Saturday, October 21, 2006

Morphing Cellphones into Blackberrys


For wireless carriers, business is becoming increasingly complex.

In addition to handling voice calls, the carriers are now faced with distributing games, ringtones and multimedia messaging. Even television is on its way. But one problem that the carriers still haven't figured out is how to make sending and receiving e-mails from a cellphone easy.

Now, there is a little-known company, Huntington Beach, Calif.-based Voice Genesis, that has come up with a product it calls Vemail.

It could be the answer.

Vemail, which is based on Qualcomm's BREW platform, is currently used by 28 carriers in 50 million mobile phones, and it is remarkably simple. The idea is fast message review.

E-mails come in and you read them. To respond quickly, you speak the response instead of trying to type a response using the tiny keys on a mobile phone. The system then records your voice and sends an e-mail to the recipient with a hyperlink. The recipient clicks on the hyperlink and hears the recording of your message.

Verizon and Alltel have given their thumbs-up and customers now pay $4.99/month for the service.

Who's next? My guess is that more carriers will jump on the Vemail bandwagon soon.

Now, when's somebody going to come out with a blog tool that allows me to talk in to the microphone and have my words posted to Blogger (with all the pertinent hyperlinks, of course)?

source: Nikhil Huteesing, Forbes.com

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