Tom Bowden
Changing the way people learn languages
Welcome to my personal webpage. I’m a cofounder of Mirai LLP. Mirai specializes in creating mobile applications, especially iOS apps, for language learning. I believe that mobile apps are an invaluable tool for helping people learn. Mirai’s language learning applications have been downloaded over a million times on the iTunes App Store. Regularly featured by Apple, the extremely popular iStart series of iPhone apps (French, Chinese, German, Korean), are affordable and highly effective language learning tools.
Due to exceptional customer demand, the iStart apps for Spanish and Japanese have been extended, updated, and rebranded as Mirai Spanish and Mirai Japanese. These two apps are now being offered as subscription-based apps on both iOS and Android.
At Mirai, we have fostered a strong partnership with Collins Dictionaries (part of HarperCollins Publishers), creating the WordUP series — the most powerful and effective bilingual dictionaries and phrase books ever made for iOS, optimized for both iPhone and iPad. To date, we have published the following bilingual language dictionary and phrasebook apps:
Arabic ・ Chinese (Mandarin) ・ Croatian ・ Czech ・ Danish ・ Dutch ・ Finnish ・ French ・ German ・ Greek ・ Italian ・ Japanese ・ Korean ・ Norwegian ・ Polish ・ Portuguese (Brazilian) ・ Portuguese (Iberian) ・ Russian ・ Spanish (Iberian) ・ Spanish (Latin American) ・ Swedish ・ Thai ・ Turkish ・ Vietnamese
We are also in partnership with Hodder Education (part of Hachette), adapting the extremely popular In A Day series, written by Elisabeth Smith. Using a very entertaining and practical approach, Elisabeth has helped people all around the world learn the basics of the language of the country they are traveling to on vacation, and in doing so has sold over one million copies of her books, CDs, and DVDs. Mirai has released the following language courses by Elisabeth Smith as beautifully designed and illustrated apps:
Spanish In A Day ・ French In A Day ・ German In A Day ・ Italian In A Day ・ Portuguese In A Day ・ Mandarin Chinese In A Day ・ Greek In A Day ・ Polish In A Day ・ Turkish In A Day
Personal Bio
- Cofounder and Managing Partner at Mirai LLP, an app design & development firm which was established in 2008, making innovative mobile applications for language learning, and partnering with the leading global publishers (HarperCollins and Hachette) for language dictionaries and other language-related content
- Formerly: equity trader, registered equity market-maker on the LSE and options trader on LIFFE (now NYSE Euronext); Executive Search for buy-side firms
- Formal education: Imperial College (Physics), St Andrews University (Philosophy), City University (Economics), Cass Business School (MSc Mathematical Trading & Finance)
- Interests: human-application interaction design, linguistics and phonetics, information design, equity valuation, MOOCs, mobile and web technologies, machine learning, and autonomous car technologies.