Spinvox offers employees shares instead of salary

July 16, 2009 | Ingrid Lunden | Comments | |

spinvoxSpinvox, the voice-to-text startup, has been on a roll: $100 million in funding from an impressive list of backers; then, a key deal with Telefonica covering its Latin America mobile operations, which bump its userbase to 150 milion (with some other contracts it claims it has yet to announce); and just yesterday, 600 registrations for its API set, which is getting the service embedded with other fast-growing mobile applications like Audioboo.

But there are signs that the company might be growing too fast for its own good — either that, or the spin for Spinvox is taking a turn in the other direction. PaidContent reports that Spinvox is offering employees shares instead of a salary. This is following an interview with Daniel Doulton, one of the company’s founders, who said that Spinvox would need more funding if it takes on more deals like the one with Telefonica.

Offering shares as remuneration is not uncommon or questionable on its own, of course, particularly in a climate where startup funding is at its lowest point in years. But now the news is ferretting out other anonymous gripes that Spinvox is not paying employee expenses and its suppliers.

A spokesperson from Spinvox has confirmed to us the share-for-salary offer. “This is a move which is entirely in line with Spinvox policy, spreading ownership among its people,” he says. But he would not comment on the other allegations. The company currently has 250 employees, down from 300 earlier in the year.

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About the Author, Ingrid Lunden

  • Pedro
    where there's smoke there's fire. Having raised $100M for this model leaves many questions. An audit of the books is in order.
  • keeping track
  • JACK
    Ms. Domecq...are you listening?

    Your day of reckoning is coming soon!
  • SpinVox has always been a company for which I have had grave reservations and one that I have been watching for quite sometime (since I have a background in telephony-based speech recognition applications, even if that isn’t my gig these days).

    Now my grave reservations are not due to the colourful history of its execs (of which I wasn’t aware until reading thedeal, pC:UK - both referenced above - and other sources) but really due to the fact that I have always felt that the company - right from when it launched, till date - has always tried to conceal the fact that its transcription is powered by humans; the core SpinVox patent is a workflow patent and while I’m sure they are trying to automate as much as they can with speech recognition (whether home grown or licensed from a real player), they will never - in the foreseeable future (and it will be that horizon against which this business is valued) - be able to achieve a material percentage of automation which will allow them to scale the business.

    Quoting the core SpinVox patent (see http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2006/0223502.... "Voicemail is received at a voicemail server and converted to an audio file format; it is then sent or streamed over a wide area network to a voice to text transcription system comprising a network of computers. One of the networked computers plays back the voice message to an operator and the operator intelligently transcribes the actual message from the original voice message by entering the corresponding text message (actually a succinct version of the original voice message, not a verbose word-for-word conversion) into the computer to generate a transcribed text message. The transcribed text message is then sent to the wireless information device from the computer. Because human operators are used instead of machine transcription, voicemails are converted accurately, intelligently, appropriately and succinctly into text messages (SMS/MMS)."

    Using call centres full of humans to transcribe people’s voicemail - setting aside any privacy concerns that may follow from that degree of human intervention - will not scale and is doomed to fail. Speech recognition isn't going to save them; they really just started in the wrong place with a service which relied wholly/heavily on human transcribers. Contrast this with Google, who following the relaunch of GrandCentral as Google Voice, have started at the other (and I would assert correct) end of the spectrum, i.e. with a pure speech recognition based service (which is, of course, but one aspect of their comprehensive voice service.)

    Given the concealing approach to the way in which the SpinVox business works and the inherent lack of scalability therein, the fact they are called *Spin*Vox is both very Freudian and very true.

    Spin. Crash. Burn. Fail. Tick tock tick tock...
  • from another site
    From: Sarah Bridge,

    Hi there,

    I'm a newspaper journalist looking at doing a story on SpinVox and would be interested in hearing more from the people writing here, especially former/current staffers and suppliers. If you'd like to chat, then do drop me a line at sarah.bridge@mailonsunday.co.uk (I write for the business section) and it would be great to have a chat.

    All the best,

    Sarah Bridge


    Posted on: July 23, 2009 10:33 AM
  • Doxin
    Worth a read....http://blog.spinvox.com/2009/07/23/spinvoxs-response/