We headed over to see regular MIR contributor and MIR Show star, James Whatley, at the SpinVox stand on the first day of Mobile World Congress — and then badgered him into giving us an impromptu tour. Here’s the vid:
MIR MWC: James Whatley Introduces the SpinVox Stand from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.
James has been busy on the SpinVox stand — but we managed to grab him for a few minutes to award him his very own MOBILE INDUSTRY REVIEW jacket. Oh yes. One problem — Dan was positive that a Medium size just would not fit him. Watch and see what happens…
MIR Show – James gets his MIR Jacket from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.
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?
But they’re back.
Some enterprising arse with a JCB Digger cut through some major fibre optics in London yesterday afternoon, killing most (if not all) of their UK/European SpinVox inbound telecommunications facilities.
Bit of an arse, eh?
Especially if you’re a billion dollar communications company. I’m not sure who their telecoms supplier is — but if it’s Global Crossing, then this Register story has more info.
At least SpinVox didn’t do the Skype-thing and blog about how much pizza they’re eating to try and fix it.
If you were wondering what was up with your SpinVox service last night, there you go.
All fine now.
Any long-term MIR reader will know about SpinVox, the market leader in voice to text services. When he isn’t starring in our weekly video show, our very own James Whatley serves as SpinVox’s “Social Media Strategist” which should explain why SpinVox has wholly embraced social media in the last year or so, culminating in today’s release of ping.fm integration.
For those of you not familiar with Ping.fm, it’s a simple looking website with a powerful backend that integrates dozens of blogging, status and social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogger.com etc etc. In a single click you can push a short status update to all your profiles.
Personally, I love Ping.fm. Enough that when I first found out about it I setup an unofficial SMS interface for it so users can send Ping.fm a text message to update their statuses (more info on this here) but now, thanks to SpinVox, we don’t even need to tap out a message, simply call a number and, as their marketing message says, Speak Freely! SpinVox will convert your voice to text and Ping.fm will push that text to all of your profiles, optionally with a link to the original sound file.
It’s brilliant stuff but don’t take my word for it, sign up for ping.fm and give it a try for free at http://ping.fm/spinvox/
This afternoon, I was hoping to connect with James Siminoff, Chief Executive of Phonetag. Alas there was a scheduling conflict but I’m going to see what we can do tomorrow to meet him.
I’d like to find out a lot more about Phonetag. It’s named after that annoying hobby — ‘playing phonetag’ — the concept being that their service kills your average game of phonetag stone dead. That can only be a good thing.
Like the $200m SpinVox behemoth, Phonetag converts your voicemails to text. But there’s more. There’s address book integration — a major arse when it comes to SpinVox. I haven’t taken a look nor have I had a demo of Phonetag so I’ll reserve judgment. I’m particularly interested to check out their transcription quality and find out a lot more about their business model(s).
The service is US-only at the moment but if you’re in the States, give it a go and let me know how you get on with it?
“You know Christina, don’t you?” I asked a chap, the other day, when we were talking about SpinVox.
“What, the ballsy one from Newsnight?” he qualified.
“That’s her.”
I’ve never met her myself. I talked to Daniel, the other co-founder (“DD”) who took me through the SpinVox story. But not Christina.
She does write to me. Me and a million+ other SpinVox users. I wanted to record their second edition of their newsletter — it contains some good stuff. Did you, for example, know that they’ve deployed service for 12 operators? Or that they’re heading into the next phase of their development plan and getting really Voxy?
Over to Christina:
It’s already time for the second edition of our e-newsletter which is designed to keep you in touch with the pace of development here at SpinVox as we lead the market that’s transforming the way people interact. Such is the pace of change, that already our newsletter has a new name ‘The Vox’ – a name that reflects how our business is evolving. But more of that later.
I’ve always believed in two business maxims: if you can’t explain your business in less than 30 seconds, you don’t have a business; and that one of the secrets for success is to focus on a single idea.
Thus the initial appeal of SpinVox was that it made it much easier for people to receive a message when they couldn’t answer, than to retrieve and listen to voicemails.
Twelve carrier deployments later, we’ve proved that we have the carrier-grade scalability to deliver real-time, accurate voice-to-text conversion on any phone, anywhere and at anytime – at a rate of thousands per minute.
We’re now ideally-placed for the next phase of delivery into our market: SpinVox services focused on delivering choice and value to the speaking ‘A’ party. That’s revolutionary – as SpinVox now becomes a network feature we can all use regardless of who we are trying to contact, or where we are calling from.
Voice-to-content will power the sort of messages that people use in their daily lives: from ‘I missed you when I called, so I Voxed you instead’; to ‘I’m busy, but I wanted to get this message to you’, and on to ‘I really want to share this moment with my social network.’
We call speaking a message a Vox. It simplifies life by using voices as the most natural and powerful way of communicating. Using Vox ensures that you can always choose how you want to create your message.
VoxMail is what you receive as text. The message arrives without it intruding on what you’re doing, and you’re given the same Vox options when you respond.
This is because every VoxMail will contain VoxLinks. These give the user the opportunity to respond by speaking a text or an email; posting a message on a social network; or even engaging Outlook to confirm an appointment.
Whether the user is the caller or the one being called, there is a single relationship through SpinVox that stimulates a natural flow of conversations, and creates new revenue opportunities for carriers.
SpinVox provides solutions to everyday communications needs that we all experience, and enables carriers to leverage existing technology and handsets and – critically – tap into existing user behaviour to help communicate and interact better. These can be delivered across the network with voice-to-text conversion as a mass-market service feature – free to receive, and at no premium to the calling party.
This increases network value: the user-experience is much more simple and natural, with obvious choices to continue conversations in ways that suit them at that time. There is also growth through messaging, and additional revenues through call-continuity and call completion – and by extending calling circles into social media spaces. SpinVox can also reduce costs, and even prompt further revenue gains, through the semantic web – or Web 3.0 as it is becoming known – by promoting the value of voice as digital content that can be stored, edited, searched and linked intelligently.
And, through brands and people-centric organisations across the globe, this principle extends to content platforms and media networks – making the human voice both immensely powerful and valuable. Whether by helping to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS by allowing people to Speak Freely about sex as part of MTV’s ‘Stand By What You Say’ campaign, or opening up the democratic process through listener engagement with New York’s WNYC on Super Tuesday, the possibilities are infinite.
That’s because the reality is that speaking remains – and will remain – the most natural way to express a thought or a feeling; while seeing is the quickest, easiest and most convenient way to receive a message or group of messages. With SpinVox, the phrase ‘I see what you’re saying’ has never been more powerful.
Christina Domecq, co-founder and CEO
I had a note in from Alfie of Moblog telling me about their new competition, Lovetheaccent.com.
It’s a rather wicked proof of concept demonstrating the integration between Moblog and SpinVox. (I haven’t written much about SpinVox recently — still loving it. Still a critical service for me.)
The competition is quite simple. Call up the Moblog SpinVox number, tell the world what accent you love or hate — and why — and your message (and audio) will be posted live to the Lovetheaccent.com site.
The best caller (I’m not sure how that’s judged… so, be creative!) will win an Nokia N82 along with a year’s free subscription to both Moblog and Spinvox. On top of that, you’ll also get 250 Moo cards.
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