Swipely comes from Tellme co-founder Angus Davis, who is reapplying some of the speech recognition principles he capitalized on at his last company to make sense of the garbled mess of digital shopping data. The Swipely team has figured out how to intake transaction records — whether through direct connection to a credit card account or emailed receipts — and match them to product catalogs and restaurant menus. The result is an easy way to tell other people what you bought. Today Swipely might just start a conversation in a comment thread, but later it might connect you more closely with the retailer to take advantage of deals, find you nearby stores that your friends or people like you recommend, or inspire savvy shopping through competition with friends.

Providence, R.I.-based Swipely will naturally draw comparison with Blippy, the automated purchase-sharing service that has already launched (and already had one major user privacy slip-up). These sites also harken back to Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon activity-sharing project of a few years ago.

But Swipely is taking a more conservative approach. Users must approve each purchase they share from the online interface (though they can opt-in to automated sharing). The amount they spend is never shared. Users don’t give Swipely the logins to their retailer accounts (though they can give the site their Gmail credentials and indicate which stores’ emailed receipts to pull). And there are lots of assurances of “bank-grade encryption” for all personal information.

“We want to let people nudge themselves into auto-sharing,” said Davis. “We could turn off a lot of mainstream people if the lever starts out at that end of the spectrum.”

Swipely has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures and including Greylock Ventures and First Round Capital with Chris Sacca, Keith Rabois, Ron Conway, Anton Commissaris (from Mint.com), Lee Hower, Charles Moldow and Emil Michael. The company previously raised $1 million from Davis, First Round and Conway.

Davis’ plans for Swipely’s future include mobile apps (along with filtering purchases by location), sharing on social networks (that will come after the site launches to the public, which is supposed to be this summer), improved transaction analysis (the match rate is currently 50 percent, but the system should learn as people start using it) and retailer participation.

Ultimately, the site should save users money while also inspiring demand for new purchases (a push-pull relationship, to be sure!). For instance, Davis said, the site could introduce a game with a leaderboard for who found the cheapest gas each week. But that’s the thing — you can’t exactly have a gas price leaderboard without sharing transaction amounts. For the service to become more useful, I’d bet it will become less private and less conservative.

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Today, Ron Conway, the well-known founder of the Silicon Valley-based Angel Investors LP fund, now associated with Baseline Ventures, weighs in with his own assessment of the benefits of the “all angel” investment path.

A former semiconductor executive who went on to co-found Altos Computer Systems, Anchor Intelligence and, most recently, SNOCAP, Conway took up angel investing in 1998. He’s seen his share of both hits and duds, but among the investments that earned Conway his “super angel” status are Google, Digg, PayPal, and Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com). He is also an advisor to Facebook. In other words, Conway knows what he’s talking about. So, if you’re seeking funding, you’d do well to consider his advice, dished out below the fold.

1) Angels are not fiduciaries. Angel investments are always going to be smaller, but the due diligence process is also going to be less rigorous, because angels are not acting as a fiduciary to another investors. VCs are duty-bound to put your company through a thorough review process because they are investing other people’s money. This is why I enjoy being an angel and not being a fiduciary: I can make my own decisions based on my intuitive process, my own opinion and gut feel about a company, because I am investing on my own account. This means I can make decisions faster, which is also good for the entrepreneurs.

2) Angels are often vertical specialists. Some VCs tend to be generalists when it comes to an industry (e.g., retail), or technology (e.g., mobile). Because angels often come from a successful industry background, you can do a better job of hand-picking a partner who will add expertise and value relevant to your precise market area — not just money. If your company operates in social networking, you might be enticed to go to a bulge-bracket, or marquee VC firm—and they would consider you because the space is so hot. But chances are that even some of the biggest VC firms won’t have someone with deep domain expertise in social networking, it’s just too new. But you could go see Owen Van Natta, who just left Facebook. You’re in cloud computing? Go get Diane Greene, the former CEO of VMWare. They’d both make great angels.

3) Angels have one-degree of separation from people in their professional network — not two, or three, or four. But because angels tend to be operational types, the business relationships they bring to the table are personal, not transactional. Angels also tend to invest in concentrated themes, consistent with their operating experience. So when it comes to accelerating your business development — through things like recruiting, partnerships, cultivating sales, etc. — angels tend to connect the dots. The combination of first-hand relationships and focus means an angel can might get your company to an “exit” sooner.

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As Om has pointed out, voice makes navigating phones easier, but the Vlingo application does eat up bandwidth. Regardless, the Vlingo software for BlackBerry devices is powered by the same speech recognition engine behind Yahoo’s oneSearch, the voice-enabled web search software that had me so excited I downloaded it in the middle of the keynote speech introducing it.

