the form of a convertible loan from the Enterprise Equity-managed AIB seed capital fund.

“Winning this funding was a big boost and instrumental in being able to get the product to its next stage of commercialisation,” O’Sullivan says.