TellMe co-founder Angus Davis has denied that the company has been acquired by Microsoft. “We are an independent company and we have not been acquired,” he says, pointing out that there have been a lot of rumors swirling around the company.
TellMe, is one of the likely IPO candidates and last week was linked with Goldman Sachs, and there was some talk of them being bought by Nuance. Davis basically squashed all that talk, and pointed out that the TechCrunch story is not correct. TechCrunch cited numerous sources in its report that the beast of Redmond is buying voice-recognition provider TellMe.
Strategically it would be a smart move as it would instantly strengthen Microsoft’s hand in mobile communications by giving it in-house expertise in a talk-to-your-phone user interface. TellMe recently introduced mobile products that make looking up information via mobile phone (voice) interface easy. Microsoft, Google and everyone else would be interested in the institutional knowledge and technologies developed by TellMe. It also would take an expected TellMe IPO off the table, while simultaneously embedding Microsoft software closer into telco operations who had already been using TellMe. Irony would abound in former Netscape wizard Mike McCue getting a big payday from new Boss Bill G. More as we hear more.
Microsoft bought Unveil which was a similar product which enabled agentless transaction using natural voice recognition.
Something could be brewing ….
You want to lose more weight. Remember what you said about YouTube?
Tellme, Tellme – How to be, How to be a “Billionaire?”
Interesting to see the note about them in talks with Nuance since Nuance just announced they’re acquiring BeVocal
http://www.nuance.com/news/pressreleases/2007/20070222_bevocal.asp
Could it be they got a better deal so they switched gears?
Now if only Tellme would ‘get’ web 2.0 and open up their applications for smaller users on an a pre-paid ASP basis (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Tellme) it would actually make a difference to the majority of us.
I mean I feel all nice and warm they basically implemented the same thing I pitched to them a year later with Skype (anyone know of any publicly available figures from that debacle?) but they have a great technology most of us cant access or make available to our end applications.
With over 200 ITSP providers offering pre-paid sip termination services in the USA alone ( http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+Business+North+America ) surely providing sip gateway services is a well defined business model these days?
Cheers,
Dean Collins
dean@cognation.net