MarketWatch.com unveiled its new iPhone application yesterday, featuring real-time headlines and news bulletins, real-time data, audio and social media features to serve the site’s core audience of engaged investors.  The free application is currently available via the Apple App Store.  We are thrilled to announce that our ReadSpeaker podCaster application powers the text-to-speech function for the Top Stories section which allows users to listen to articles directly from the iPhone.
MarketWatch.com is part of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, which includes WSJ.com, Barrons.com and AllThingsD.com.

You can download the MarketWatch iPhone app here.

October 8^th, 2009

VoiceCorp released today an iPhone application in association with one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, Upsala Nya Tidning (UNT). UNT is the first company to launch VoiceCorp’s iPhone application, enabling iPhone and iPod Touch users to listen to the latest news.

VoiceCorp has developed an application for iPhone and iPod Touch that allows content providers to expand their reach by offering high quality and fully automated podcasts from their RSS feeds. This automatic podcast service is based on the ReadSpeake podCaster product. The application can be seen as a ‘company branded’ podcast player on the iPhone that plays back an audio version of a full text RSS feed. In addition to the iPhone, the application is also available for Andriod phones, and will soon be for Blackberry and Java.

“With the iPhone application, based on our ReadSpeaker podCaster product, content will be accessible to a larger audience by reaching those that prefer to listen to content, rather than read it” said Niclas Bergstrom, CEO at VoiceCorp. “This can range from people with reading difficulties to business people that want to listen to the latest news feeds while doing something else”.

The iPhone application is immediate available to content providers worldwide.

About VoiceCorp

VoiceCorp is the leading Software as a Service (SaaS) company in the area of speech-enabling online content for web sites and RSS feeds. The founders of VoiceCorp pioneered the first-ever speech-enabling application for web sites with its ReadSpeaker application in 1999. VoiceCorp has a wide variety of corporate, media, public and non-profit customers worldwide subscribing to its services and several million users listening per month. VoiceCorp speech-enables online content on the fly in up to 20 languages and provides a portfolio of web based text-to-speech applications for web sites, RSS feeds, online campaigns, newsletters, and emails deliverable on computers as well as on portable devices such as mp3 players, smartphones, iPhones and PDAs. More information about VoiceCorp: www.voice-corp.com.

an overview of the audience during Mindtrek

It have passed some days since I got home. So it is time to wrap up my report from the Mindtrek conference. It was two great days with a lot of new inputs and insights shared by great speakers. The practical arrangement in total was good. I have just one complain and that is the Internet connection that was very shaky and fragile. It is possible to make a rock stable wifi for a lot larger conference. And here is how to do that.

Networking is the best part

I am happy for all the great networkning during these days. But 800 people is a lot of people and I have managed to talk to just a very small part of that. But it is not the quantity that matters but the quality. It is also always great to be able to tell people about our services and it is so few that know about it even if we have been around for some time now.

Twitter

One of the best sides with Twitter is how easy and effective it is to get in contact with the other participant at the same conference when meeting on the backchannels of the event. It gives an extra value to the conversation and what is said. The Mindtrek staff themselves was not very visible at all att the backchannels except for broadcasting some public messages to the people (one-way communication)

Rebirth of mobile life

Day 2 started for me with paticipating in the Track “Rebirth of Mobile Life”. First speaker was Måns Adler at Bambuser. Great talk where he started with an historical review of former technologies that became used in another way than they first was ment to. He then told about their great service for free broadcasting from a mobile or web camera. I have been using the service since the very beginning and love it. So it was interesting to hear Måns telling about it and to meet their developers.

Interesting with the cases on how one never know how new technology will be used. The same goes for ReadSpeaker since we now see a fast rising usage of our services for mobile devices.

Second speaker was Pekka Markkula from Teliasonera. Shared some interesting views from the perspective of one of the largest operators in Nordic countries. Both on the current situation and something about the future.

Last speakers was also great even if that was not really related to what we are doing. It was two people from Backstage Alliance that talked about the Music industry and the absolute need for it to adapt to the new market if they are going to survive. Most likely they are not needed any longer if they dont understand that they have to start to treat artists as customers and that the thing they have to focus on is the relation between the artist and their fans. Not on just tweeking the assembly line to be as profitable as possible.

I had great lunch where I was introduced to yesterdays Keynote speaker Chris Messina and had a brief chat with him and his girlfriend Brynn Evans. Cool to talk to a Social Media Rock Star. (he have over 17 000 followers on Twitter for an instance) even though he didnt consider himself as one (…Yes, I asked

After lunch there was some awards to be celebrated where one winner was surprisingly a hardware not a web service. A bit strange. It is like if the winner in the Academy Awards would be a camera.

