TellMe For Sale

Mike - does this tie into your post about a Zune phone? Could MS need tellme to make a iphone killer?

Michael,

Isnt your blog meant to be about startups, if they last raised funds in 2001, 6 years ago and are turning over 100 million - I think that they have grown beyoind the startup category.

I think that there are too many of these ‘generic’ article sneaking into techcrunch now - at the expense of new startups - which is why people starting coming to techcrunch and continue coming to techCrunch.

There is enough generic IT news sites.

One of the few companies I remember using back in ‘99 to check NBA scores in middle of night.

Most recently I used it to check directions - they can still take some help in improving voice recognition.

Let’s see where MS takes this.

-Zaid

They did have a financing in ‘05 with ATT as the lead.

Zaid - who won?

i will give tellme their props. when they started they were a total cliche of the .com boom - the bunk beds in the office, etc

i had written them off after that, presuming their tendency to burn out in one quick sprint would do the company in (and my guess is they had high turnover after that sprint failed to make everyone rich)…but to my surprise they kept it going even when the focus had gone off of voice. kudos to them for slugging it out.

Allen,

The one I cannot forget: Lakers beat the Kings in round one, game 5. Good ol times of Kobe-Shaq:)

Didn’t have power all that night. Tellme was the only savior.

If I remember correctly, Yahoo also had a similar service back then. It went paid, and probably dead now.

-Zaid

Rich Tehrani speculated the same thing about a month back in his Blog.

His suspicion was that Google would acquire Tellme.

Nuance snapped up BeVocal
and Genesys Lab (Alcatel-Lucent) snapped up VoiceGenie

that leaves TellMe … they will be acquired, its a matter of time.

Microsoft sounds like they might finally be stepping up to the plate and spending some of that cash in the bank. http://venturebeat.com/2007/02.....-medstory/
and would still like to see them pick up Yahoo: http://www.thestreet.com/_yaho.....;cm_ite=NA

Steve FYI, Mike’s main blogging interests now are:

- GooTube
- Microsoft
- Yahoo

Other than these, forget it. New start ups should not expect much from Techcrunch. Since January (if not earlier), he has written about GooTube more than any thing/one else. Check yourself..

Maybe Mike might soon get a job in any of those BigCo’s as Chief Blogger for them. A $1 Million monthly salary would not be bad…

Nice work, Michael. You accomplished two things:
1) Freaked out all the PR monkeys in both companies. Kinda fun to do…
2) Drove up the TellMe valuation in the event there were some fence sitters on the deal. McCue better buy you a few cases of good Cabernet…

yeah. oops.

It looks like there are so many rumours circulating these days.

Hahaha… February fools!

Interesting because Microsoft has its own speech recognition server and has embraced S.A.L.T. as its speech markup language of choice (its fully integrated within the .Net framework). I think TellMe has always used Nuance speech servers and VXML. At the end of the day, this would be a business deal, but just found it intriguing because their technology preferences don’t really line up.

Rumors aren’t always bad … I’ve heard Microsoft and IBM are interested in hiring me as a social media producer … how true that is remains to be seen.

Okay, just kidding.

What would Google do with a company like TellMe?

Tellme has singlehandedly driven the notion of customer service into the dark ages. I doubt I’m alone here - I hate talking to a machine. I can’t count the number of times I got caught in Tellme hell when robot girl couldn’t understand simple numbers or words. Someone ought to write a boyfriend bot for Tellme girl whose only function is to call the toll free numbers of those who use Tellme and strike up thousand-hour conversations with the Tellme girl.

Tony,

If Google acquired TellMe, they’d integrate it into Google Maps and other properties. It would also be an expanded part of their Click-To-Call service in some form or fashion.

Also, there could be integration potential for Google AdSense. There’s unlimited potential.

By the way, I want to reiterate that my comment at #15 is a joke (I’ve noted visits from Microsoft and TellMe) — Microsoft nor IBM has expressed interest in hiring me to produce their podcasts — However, I’d be more than pleased if one stepped forward to sponsor my work in social media.

Eating ramen noodles and crackers while interviewing some of the world’s leading CEOs and visionaries seems a bit unusual.

