I came across an interesting tool last week. It is not directly about enterprise 2.0 but it helps with an important aspects of it, how can you process text information faster from the computer screen to be more efficient in your work with applications. I was trained as a cognitive psychologist and studied how different media affect cognition and learning. So I was interested when I heard about the possibilities of increasing speed and retention from reading off a computer screen.

I spoke with Lee Johnson, CEO of MindTalent, about his company’s product, HeadCram. According to their site, it currently allows users to “read email messages from Outlook not only at higher speeds but it also provides the Microsoft customers with a rapid summarization of each message.” The site goes on to say, “unique software tool that applies proven speed-reading techniques to text. By only showing you what you need to see to understand a document or book, you can quickly cut through extraneous text on a page and focus on the relevant information you need to know.”

The last statement captures some of the essence of what the tool does. Lee told me that the average college graduate reads text on paper at about 140 words a minute and 70 words a minute on a computer screen. With MindTalent many people can increase their speed for reading long text documents on screen to 400 words per minute or more. The tool is not designed for the short email you can see at a glance. Lee said you can set the word count for it to kickin to Outlook messages. He generally uses anything over 200 words.

The tool brings up the text in two ways (you choose or see both) without any of the distracting other information. It focused for you. One method provides one word at a time at a preset speed. The other method shows column about 3 to 4 words wide with a highlighted strip going over the words at a preset speed. I liked the second method much better. I found myself reading just under the highlighted section. It seemed easy to follow and I was surprised that Lee said I was reading 400 words a minute. There is a nice feature that allows you to slow down when you want to study something closer. So, in essence you scan until you want to focus.

Lee said that studies indicated that employees spend about 20% of their time on email so anything that lets them get through these messages quicker is a boon. MindTalent plans to expand to other formats (e.g., PDFs, html, and Word documents) which I think will have even greater applicability as there are often more long documents in these formats. They also have agreements with Lexis/Nexis Concordance™ and have a product that is integrated with them. Lee is planning to offer an iPhone version by the end of the summer. If you struggle through long documents on the screen or need to print them out before reading, this tool might help you.