The final speakers had the ungreatful task to get the attention from the audience after a couple of intensive days and a late nights party. It didn’t become easier when Adam Greenfield held a VERY theoretical speech on the subject “Elements of a networked urbanism”. And the last speaker Pekka Himanen might had some really interesting stuff to tell about but by then I wasn’t listening any more.  So I joined the other 50% of the audience that was mingeling in the hallway instead.

There is some material now online at the www.mindtrek.org website from the conference. That is unusual. Mostly what happens when a conference is over is that the website freezes over. You can also find a lot of comments and content on www.andreavascellari.com

If you are going to choose just one speech. Pick the one Chris Messina held.

On my Bambuser channel you will find most of the sessions I attended. Except the keynotes on day 1.

I just attended 2 great days at the FOWA London 09 conference. I must say that @ryancarson and his team really made the 2 days worthwile. Apart from the wifi problems on day 1, I thought that the panel of speakers, the length of each talk and the general atmosphere at the event were really good. There was also a tweeter based sytem called Hello which enabled all participants to say who they were so that you could visualise who was sitting where as you can see on the image above.

One of the highlights of these 2 days for me was the presentation by Chris Thorpe from The Guardian. Chris described The Guardian’s approach to the disruption which is affecting all newspapers worldwide with the advent of digital forms of communication and participation and the bi-directionality that this is causing where all of us can become creators and distributors of information. There are 3 approaches newspapers can have here : ignore, control or embrace. The Guardian is clearly embracing the latter in each of the 4 building blocks of the newspaper industry : creation, fabrication, distribution and monetisation.

The Guardian’s strategy here is one of what Chris Thorpe calls mutualisation. The idea is to take advantage of the bi-directionality that digital forms bring about by bringing together different external parties in each of the 4 building blocks referred to above. For example, mutualisation in the creation area is what Chris calls co-creation where both The Guardian journalists and the individual take part in creating unique content. He presented a great example with the g20 events in London where the combined efforts of professional journalism and amateur video footage brought about more informative and objective coverage of the event. In the areas of fabrication and distribution, The Guardian is opening up its platform so as to make it as easy as possible for developers to think of new applications which can disseminate The Guardian’s content (read here articles and datasets mainly) in many different ways. It is as if you were opening up the car hood of a given car maker and enabling any driver to come up with new ways of making it a faster, safer, greener car for example. The main difference here is that the threshold of doing this for the average individual is much lower for influencing digital text media than it is for a car…

Less clear was how mutualisation was going to fit in the monetisation block. In the co-creation model talked above, how do you mutualise i.e. share the revenue brought about the joint effort of a blogger and the professional journalist. How do you measure the weights of each in the piece of news which has been produced? How do apps which weave The Guardian’s content into other forms of content get retributed?  These questions will need economically balanced and fair answers in order for the co-model Chris Thorpe discusses to be successful.

I am attending the third Mindtrek conference in Tampere, Finland.

MindTrek is the leading Nordic digital media and business conference, focusing on social media & Web 2.0. At MindTrek the newest trends, innovations, revolutionary business phenomena is presented.

I came here for two reasons: Network with Finlands elite within social media and web business. And also to get new insights and inspiration from the really great panel of speakers.

First Keynote speaker was Chris Messina aka “Factory Joe”. For me a familiar name and I have followed this great podcast in 1.5 years. A great keynote that I didnt manage to get recorded or broadcasted.  Luckily someone else did ;-).  Chris also posted his slides and a short summary of what he said and is now public here. “Identity is the platform” was the subject of his speech.

Then Dave Coleman (at Collaborative Strategies) talked about Enterprise Social Collaboration. And his talk was followed by a panel discussion on that topic.

After lunch I attended in the track “Mind your community business” held by Andrea Vascellari. I have been in contact with him on Facebook and Twitter for some time. And he know how to use the technology of 2009 for events like this. He put up the backchannels 2 weeks ago and started to prepare the panel discussions. Everyone have been able to vote for topics and questions for the panel. And it was very educating and interesting to take part in. Everything around this track can be found here

Last thing I attended today was the keynote by Jyri Engeström from Google. Really interesting speech about trends and strategies under the headline ““Snack Size Sociality: Affection, Influence and Identity in the Days of Bite-Sized Media”.