Mark - I get my agressions out on the Delta robot woman. When she does not understand “representative” or “reservations” - all heck breaks loose

Great news. Hosted Voice Apps are now getting invited to the dance. TellMe has a great Hosted IVR offering. Soon these acquisitions will move into other hosted voice offerings such as hosted call center.
Last summer Oracle purchased Telephony@Work a hosted call center offering.

Reason to sell TellMe… Any competitors can clone Tellme networks in cheapest way.

TellMe - Could be integrated into any search engine!, and that would be great and cool if it were a free number to call.

- of course the first (2) results would be, sponsored …

- would be neat if I could call for directions… then it talks me home.

-Rb

TellMe would want an arm and two legs for all of their “stuff” they accumulated over the years and the customers who are barely paying for the lights.

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

Alex

Alex,

There are a few things I am tired of hearing/seeing

1. posts on techcrunch about digg, I think all techcrunch wants to do is appear on the digg front page, after all, tc is trying to drive reader ship

2. people talking about how “product X” can be created in “2-8 weeks” meaning product X ain’t worth the VI is typed into, this just completely misses the boat on where value it, hint, with this web stuff it is RARELY the product, but more the traction and community, like or not, TellMe does have traction that you can not even begin to understand how to get

I often tell people … ‘ok, assume you spent the 6 weeks and created something better than product X, then what’, I usually get not response

when will I learn my lesson and check for typos before ranting !

I don’t work at Tellme, but I know a number of people who work there and have a fair idea about what they have built. Alex claims that something more featureful could be build for much less money in 6 months. If you you don’t mind sucking sound quality, and crappy reliability, then he has a point. After all our cell phones only have something like 99% call completion rates, and lots of websites only hit 99.5-99.9% availability. Lets pile on the features and to hell with reliability.

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.

Typos are the norm, so I wouldn’t feel to bad about it.

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.

TellMe is over 6 years old, they were a first mover, but that is largely moot now.

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.

Since I know the space pretty well let me clarify.

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!

The Microsoft and TellMe speech recognitions aren’t that different anymore…Microsoft has embraced VXML, as well. SALT is recognized as a failure, and the company has moved on. Further, Nuance and TellMe have been engaged in a law suit for quite some time.

“Alex Manner” wrote:

“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

Maybe Nuance Communications is in talks to buy Tell Me. If I remember Nuance started a patent lawsuit against Tell Me. I think the lawsuit cancelled their IPO. Maybe Nuance is trying to leverage the patents lawsuit to buy it at a discount. 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.

I’m very surprised that a company would slap a lawsuit prior to another company going public. In fact you want that company to go public so they raise a whole bunch of money. Once they raise the capital then you sue them - I thought that was standard practice. Or do what Google did with Yahoo. Give them X shares to be sold at the IPO price. Or just tell them to kiss their ass:)
What I don’t know and is very interesting to shed more light on is what is the status of that lawsuit. Anybody know? Are there not some newer open source speech technologies now available?

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.

Laurent wrote:

“… 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

Gern, interesting post. You know the industry well and are holding the cards close to your chest.

- 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……………..

Alejandro wrote:
“I’m very surprised that a company would slap a lawsuit prior to another company going public.”

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.

Tellme now has a news group for all the latest news of Tellme. Tellme users are also welcomed to post messages and their pictures.

not for nothing #33….but nuance is not “thee” leader. For clarification purposes, nuance is a consolidated effort of LHSP/bevocal/scansoft/dragon/speechworks. Thats why they are @ where they’re @. they just went on a buying spree & scansoft really did most of the work that mattered. nuance was actually bought out, scansoft just kept the “nuan” ticker. If anyone in here wants hush hush diamond in the rough info…no bs….Fonix corporation. you’ll see. buy it up in droves!

Oh & btw, not only is it not the bul.lshi.t HarmenMarkovMethod VR, but actual patented neural network based speech in/out With the #1 DecTalk TTS, microsoft has EXCLUSIVE use of fonix tech in the xbox, not to mention Sony PS2-3, Electronic arts, & every chip vendor.intel/motorola/seiko-epson/casio/canon, & Operating system. 2 - 3 more years…this will be a bigcap.Mark my words!

{VOIP - BPL - embedded - Voice user interface technologies}

5 - 10 years

It’s true. Microsoft announced its intentions to acquire Tellme Networks this morning: http://www.microsoft.com/press.....echPR.mspx

Now that MS have put speech on the map with this deal can anyone see Google seeking out a target so they wont get left behind?

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