One cool thing about this: I deal with people in China all the time. They speak and understand English, but have difficulty reading and writing it. This would be one hell of a way to communicate with them.

I don’t always have everyone’s phone number on me…but I have most emails at my fingertips at any given moment. IMHO it’s easier to voice a coherent message from a cell phone than type it out for sms on it’s keyboard if it’s more than a line or two.

I also really like the fact that you can forward a message received to others (groups: family, friends, co-workers) and even download the wav file to repurpose it (podcasting, sampling, ?). Again, perhaps that’s a niche market, but the best things embraced by the mainstream generally start out as deviations to begin with.

A little bummed about the low-usage level to where they start to charge. But with a decent laptop and/or a mic on your desktop system you could still make great use of this.

At least someone’s trying to be creative.

We’re seeing great traction with Vnotes at Sprint – by the end of this year, just about every data-capable Sprint phone will include it.

I’m not sure why this will be a big business. Can somebody explain me ?

Did you try it? I think you will like it. And yes, we may fall into the niche category of people are too busy for their own good, and for whom this service is targeted. There are times when I’d like to leave a little voice message for people while I’m driving, and to press one button, speak their name, and start talking is pretty easy. Now, regarding service, versus stand-alone business, you have a great point. See the comment above left by Brian McConnell about Trekmail, and link by Steve_Ray below it. Trekmail had a voice email service that worked exactly like this minus speech rec. It sync’d with your Plaxo address book, and enabled you to send quick messages by voice. Nobody was willing to pay for it as a stand-alone product, so they sold out to Visto last year, and integrated into Visto’s mobile email clients.

Now, this service is not linked with Plaxo (it is broader than that), and has voice recognition, which also pushes things forward.

But how many people are going to actually pay for this? I’ve got a lot of monthly bills gouging me for this and that, and I haven’t made up my mind whether the service is really compelling enough to make the cut. It’s a great service, and may indeed only survive as a service offered by a larger company. We shall see.

you can leave a voicemail pertaining to a matter – for them to retrieve later. Sometimes you may think of a matter at an incorrect time to phone someone – and sometimes you simply forget to contact someone at the time you planned.

It is especially helpful to do all this from your PC – you may come interesting news you may want to share with a business associate who may be commuting – so you can just send a email or send a voicemail

http://w2.trekmail.com/discuss/msgReader$1

The only problem is that it was a feature, not a business, and it was impossible to get people to pay for something like this. End users didn’t want to pay $5/month on their credit cards, and the carriers wanted to keep most of the revenue for themselves.

After giving up on trying to sell it direct to consumers, we ended up selling the business to Visto, which rolled it into their portfolio of mobile email services We considered ourselves lucky to recoup some of our investment, and were not particularly happy with the whole experience.

Services like this look appealing, but the adsense model doesn’t work, and getting customers to pay for point solutions like this is really hard.

Not saying it’s a bad idea, just that we had a nearly identical service with loyal users, virtually none of whom were willing to pay, which made it a cool feature, but a lousy business.

1. Most vaoicemails are relatively short – anything long and most people dont listen. If you agree with that then why not just send an email or sms instead of an email voicemail which is essentially what this company does.

2. When I call someone and hope to get their voicemail its for a few reasons a. I dont want to talk to them but would rather leave a message b. I want them to think I tried to reach them (here is where this model falls apart. If I get an email voicemail from someone it will make me think – what they didnt want to talk to me live?)

3. It would be much better if this service new the voicemail number for all of the networks and dialed that and let you leave a real voicemail for someone – I am sure this can be done.

4. Why bother – 10 voice emails and I am paying for more – I dont think so…Ill just send an email or sms….

Can someone do a sanity check – $3mm raised…for what? This can be developed by someone else fast but the bigger question is WHY?