Dial2Do’s HandsFreeAssistant was shortlisted yesterday for an InfoVision Award at the Broadband World Forum Conference to be held in Paris in October this year. We’re in the “Best New Service” category , and it would be fair to say that we’re thrilled skinny. Mind you, the competition is a little intimidating – the shortlist includes us and one or two Telco Brands you may have heard of:

So yes – we have our work cut out to win the prize!

Our first time at the Broadband World Forum conference was last year, when we took part in a panel moderated by Alan Quayle. Depsite the “Broadband” word in the title – it’s actually a broad conference covering key topics in wireless, mobile and broadband, and includes many of he key movers and shakers worldwide. Keynotes are from the CEOs or CTOs of the world’s top operators and vendors, so it’s great for “taking a temperture” for where things are at in the industry.

Alan works with Operators and other Telecom vendors around the world, and has long been both advocate of how operators can change to take advantage of their strengths in the changing Telecom landscape, and thorn in their side when he explains where he thinks they’re going wrong. A nice example is his recent piece on Developer Communities in his blog, in which he helps categorise the different Operator Developer and Content Communities.

Alan is moderating several sessions at the World Forum Conference – one on Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Evolution and one on Developer Communities. We’ll be taking part in the panel discussion for the latter session, which will have presentations from Orange, Verizon and KPN about their development community initiatives, as well as  some opening comments and stewardship from Alan himself. It’s always interesting to get together with the operators and talk frankly about what works and what doesn’t – and I’d expect this session to be no exception

You can get a feel for our Point of View from our presentation at ICIN 2009:

Great conference, and we’re delighted to be nominated in illustrious company. Hope to see you there!

Nice infographic from Mashable about the continued rise of text messaging. Some great stats in there, including this nugget:

200,000 auto accidents in the US every year are attributed to texting while driving.

Wow. Worth a read. Let’s be careful out there. Detail here.

View clip here.

At Dial2Do – we love Evernote. If you haven’t heard of it – it’s a beautiful and deceptively simple service to help you store stuff that you don’t want to forget. Ever. Pictures, notes, docs, business cards. Whatever. You send it to Evernote and they’ll store it securely for you and make it available to you anytime you want, on the web, on your phone, on your laptop. If you want to try it – go there now and sign up – it’s free!

We first met the Evernote Team in 2008 at a Mobilize Conference in San Francisco. We hatched plans back then for how we might collaborate to make it easier for Evernote users to take more advantage of audio and speech in the Evernote service. The Evernote team was working on a new API, “and more”. We started by working with their API to make it easy for Dial2Do users to create audio notes in the service.

Last week, Evernote formally launched their platform – the Evernote Trunk.  It lets Evernote users easily access partner services from within Evernote, and activate and add partner services to their account. From the end user perspective, it looks a little like an app store, with loads of cool value-add stuff that helps you get more out of your account.

From the partner perspective, it’s a great way to put our service in front of 3.7 million Evernote Users, who tend to be some of the more technically savvy and clued-in users out there! Evernote ceo Phil Libin (pictured here at the launch event) regularly shares killer data on his blog about Evernote’s conversion rates, usage metrics and more.

Together with Evernote, we created a new dedicated service that works with Evernote, and called it (drumroll please….) Voice2Note.

What is Voice2Note? It’s a value-add service for Evernote users that does two key things:

• It finds audio notes in your account and converts them to text
• It gives you a phone number so that you can create audionotes by dialling a number and speaking. This means that anytime you think of something that you would like to store securely in Evernote, you have yet another way of getting it in there: hit the Voice2Note number and speak.

That’s it! It takes 2 minutes to register and set it up if you already have an Evernote account. Once you’ve done that, you can get busy phoning in audionotes, and watch (as if by magic) as your existing and new audionotes are converted to text!

Like Evernote, Voice2Note is a Freemium offer. You can use the basic service for free (max of five audionotes converted to text per month), or else get a Pro account (unlimited audionote conversions, plus tagging) which costs $29.99 per year or $2.99 per month.

Try it now and tell us what you think. The initial feedback has been great. Thanks again to everyone at Evernote for being genuinely great partners to work with.

]]> http://blog.dial2do.com/2010/07/22/voice2note/feed/ 2 sos100 P1010647 P1010648 P1010639 voice2note logo audiocapture P1010633 http://blog.dial2do.com/2010/04/30/driventalk-the-new-klat7-powered-by-dial2do-hits-the-stores/ http://blog.dial2do.com/2010/04/30/driventalk-the-new-klat7-powered-by-dial2do-hits-the-stores/#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:52:11 +0000 sos100 http://blog.dial2do.com/?p=636 Continue reading →]]>

We announced a deal with DriveNTalk at CES in January, to put Dial2Do in to their innovative new handsfree car-kit : the Klat 7.

So let’s explain the name first: “Talk” spelled backwards is “Klat”, and this handsfree carkit understands what you say and talks back to you. Get it? See what we did there?

Anyway back to the main event. The Klat7 is an installed hands-free kit: you install it in the car like any regular new stereo / music unit, and it uses the car’s speakers to play the audio. It has all the fancy-pants stuff you expect and need of an up-to-the-minute car-kit, including noise suppression and echo-cancellation (translation: great quality sound for you and for the person on the other end of a call).

Plus! It comes with a super convenient remote control that you can put in your favourite spot in the car so that it’s a cinch to control volume, skip tracks, answer calls and more.

And last, but not least, it comes with three months free Dial2Do service “out of the box”.

After that, if you like it, it’s the regular price of $39.95 per year, or $3.99 per month. The units are now in production and for sale across the US. You can buy them online right now. They’re on special right now at $149.95 (normal retail $199.95). For wholesale interest – go here.

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.