CTIA Bliss - SpinVox and Teragram

So I went by the Spinvox stand yesterday. Seems I wasn’t the only one.

Richard Bliss, VP of Worldwide Marketing for GWAVA, has kindly agreed to write a series of posts from the CTIA show floor this week. GWAVA, by the way, make products for the GroupWise space however I was really taken with their ‘Retain for Blackberry Enterprise Server‘ service — a clientless solution that captures and archives text and pin-to-pin messages and makes them searchable. Genius for many industries, that. I’m thinking lawyers, accountants, big FTSE and Fortune 500s. If I was using Blackberry Exchange Server, I’d definitely implement that. Although I’m not sure if you can buy Retain for just one guy 😉

A wee bit of an introduction for Richard. Prior to managing GWAVA’s marketing, he did the same for Novell GroupWise, as well as Allegro (the folks behind mail.com) and Sigaba (email security). So Richard’s pretty well experienced when it comes to messaging. I thought it’d be interesting to get his thoughts on what caught his attention at CTIA.

Here’s his first:

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Stopped by the Spinvox booth, (www.spinvox.com). Their pitch is to take spoken words and convert them to text and then allow you to send the text to a variety of different destinations such as email, and blogs. It also allows voicemail to be converted to text and emailed to you.

Their technology doesn’t have much to do with wireless or mobile other than using your mobile device to call in your thoughts and have those thoughts converted to text. Or to have your voicemail emailed to your device for you to read it without calling in.

I have used a similar service in the past, and although it sounds cool in theory, I found it very hard to change my way of thinking to capture ideas by calling them into a service.

The service is great for attorneys who already do voice dictation but if you aren’t used to dictating your thoughts it is a lot harder than it sounds.

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It’s fascinating to get, if you like, an ‘outsider’s’ take on SpinVox — I’ve been using it for so long.

Next up, Richard visited Teregram:

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Teragram, recently acquired by SAS, was showing off their Enterprise edition of MyGADs.

MyGADs allows a group of people to easily create information and then share it without relying on IT or email to distribute the content. You can create content from your mobile device that is posted to the MyGAD server where it is easily accessible by anyone on the team from the web or another mobile device.

The demo they showed me was pretty cool. He took my name, my birthday (It was a made up date for privacy reasons) and then posted this information to MyGAD. Then, using his texting capabilities from a cell phone he sent a text message to MyGAD simply saying “Richard Bliss Birthday”…a few seconds later MyGAD sent back the birthdate that was associated with my name.

My review doesn’t do justice to the technology and the poor guy doing the demo was visibly stressed once he realized I was there to write comments about his technology. He couldn’t stop shaking to punch in the data on his cell phone.

The challenge I see is how to get your teams to begin putting all of their data into MyGADs instead of the way they are used to, mainly by sending an email with the content and ccing everyone on the team. Even though this isn’t the most efficient, it is the easiest way for anyone to share. Getting people to change their behavior will be tough.

If you have virtual teams who are constantly working on projects and needing to keep track of information that needs to be shared MyGADS Enterprise Edition would be something that might help.

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I’ll publish Richard’s final experience tomorrow. Thanks for taking the time to write, Richard!

If you’ve got a CTIA perspective, whack it to me.