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SpinVox vs HulloMail — they’re not competitors
Published by Ewan on Tuesday 11th November 2008, 12:19 Comments | Filed under: Mobile

I’ve seen a lot of conversation recently regarding SpinVox and HulloMail (whom we featured yesterday on the MIR Show).

In fact I actually interviewed regular contributor, Barney Craggs, last night at MoMo/Swedish Beers and he commented on this, thinking it was weird that we had James Whatley of SpinVox interviewing Andy Munarriz of HulloMail.

If you wnat your voicemails by text — I do — then SpinVox delivers. If you want to ‘own’ your own voicemails — that is, keep them in one place (e.g. your email) and be able to reference/forward/reply to them easily through your mail client, HulloMail is the way ahead.

I don’t think they’re competitors per se. I think they are offering alternative services — and that you’re very much one or the other.

However increasingly I’m finding that I’d like both.

I’d like to keep my voicemails in my inbox — AND get them immediately transcribed and delivered to my handset’s SMS inbox. I wonder if there’s a way for them to do business together?

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  • I'm in the same boat Ewan - I love my Spinvox service - it's second to none, but what HulloMail offers is very clever too.

    K
  • How hard would it be for Spinvox to attach an MP3 to the emails they already send out?
  • Well now you say that, Terence -- let me raise you with this question: How hard would it be for SpinVox to integrate your address book so that when you get an EMAIL notification, it tells you who is sending the message, rather than a highly useless 'FROM 44786876876' statement.
  • They do on the BlackBerry client. Problem is, it would mean periodically syncing your phone to them. Maybe they could hook into the http://zyb.com * APIs. Or even Facebook.

    Personally, I'd like some public APIs. I think it would be great fun to have a tag-cloud of my voicemail.

    T

    *Owned by my corporate paymasters.
  • "Is taking this whole conversation and emailing it to the NPD guys who sit behind me...
  • But what do they say when they get the mail? Does the man from Delmote say yes?
  • Like I can *actually* answer that..

    Dude. Come on.

    ...I'll let you know ;)
  • It wasn't so much that I thought it was weird James was interviewing Andy from a "competitor" point of view more so that their was an interesting tension there. That said Hullomail and Spinvox are very much in competition along with any/all other voicemail services including those from the incumbents.

    They compete for the attention of a user and given that 99.99999% (I suspect) of users will utilise only one service then compete they must.

    They compete on very slightly differing services which ostensibly perform the same function - providing service based alternative voicemail. Sure once transcribes and one records, but that I would bet that Spinvox records already (needed for the transcription and fine tuning) and HulloMail are looking towards transcription as well.

    All of that said competition in this space is a fantastic thing. For one it keeps Spinvox on their toes but more importantly it demonstrates to the network operators i) that alternative edge of network services work and are wanted and ii) that competition in that space is viable, healthy and productive.

    All good and do feel free to leave me on the cutting room floor if time is short ;o)
  • If only one or both firms would open some public APIs to allow service mash-ups... Please?
  • I agree with Barney. Although they're not direct competitors they are competing in the fact that most people will only want one voicemail service. They're also competing on philosophy ie do you want to 'own' or 'read' your voicemail.

    That said, I think there's room for both.

    I also see that Spinvox is moving into the enterprise space as well - I've posted about it here:
    http://smsisthenewblack.co.uk/2008/11/11/avaya-...
  • Thanks. I'm not sure that Spinvox lays claim to any ownership of the VM, but certainly I'm with Ben on the mashup thing - indeed I mentioned a part of this to Andy last night.

    From a user perspective the content of the VM is mine and indeed the senders. As such through the intermediary service we should be able to take the content, mark it up how we see fit and disseminate to services of our choosing.

    For instance one scenario which I could foresee is with Spinvox and the posting to SocNets. Currently this is fairly clunky and fire & forget. In an ideal world I should be able to use Spinvox as my social quarterback, throwing content at them, logging into their service, choosing individual posts, marking them up with useful information (tags, routing rules etc...) and then letting Spinvox push them out the door to places of my choosing.

    This is a very small but conceptually different usage of the toolset but I for one would actually pay for a more personalised and flexible service.
  • Love the phrase "social quarterback".
  • It's a term I coined in response to one made about wide receivers a while back (and have been meaning to publish something on it).

    Essentially most social network sites are trying to play the role of a wide-receiver. They want as much of your attention as possible, dragging in your feeds and those of others and effectively acting as a personal portal (oh yeah Web 1 here we go again). Think FriendFeed, FB et al. They allow me to create content but only within their own walls.

    Now the quarterback is far less attention grabbing but IMHO more important. It is the point of dissemination, the personal content router if you will. You may create content within it, or indeed suck in content created elsewhere, but it is at the quaterback you define rules, preferences and such to create routing for your stuff. It doesn't pretend to be a social network nor does it seek to be, it's more about giving the user control over what goes where and to whom.

    So Ping.FM is an early example of a quarterback in the making, as is tarpipe (yahoo pipes for social media).
  • mark
    does anyone under 25ish use voicemail anyway ? I'm really old and dont anymore IM and email isnt that ok
    I hate voice stuff so I suppose hullomail is for me
  • Taltos
    I have to agree with this - I don't use HulloMail as my service providor (Vodafone) already allows me to get my voicemail as an email message with a sound file. However, I have been using SpinVox for about 6 months or so and within a couple of weeks had contacted them to ask for exactly this feature (or even just a front end so that I can select which messages to keep the sound files for).

    Hope that thy hear this! I really appreciate what Spinvox does, but this seems almost trivial (appears to be!) and I'm sure someone else will take on the challenge if they don't.

    Cx.
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