“About Dial Directions

Dial Directions provides the leading platform for voice-activated location entry, directions, and other LBS, powered by innovation in speech recognition and voice user interface. The Dial Directions platform enables industry partners to expand their mobile services with a voice-activated interface, including 411/directory assistance providers, carriers, mobile applications and devices, and navigation solutions. Dial Directions partners include leaders in innovation such as Ask.com Mobile, Evite, Jingle Network’s 1-800-Free411, Virgin Mobile USA and Volt Delta Resources. Dial Directions also provides the first free nationwide phone service for driving directions, 1-DIRECTIONS (1-347-328-4667). In any U.S. city, mobile phone callers can say their start & destination address; and receive turn by turn directions by text message.”

Good ad sources for us are welcome at this point, so who knows where this might lead once you get away from the ‘on-hold’ albatross.

They are NOT profitable though they’ve thrown that term around in past PR. They finally have a slim gross margin, or so they announced, but that’s not a PROFIT. They still lose money bottom line and I’ll bet even before marketing expenses. They’ve also never been specific about that positive gross margin. For a day, a month, a quarter? Who knows, but when companies aren’t specific there’s usually a reason. Is it still positive gross margin? consistently? How much? Spare us the spin, it’s so 90’s dot com.

They talk about call volume, but the number of users must be only about 5 million I would guess, if you assume people use it 4 times a month. Even at the gross 20 million calls a month they claim, it’s not much of a network as far as the typical numbers associated with that term are concerned. There are spam networks that hit 20 million users and that’s peanuts.

Listen to an ad while on hold? yeah, ok, but limited to brand and message themes, not the high dollar value “live caller” of import that they tout (because if the caller were to interact, he/she would be disconnected from the call they were on hold for, wouldn’t they?). I like when things are free and they had an idea going here but they developed no real technology, mismanaged that given the “return” to east coast focus of past releases, took way too long, spent way too much money ($75 million) and they long ago lost the lead. 1-800-THE-INFO is free and has operators when the voice recognition software fails, so it beats FREE411 all day long, which has similar VRS failure but no operators. And GOOG411 has no ads.

Down rounds and running out of cash I’d say. It’s been up for sale at least twice as I recall with no takers. I’ll bet the ones hanging on still there wish they’d spent the money they once had more wisely and judiciously. They’d give anything to have just a couple more millions of that past pile. Maybe, that’s what you get when you take it for granted. Where are these guys, NY? Tough job market there. Good luck.

Oh vey!