Part 3, Shawn Barber of Acision

I’m delighted to bring you the third part of the Future of Voicemail video series featuring Shawn Barber, Director of Product for Voice Messaging at global messaging provider, Acision.

To say Shawn is ‘Mr Voicemail’ is to put it mildly. He lives and breathes the medium, although he was clear to point out that it’s no longer referred to as simply ‘voicemail’ but instead, ‘voice messaging’. Which is good news. Because that’s where I’d like the medium to as well. I’d like us to get away from the ‘mail’ aspect (i.e. having to dial in to retrieve messages in sequence) and move to some kind of messaging-based facility. But what does the future look like? Well, Shawn set out some rather stimulating points in today’s video — including discussing the possibility of simply providing operators with the building blocks to create their own voice messaging systems to fit any consumer scenario. So if you want the mobile operator to recognise that you’re driving and thus it should pipe the voice messages down to your car stereo, no problem. Or if you want to be called with my voice messages as a matter of priority, no problem.

I’d dearly like to see mobile operators offering something like this — something better than just the same-old-thing.

Shawn did a super job of answering my questions and I’m sure you’ll enjoy his perspective on the future.

Thank you very much for taking the time, Shawn!

Here’s the video:

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Just a reminder, view the preceding episodes in the series here:

– Part 1, Olivier Sichel of Sofinnova Ventures
– Part 2, Tim Rea of ePlanet Ventures