Former TBayTel CEO creates new business model for Mobivox

Realizing that there was little growth ahead in the provision of inexpensive wireless long distance minutes, free member calls and Skype connections, the new CEO of Mobivox Corp. moved the company in a new direction. Peter Diedrich, who was once CEO of TBayTel in Thunder Bay ON, took over as CEO of the Montreal-headquartered firm in June and in the last four months transitioned the company to a provider of a voice-activated services platform, inking agreements with Jajah Inc. and Unyk."Mobivox is more than mobile VoIP and cheap long distance," Diedrich tells Tech Media Reports. "We are focussing on value-added services that can be voice-detected."Specifically, Mobivox's VoIP service offers a voice-activated user interface (VIU), which lets users dial and perform other actions by speaking rather than by pressing keys. With particular appeal for mobile users, Mobivox has begun to offer VIU as part of a new platform called ‘Mobivox|PL' that can be white-labelled and resold by carriers and providers, or used independently by large enterprise customers."It can be accessed anywhere in the world," says Diedrich. "But our development environment is in Montreal, as is our hosting - we partner with iWeb Technologies Inc."In August Mobivox announced that it was providing the voice interface for Jajah's new Concierge voice-activated calling service. And on Oct. 7 Mobivox confirmed a partnership with fellow Montréal-based firm Unyk, creators of an Internet-based ‘intelligent address book.' Unyk will offer its 10-million users the ability to navigate their address books, place low-cost calls around the world, and use other advanced Mobivox voice-activated telephony services. A year ago, the company scored an infusion of $11 million in venture capital funding from Brightspark Ventures, Skypoint Capital and IDG Ventures."We allow users to import all their contacts to Unyk, where we can connect in the cloud," says Unyk's CEO Sebastien Brault. "This functions as a portable memory - it's accessible by voice from any phone anywhere in the world."Unyk keeps its users' contact books synchronized through one centralized database. Whenever users make changes to their contact details through Unyk.com, the service automatically updates all of the contacts' cloud-based address books. At present the Unyk site is available in six languages (French, English, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese)."People can create voice tags and associate them with contacts in the book," says Diedrich. "These are matched against voice prints - we can quickly get to 100% accuracy this way. And the system can make contacts on the fly and update the database."Diedrich is not only taking Mobivox beyond cheap long-distance, he is also helping partners like Jajah and Unyk build their brands without having to adopt complex technologies. For example, in partnering with Mobivox, Unyk leverages its investment in its user relationships by offering voice services with its own look, feel and customer relationship management."There is the bare bone service," says Diedrich, "where someone calls into an access number and can create a SIP-based call. This is then sent out over the network to terminate on whatever network the call number is on. We can do that also; however, if you don't want our termination, then we can bolt it onto your network. This is the same with the carriers - all that's needed is to request termination with the carrier."Minutes are deadThis is a shift from Mobivox's previous value proposition based on the ‘Voxgirl' software agent that brokered calls between mobile and Skype. Though Voxgirl's sophistication is still put to good use - including signal processors to clear up background noise, speech recognition that can handle accents, and adaptive ‘preference learning' - it is the shift in business model that makes all the difference. By rebranding and reselling the Mobivox services, carriers and social networking communities can differentiate their offerings and leverage previous investments in databases and proprietary networks. And there are no PIN numbers or downloads required.Independent Telecom analyst Jon Arnold has focused on how the move can appeal to carriers: "It's a way for carriers to leverage their existing resources," he says, "without adding capital expense or...appreciable user effort."Simply put, Diedrich knows that minutes are dead. Offering free calls to Mobivox members and Skype users only offers modest value, as does low per-minute rates that piggy-back on the PSTN. The proliferation of mobile hands-free laws for drivers makes voice dialling increasingly compelling; the future is in multi-lingual voice activation as part of a partner-centric, white-label business model. Unyk's voice-activated mobile services, for example, will become available in November, with worldwide general availability slated for January 2009.

Former TBayTel CEO creates new business model for Mobivox

News | 10/08/2008 2:36 pm EDT

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