Mobile Voice, a Modest Proposal
March 7th, 2008 | by Brad King |My friends run a start-up company called Unwired Nation.
I first found out about it three years ago, here at SXSW. Eric Hellweg (online EIC for Harvard Business Review) and I met them at one of the Interactive parties. They spelled out their idea — and, of course, I hated it. No way.
The premise: audio messages would be better than SMS messages for communicating with customers (in some cases).
Puh-leez.
Three years later, Unwired Nation is now courting some pretty big names in the industry. I can’t go into the who is and what’s what…but it’s fair to say that I was likely wrong in my initial assessment.
UnWired Nation provides an innovative voice-based commerce platform that delivers real-time, interactive mobile notification and transaction services directly into the consumer’s hands anytime, anywhere. UnWired Nation is able to extend commerce to US based mobile phones to close event-triggered transactions via voice. The company’s first platform, UnWired Buyer for eBay, allows buyers and sellers to remotely bid in the final three minutes of an auction.
Yup. 300,000 calls to 1 million people.
Now I’m trying to figure out how this service can apply to news. Stacy and Eric Smith gave me some interesting ideas earlier today. The one that I think they are correct about is turning books — or newspapers — into podcasts. You would dial into your account and either through your Bluetooth ear piece or if you have Bluetooth speakers in your car, the newspaper would be audio streamed to you.
Many media companies use Audible, one of the more well-known audio-translation companies, but UnWired Nation uses the device you already use for audio — your phone. It’s an interesting and innovative idea.
Two reasons for the business sell: SMS messages cost more than auto-generated calls and voice allows for interactivity (press 1, press 2) which can be instantly stored in a database.
