An Israeli startup, Silent Communication, first appeared on the map in the last days of 2004 when telecom paper (paid subscription required) reported that it had secured USD 600,000 from private investors. More recently it has been featured on engadget. Their product it simple: "Talking without talking" sums it up pretty well.
Instead of having to ignore calls which arrive at inappropriate moments, when you can look at the phone but not conveniently answer (e.g. during a movie, or a meeting); you can elect to have the phone play a prerecorded message, or type in a text message which will be translated into speech.
We don't think this will work.
An Israeli startup, Silent Communication, first appeared on the map in the last days of 2004 when telecom paper (paid subscription required) reported that it had secured USD 600,000 from private investors. More recently it has been featured on engadget. Their product it simple: "Talking without talking" sums it up pretty well.
Instead of having to ignore calls which arrive at inappropriate moments, when you can look at the phone but not conveniently answer (e.g. during a movie, or a meeting); you can elect to have the phone play a prerecorded message, or type in a text message which will be translated into speech.
In some senses this is a waste of time, because you can reject the call and send an SMS. In fact, I probably wouldn't buy it as a symbian application, because I'd rather do just that. But here's the marketing genius: Instead of making a symbian (or whatever smartphone) application, they have latched onto a specific goal of cellphone producers and service providers - Increase the ARPU, the Average Revenue per User/Unit. This means that instead of trying to sell to individual users, their target audience are mobile phone vendors and operators.
As Silent Communication's Vice President for Marketing and Business Development
said in an israel21c report: "With all of the millions of phones in circulation, there is great potential for increasing earnings by saving 'lost calls' - telephone calls that go unanswered or uninitiated because the user is in a situation in which he or she cannot speak - not just in business meetings, but everyday situations such as a mother who is trying to get her baby down for a nap. According to our research, these 'lost calls' are worth $20 billion per year worldwide."
First, lets assume the execution of this idea is perfect:
- has an option to be activated automatically (part of a profile, for example)
- is otherwise easily selectable; not more than two button presses to select a specific response.
- had an ability to store what the other person said.
- can send an sms automatically instead.
Look! it's a glorified answering machine! Still, it is unlikely to work; in the sense that the specific "talking without talking" concept is pointless. Here's why:
First, this reverses the charges. Instead of calling back later, or sending an SMS - actions you pay for; you force the recipient to listen to a canned message. Yes, they called you: but only to speak to you.
Second, an SMS is always sufficient, and you can "pre-write" SMSs beforehand. This is my motivation for including option 4; and in fact Mikael Wiberg suggested this in The Feature last July. Using this basically means the whole "talking without talking" concept has been rendered moot, and I would be surprised if their patent application covered this.
Perhaps I'm not forward thinking enough, or cost is too important a factor to me, but I really can't see this helping ARPU to any significant extent; the SMS option is likely to be the most used, and even if it is the revenue gain is unlikely to be terribly significant. I would be very interested in finding out how they derived their figures. Finally, the text-speech conversion seems particularly useless. How likely is it that you can write the sms immediately, or fast enough that the caller will still be calling?
Indeed, there are other more compelling software applications (for symbian anyway) which would really make me pick one service provider or phone over another: things like Full Screen Caller, and Skyforce, or best of all, miniGPS. (although we have not reviewed it, and have no idea if it works effectively)
Then again; I don't buy ringtones (or call-back tones), nor am I likely to buy moantones.
