Barron’s coverage of our CES announcement here. Industry Standard here.

• WSJ Video on the Icon with Dial2Do
• Full WSJ article here.

Aliph, the people behind the Jawbone suite of Bluetooth Headsets, have just announced their new line of headsets: The Jawbone Icon. And we’re delighted to announce that Dial2Do is one of the launch partners for their new “Dial Apps” concept.  CNET has provided an in-depth review of the new line-up here.

Aliph has really gone to town on this new line-up of headsets, and has several innovations on board, which they have grouped under the name MyTalk. MyTalk lets you can customise core features of the Icon headset from the web at mytalk.jawbone.com (live soon), including voice personalities, and a new range of Dial Apps – essentially one button access to some of your favourite services – including Dial2Do!

Users can log in to MyTalk and set Dial2Do as the default app to be called when the Talk button is held down. This provides one-touch access to the Dial2Do Handsfree Assistant from the JawBone – simple, convenient and safe – especially if you’re driving.

We’re delighted to be one of the Dial App launch partners for the JawBone Icon, and we look forward to bringing one-touch access to all your favourite services – email, text, twitter and more – to JawBone users everywhere in 2010 and beyond.

Late addition: in depth review from the Wall Street Journal here.

Yes, yes. Busy bees are we at Dial2Do HQ. At CES today we announced another partnership for the Dial2Do Handsfree Assistant. With our partners at Enustech, we’re proud to be launching a new installed hands-free car kit called the drive’n'talk (drive and talk – geddit?).

Launching today, the Klat 7 will ship with 90 days Dial2Do Pro bundled, enabling users to text, email and much, much more, while keeping their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. This is a first in the installed car-kit market, and so we’re very excited to be working with Enustech to help bring value-add for the busy driver to this segment of the market.

More details at the newly launched site here. Press release is here. Remember, the Dial2Do team is out in force at CES, so if you fancy a chat, please stop by our booth in the Safe Driving Zone.

The Dial2Do Team are out in force at CES this week. Our shiny new stand is in place in the Distracted Driving Zone, and we have people to meet and announcements to announce!

First announcement out of the blocks was our partnership with one of the world’s premium Bluetooth Headset manufacturers: BlueTrek. Known for being something of an innovator in the headset space, BlueTrek and Dial2Do have teamed up to launch a new headset called the Concerto, which will come bundled with the Hands-free Assistant service from Dial2Do. This means consumers can now email and text, hands-free, right out of the box.

And speaking of box – here’s how it looks “in situ”:

We’re delighted to be working with BlueTrek, and are very excited about the potential for the HandsFree Assistant service to address a real need for busy drivers everywhere.

Full details on the announcement here.

By now you might have noticed that there’s been a few things happening this week at Dial2Do. We have spruced up our website, added new content and a shiny new video to explain how it works, and switched on our paid service. We also quietly made some improvements to the way Dial2Do works for you when you phone it.

And finally, we gave a Christmas Gift to all our Beta users who have helped get us to this point – one year’s free subscription to the new Dial2Do Pro service! We are extremely grateful for all the comments, feedback and suggestions from our Beta users over the last twelve months – so we’re keen to keep you all with us! Please keep up the feedback and critical comments – it helps us make a better service for everyone.

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve been doing:

• New Site, content and naming: Now with added colour and cars! We’ll be promoting the service as the Handsfree Assistant for drivers in 2010 and beyond.  There’s a new area to help you learn more about Dial2Do before you try it. Complete with shiny new video!

• Payments: Dial2Do now has a free service and a Pro Service. When you sign up for the free service, you get one month of the Pro service to let you get a feel for what it can do for you. At the end of the month, if you’re not convinced, you can stay with the free service, which lets you manage your reminders (one of our most popular services). The Pro service costs either $3.99 a month, or $39.99 for the year, and lets you use everything Dial2Do has to offer. Full details on the Free and Pro services here.

• Conversational commands. You can now speak a little more naturally if you like when talking to Dial2Do. For example, to send a text, you used to do this:

You: “Text”

Dial2Do: “Text. Ok. Text who?”

You: “Aunt Marge”

Dial2Do: “OK. Ready to text Aunt Marge….”

Now you can just do this:

You: “Text Aunt Marge”

Dial2Do” “OK, ready to text Aunt Marge….”

Full details of the new style and some of the options here.

Finally – we’ll be at CES show in January in Las Vegas, Baby! We’ll be exhibiting in the Distracted Driving Zone. So – if you want to meet or chat to the Dial2Do Team at the event, please drop a line.

We’re a winner!!

OK, belatedly, it’s time to update everyone formally that Dial2Do scooped the “Best Mobile International” awards at the Mobile Excellence Awards in Los Angeles a few weeks back. Ivan Mac Donald, Dial2Do CEO, was on hand to collect the award and bring it back to base where it now has pride of place in the Dial2Do Boardroom.

We’ve had a very busy year at Dial2Do HQ, and so this was a fantastic acknowledgement of the work the whole Dial2Do Team have put in so far in 2009.

As for new news – we have quite a few announcements coming down the tracks over the next few weeks. We’ll be exhibiting at CES in January (more on that later) – so let us know if you would like to meet up and discuss ways we might work together.

Full details on all our fellow award winners here.

• Irish Times
• Silicon Republic

We just announced that Dial2Do has closed a new funding round. We’re obviously thrilled to secure the new investment “in the teeth of a recession” as my friends like to say. The funds were raised from Powerscourt ITC BES and Enterprise Ireland.

The money is to help us saddle up and really take the show on the road (literally) in North America, where the market has a couple of characteristics that make it very receptive for Dial2Do.  In the US, people spend a lot of time in their cars every day, and they’re itching for a safe way to engage with and use their standard web and phone “stuff”, while driving. Distracted driving legislation is also rolling out across the US, State by State, to encourage safer driving.

Dial2Do helps people use their driving time productively and safely to send texts, listen to and send emails, create reminders, use Twitter, listen to their calendars, and so on. All while letting people keep their hands on the wheel – they just have to speak to the Dial2Do service using a hands-free car kit or Bluetooth Headset.

We’re partnering with the “hands-free” ecosystem – headset providers, car-kit makers, and others – to bundle Dial2Do with the physical product, so that consumers will be able to just walk in to a store and buy a “joined up” experience, where the voice service works in harmony with the hands-free hardware “out of the box”.

Anyway – we look forward to announcing some exciting deals in the coming months. 2010 promises to be quite a year for value-add voice services in general, and Dial2Do in particular.

Gotta back back to work