Shoots assortment of cheep checks from supercooled nitrogen to superheated liquor….

In the UK I work for Eckoh based in Hemmel Hempstead and we are emurging as one of two speech companies in the UK that are posed to do well (Telephonetics the other)

I see us really undervalued at the monent and I believe we had interest from another company last year (probably for our large cashpile rather than speech)

Any views on the next move in the market?

Becksy

5 - 10 years

Actually, it happens more often than you think. While you’re right that waiting until a company goes public means that the target of the lawsuit has deeper pockets, a pending patent lawsuit while you’re in the middle of the IPO process yields incredible leverage. Waiting for deeper pockets only works well if you believe you have a reasonably high probability of prevailing in court.

This happened to us at PayPal prior to our IPO in 2002. Two different companies, CertCo and Tumbleweed, brought patent suits against us while we were in the final stages of going public (search on “Paypal” “IPO” and either of those comapanies and you can find lots of old articles). Underwriters and potential investors understandably get very nervous about pending IP suits, so the target of the lawsuit has massive incentive to settle even if they believe the suits are without merit. Basically, your IPO gets put virtually on hold until these suits are resolved in somehow (in PayPal’s case, we chose to settle).

Whether you think of this as blackmail or clever IP strategy is a matter of opinion, but timing an IP lawsuit during a pending financing or M&A event can often maximize the outcome.

- I’m curious to know what the technology is based on. My hunch is its open source with an incredible amount of web services, giving TellMe some cool IP
- There is also an Israeli company that has some great technology. Israeli’s are incredible in the telecom technology sector
- You’re correct. NUAN only has approx $120M in cash. The BeVocal acquisition represented approx 5% of NUAN. Rumor has it that TellMe is worth north of $700M……………..

“… Tell Me relies on Nuance technology, if Nuance decides to stop supplying Tell Me, Tell Me business model is dead.

“Think of it. Nuance is THE WORLD LEADER in speech technology and also the big consolidator of this industry.”

Not correct, Laurent. Tellme currently uses Nuance technology but there are other speech recognition solutions available, and I have it on good authority that Tellme is developing a new platform based on a speech solution other than that provided by Nuance. Another thing to consider is Nuance’s market cap, a relatively paltry $2.5B — I don’t know how much cash Nuance has but could they even afford to buy Tellme, lawsuit notwithstanding?

Perhaps Microsoft is interested in both Nuance and Tellme?

Gern

Very similar to the lawsuit that eFax (JCOM) planted on CallWave (post IPO). Went into a black whole and nobody has heard since……. though an attorney recently told me that a number of JCOM patents are being challenged and under review.

Think of it. Nuance is THE WORLD LEADER in speech technology and also the big consolidator of this industry.

“One could build what TellMe has in less than 6 months - from scratch - much cheaper and with more features.”

This is the notion of an idiot, someone who has no idea how complex speech recognition truly is. Tellme has captured billions of utterances and used the data to continually tune its applications. What do you know about speech grammar, grammar generation, and grammar tuning, Alex? Probably nothing. And then there’s the business side of things — please do acquire, what, ten or twenty fortune 100 companies as customers and build their voice apps in six months, as well. Cretin.

Gern

1) Could this platform be built for less than $200+? Answer is yes. Because technology has evolved
2) Is TellMe a legitimate company in the hosted IVR arena? Answer - Absolutely, With revenues exceeding $100M I’d say they are legitimate
3) Could someone build this platform in six weeks? Answer - Only if you smoke crack. You can may be come up with a similar UI in that time span

I founded a hosted voice company that has been extremely successful. I can’t tell you how many times I also had people tell me they could do the say platform in six weeks or six months. When they would tell me that I would encourage them to get their product to market so it could further validate our platform…….. guess what. None of the jokers could deliver. Developing a multi-tenant platform for voice is extremely difficult. The greatest barrier to entry is ENGINEERING. There are only a handful of qualified engineers worldwide that understand and have the knowledge to build such a platform in a fault tolerant architecture. I can also tell you that these engineers are not working at Cisco, Avaya or Nortel. Hence, why do you think MSFT is looking to buy TellMe? Why do you think that Oracle has acquired 3 telephony infrastructure based companies in the past 12 months? Why do you think that Avaya just bought Ubiquidity in the UK? Why do you think that Nuance acquired BeVocal last week? There are more acquisitions coming this year in the hosted voice space!

Traction is measured differently depending on the company. For TellMe, whose main business is selling automated call center services to big ass companies, I think traction is defined by the number and quality of those big ass companies. Judging by 1) there customer list and 2) the number of times I’ve heard the TellMe chick when I call companies, I’d say they have serious traction.

Maybe you’ll learn that lesson about the same time you learn that “traction” should not be defined by usage of an application/ service by the first movers (or Valley dwellers). There are simply so many “technologies” out there (and emerging) that the average tech user simply cant keep up or keep them straight.

Only when these applications/ services become so compelling, and as a result receive due recognition in the media, will the bulk of users even consider utilizing them. The lower the barrier to entry, the more “copy cats”; and when these “copy cats” are one of the Co’s #10 mentions above, there is cause for concern within the startup that “leads” in that area.

On the other hand, if someone wants a platform and a service which will *reliably* answer the phone, enable a significant amount of self service using the same infrastructure that is powering folks web sites, then Tellme is pretty useful. Tellme is one of the few services I know of that have been continuously exceeding 99.99% available over the last five years. Hitting those sorts of perform metrics requires a significant amount or time and refinement, in both how products are engineered and how those products are operated. The other thing Tellme has is a good team of people who truly get how to design a good speech user interface and some amazing work related to providing good sounding text to speech on the phone. None of that can be duplicated in 6 months, much less at scale.