With the ability to text and email by voice, the Vlingo software has more features than oneSearch, but in return I’ve given Vlingo voice control of my entire phone. And that poses a problem for Nuance Communication, the leader of speech recognition software for dictation and for mobile phones. Nuance powers my BlackBerry’s voice dial feature — or at least it did until I downloaded the Vlingo client. (Device-wise, for now the software is only available for BlackBerrys.)

Both Nuance and Vlingo are going after deals with carriers because that’s where the money and reach are. Vlingo hopes to sign deals with partners to make them the default option for voice-powered commands such as web search or directory services. It’s popularity so far may be one of the reasons Nuance earlier this month filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Vlingo.

Vlngo’s CEO Dave Grannan says the suit is without merit; he also recently raised a $20 million round of funding, which he says he’s willing to use to fight the infringement case. However, infringement suits are a messy business and have long been used as a blunt instrument to fend off competition. Vlingo’s technology is good, but as a startup going up against Nuance, which has sued everyone from Yahoo to TellMe, it’s going up against a practiced plaintiff.

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So, what makes Brightmail, PayPal and IronPort great names, but Lycos, Xobni and Vidoop really lousy? It turns out there’s a formula for effective naming and it’s surprisingly simple.

Look at many of the most successful brands and you’ll notice they’re often compound names, consistently made up of two components:

• a word that relates to the company product in a direct, literal sense, establishing a clear association between the brand and what the company does.
• a word not literally related to the product, but rather a metaphorical adjective to evoke a differentiating characteristic or “feeling” about the company’s product.

Our minds are built to make connections, mostly at a subconscious level. When a metaphor is detected, it triggers a process in our brains that associates the metaphor with the next object or reference. This naming system forces the mind to take the cognitive step of associating the metaphor to the product it represents, thus forming a positive association to the brand. And once your brain has woven the connection, it sticks, so there’s a great chance your company name won’t be forgotten.

So when we break down the name Brightmail, we see that “mail” indicates what the product does — they make email — while “bright” is metaphorical, framing their product in a positive light. This same logic applies to PayPal; “pay” is literal, “pal” is metaphorical. Ditto with IronPort, a provider of email and web security products — “iron” is a metaphor for strength and “port” is a literal reference to what the company product protects: network ports.

Search company Lycos tried a made-up word, to ill effect. After all, what’s a lycos? Xobni makes a cool email service, but someone had to tell me that xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards. Vidoop is just yucky. Reminds me of, well, you know.

Of course there are startups that get so far out in front of their competitive fields, or whose products are so exemplary, that names which ought to have been tricky are nevertheless well received.

Consider Twitter. If you had asked me a year-and-a-half ago, I’d have said it was a terrible name — all I could think of was “twit.” But people’s associations with Twitter are good because its communication tool is first-in-class and offers a great experience.

I was recently asked to consult with a startup that is considering re-naming itself. It’s a good thing, because the name they’re using now is totally confusing. It’s one of those Google-wannabe made-up words that sounds vaguely Latin, but isn’t. Worst of all, it doesn’t tell users like me anything about the company’s product (they archive web pages). When the company explained the name to me, I got even more confused.

In my view, while site archiving is useful (and they do it well), this probably isn’t a broad-based enough service to be elevated to the level of a consumer utility, as search or micro-blogging (Twitter) have been. This means their made-up name is unlikely to ever be turned into a verb (like “to google” or “to tweet”).

I suggested some new names, based on the two-part formula:

ArchiText: Archi sounds like architect, a good association. It also refers to archive. “Arch” as a prefix is “chief,” so metaphorically it evokes priority. Text is literal for content. Combined you might get: “storage for vital web content.”
PermaPage: “Perma” evokes impermeability. “Page” is literal.
ArchWeb: “Arch” for “archive,” and the metaphorical “priority.” Web is web.

Evan Paull is software engineer for Mark Logic and a startup consultant.

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The funding will also go toward expanding the infrastructure required to serve carriers who offer the service. About a dozen carriers currently offer voicemail-to-text through SpinVox, and company spokesman Jonathan Simnett says it will add a dozen more this year, including more in the U.S. The carriers currently offering the service have about 100 million subscribers between them. SpinVox has 6 million.

The whopping valuation makes a bit more sense if you consider that players ranging from Microsoft (it bought TellMe) to Nuance Communications (it’s bought a lot) are all trying to crack the speech-to-text market as a way to improve navigation and search on mobile phones. IBM and Google are also making plays in this area while startups including Jott, Yap and Vlingo have offerings as well.

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