Most of Jyri Engeströms speech, Andrea Vascellaris track about “Mind your community business” I managed to broadcast on my channel on Bambuser. But there have been som major problems with the WiFi today so it got interupted some times.

Talking about the Swedish Bambuser I met one of the founders Måns Adler that arrived this afternoon. He is going to speak tomorrow. Will be interesting to hear and to bambuse (new verb for “broadcasting with Bambuser). A lot of great stuff on the web come from Sweden besides ReadSpeaker Another example is the Twingly Channels that was launched today (beta-release). I was attending at their pre-launch event yesterday in Stockholm and got myself an invite. I will try it out next week. Seems to be a great tool for tracking ones brand. So the first channel I will make is for ReadSpeaker.

Now it is time for some more networking at the Mindtrek party. Next report tomorrow!!

Seriously, I am so done reading long news articles on my tiny Sony Ericsson (C702) mobile phone screen. It just don’t do it for me. I like to use the phone in a good old fashioned way; Listen to it. (for emailing I choose my Blackberry).

Sweden’s largest morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter today announced the news about the ReadSpeaker service on their mobile website mobil.dn.se.

The ReadSpeaker services are well used among groups of people that have problem accessing text all over the world. Dagens Nyheter are now targeting the Speech Enabling service towards mobile users “on the run”.  Originally developed to be a tool for web content owners to increase the accessibility to the text content for people with reading handicaps, ReadSpeaker is now going more main stream. More and more people discover the advantages of letting web pages “speak for themselves”.   I use the ReadSpeaker services, when available on the website I am visiting, for example when preparing breakfast for my kids. It enables me to catch up with the latest news while doing other stuff. You should try it out yourself!

I often use Thalys to go from our Paris office to our management meetings in our Dutch office in Huis ter Heide. So far, apart from the train being much slower on the Belgian and Dutch side and the occasional delays, the service was good but not excellent.

Yesterday I was coming back on the train that leaves Rotterdam at 19h26 and is supposed to arrive in Paris at 22h35. Due to a power failure (that was known to Thalys since 18h), the train could not go to Paris and dropped us off at Breda. From there we took buses – that took 2 hours to arrive – that drove us to the Bruxelles train station. On the way, we had been promised that hotel rooms would be reserved for the 300 to 400 of us approximately. Upon arrival, we were dismayed that the not too experienced looking Thalys team told us that they were unable to find any rooms. The only plan B they had was to have us sleep in the standstill fully lit train at the station from 1 am to the first departure this morning at 6h45. I finally got to Paris at 8h10 so 9h35 late. When arriving in Paris, the local Thalys team seemed surprised about the whole situation…

I think this is a good example of all the wrong steps a company takes when it comes to one, if not the most important, part of the building blocks of an organization namely customer support.

Error #1 : the personnel on board Thalys was uninformed on what was really going on. Companies should ensure that the employees that are in direct contact with their customers should know as much as possible in real time. Is that so difficult in 2009?

Error #2 : it shows real fast when customer support hasn’t done its uttermost to help out. I just can’t believe that it is impossible to find a couple hundred rooms in a hotel rich city like Brussels.

Error #3 : it was obvious that no real contingency planning had been carried out. This seems really strange since you would imagine that this kind of incident must be planned for. There was little or no coordination between Thalys personnel and the staff at the different train stations involved. Customer support teams need to live and breathe these worst-case scenario plans so that the day they are needed actions run more or less smoothly.

Error #4 : not listening to your customers. One traveller told the Thalys staff at the Brussels station that in these difficult economic times there must have been a bus company that would have jumped on the opportunity of bringing us all to Paris and prove to Thalys that they could cope with these kind of emergencies. The Thalys staff just discarded that option without any explanation.

Error # 5 : not escalating the decision process. The somewhat junior staff at the Brussels station didn’t “call the boss”. That would have calmed down some of the travelers and could have perhaps brought about a more experienced view on how to find a reasonable solution (since staying in a standstill train for almost 6 hours is not an option).

Error #6 : not to give more than the damage is worth on paper. Thalys’s reimbursing policy is to give compensation of 20,50 or 100% in case of delays above 30, 60 or 120 minutes. Rules are nice to have, but in some extreme cases companies need to be much better than the rules. You need to build a memorable support experience where the customer really thinks that the company has gone way beyond its duty to solve the problem at hand.

I think that Thalys could have a look at how a company like Zappos goes about customer suppport. It’s not rocket science, it is about caring as much as possible for the human beings that buy your products and services and not treating them as a somewhat abstract vision of the customer.

