Gripes and Grins

Future of Voice: Reviews Are Mixed

I'm pretty jacked up about the Jangl usage milestones. We recently surpassed 30M listens a month. The voice aspect of our service continues to see great usage. But, across the industry, enthusiasm for voice services seem to be waning amongst veterans and strong amongst press. Strange dichotomy. Need some examples?

I was read this article from Christopher Dawson today: http://education.zdnet.com/

Here is an excerpt...
"Last week, I blogged about the importance of communication, verbal and otherwise. This week, Google announced embedded support for voice and video chat within Gmail. Services like Utterli are making Twitter look a bit old-school. I have this feeling that voice is going to be a big deal."

And, then, a competing perspective from Michael Cerda, an EIR over at VenRock, former founder of Jangl and Ooma:
http://cerdafied.typepad.com/…_____.html

Here is an excerpt...
"No one really cares. The consumer VoIP market place has been for sale for at least two years, and very few people care. Skype got its hit, and nothing else since has been big enough to move anyone's needle."

Cerda might be the guy that thinks a show is over when his band is finished playing. Or, maybe he is onto something. Or maybe Dawson is right -- maybe voice is just about to hit an inflection point.

What do you think?

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Gavin Newsom on MSNBC

There was a moment of real news burried in today's back-to-back blathering of split-screen talking heads on MSNBC.

Addressing his fellow Democrats that supported prop 8 in California, "guys, spare me the speeches at the Jefferson dinner if you're going to strip rights away from people based on sexual orientation".

Whatever your position on Prop 8 and the constitutional debate over sexual orientation as a protected class, it was good to see a Democratic party leader take a not-so-subtle swipe at his own party's leadership. At least Mayor Newsom is consistent and honest on the position of civil rights.

Disclosures: I represented PodShow on Mayer Newsom's Digital Media Advisory Committee in 2006-2007.

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Utterli and ABCNews.com

I'm waking up this morning and looking at the impact of the election and ABCNews.com on Utterli. http://blog.utterli.com/. We apologize for a delay in notifications delivery. People might not have noticed, but our notification engine choked on volume starting yesterday around 5pm eastern. I guess this is a good thing to learn and fix. Thanks everyone for your patience.

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