The Gov2.0 Summit in is on its second and last day in a warm and quite sunny Washington DC. Weather is not of great importance though since the Summit is being held three stories below ground level at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The event is fully booked and filled with interesting presentations and panels. Expressions like “Government as a platform”, “the cloud”, “Open up the data archives” and Tim O’Reilly’s favorite “Do things that matters” are frequently used. US Government officials as well as entrepreneurs explains how they work with social media components, citizen participation and data visualization together with geodata to provide better service for the citizens as well as creating tools for internal use. The area of accessibility has however not really been touched upon as of yet.

The rest of the day will be filled with talks about policies, security, transparency, healthcare and “.gov websites that work”.

On thing that was brought up on a number of occasions yesterday was the “Apps  for America 2: The data.gov challenge” managed by the Sunlight Foundation. A number of web applications were developed on top of the data from the data.gov website. The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government and the purpose of the challenge was to see what creative developers might come up with. The result was a very interesting and some very useful apps. Great work and great initiative!

What also came out of this was that once again stress the importance for government websites to publish all information and data in machine readable formats (i.e. NOT PDF) to make data collection and mash-ups possible.

Techshare Logo

I just got the message that I have been offered a presentation slot at this year’s Techshare Conference in London hosted by the RNIB at 3.30pm on Friday September 18. I will speak about the new web standard for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and I will be presenting our current work for speech enabled Government eServices. A way to make it possible for more citizens to participate in the digital community, and create better reach for government web applications.

Techshare is a series of pan-disability assistive technology events, hosted by RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People), which aim to develop this exciting and innovative field to support end users.

Assistive technology can be defined as any item, equipment, product or service which increases, maintains or improves functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities.
Techshare conferences are supported by partners who work with us to develop and deliver the conference, providing a valuable contribution to, and steer on, the content of the event.

We thought it would be a good idea to share with you a Q&A session we had with one of our customers about the thinking process that goes with giving a web site a voice. We are honoured to share the following discussion we had with Michael Clevestig, Senior Manager Online Marketing of  SITA who is the world’s leading specialist in air transport communication and IT solutions. SITA delivers and manages business solutions for airline, airport, GDS, government and other customers over the world’s most extensive network, which forms the communications backbone of the global air transport industry.

Q : How did you come up with the idea of speech-enabling your web site ?

A : When we re-did our web site in 2008, one of the main objectives was to provide different access channels for the various constituencies that visit our web site. We see our web site as a multi-faceted and dynamic media and wanted to go beyond the text version only. At the same time, we were looking for a way to introduce some of these new channels without having to engange in costly production costs. When we heard about ReadSpeaker, we thought this was a great way to emulate a speaking version based from our already existing text content.

Q : When you say « already existing text content » what did you have in mind ?

A : That is a good question ! We initially thought that ReadSpeaker provided pre-recorded messages that would need periodic updates. That is where we discovered that the ReadSpeaker application converted on-the-fly our text into speech. The process is entirely dynamic ; the ReadSpeaker application parses the html code on our web pages, converts it into text and then file streams the mp3 back to the user.

Q : How much effort did it take your Internet team to implement ReadSpeaker ?

A : Since ReadSpeaker is a web-based software, our implication was limited to the initial implementation of ReadSpeaker’s html based code in our content management system (CMS). The ReadSpeaker web-based software comes with a number of customisation features such as start and stop tags to determine which part of our pages sould be read, personnalisable and accessible flash players, custom owned dictionnaries where we could provide ReadSpeaker with certain abreviations that needed specific pronunciation. Once the ReadSpeaker software was implemented – and the support we got from the ReadSpeaker team during this phase was A-class – our part of the job was done. The advantage thereafter of using the web-based ReadSpeaker product is that we are always getting the best and latest version of the software and don’t have to periodically update it ourselves.

Q : Your web site doesn’t seem to be aimed at end users who have reading disabilities so why did you take the decision to add ReadSpeaker to it ?

A : Our web site is mostly used by professionals in the air transport industry which, in their vast majority, do not encounter reading problems. However, we feel that adding an audio dimension to our text content brings our site to the next level by introducing greater usability for all, irrespective of any disability. We see the listen function on our web site to be as natural as the print and email buttons we provide. Many of our visitors are busy professionals that operate in multi-task contexts and to be able to listen to our articles while doing something else has a value in itself.

Q : Would you recommend ReadSpeaker to the air transport industry ?

A : Definitely ! We see ReadSpeaker as a very useful tool that can be used for different types of web site visitors who have various needs. It is easy to implement and the team behind the product are experts in speech technologies.