SpinVox Drama Continues

The Register & Techcrunch UK have been doing a great job keeping up with the ongoing soap opera at embattled voice-to-text (once) superstar SpinVox. In a post last month I discussed scandals over the company attempting to pay its employees with stock, despite having been the recipient of $200mil in funding (much of it quite recent), and a BBC investigation that revealed substantial human intervention in the company's highly touted, automated, voice-to-text processing technology. Before these issues came to light, the company had recruited former Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo to their board...ostensibly to provide some additional street cred...but clearly she didn't want anything to do with July's drama-fest, and according to reports, she hastily stepped down early this month. Now, The Register is revealing that the company has secured a short-term $50mil loan, due to be repaid in December, from hedge fund Tisbury Master Fund and made its director, John Botts, Chairman of the company (Botts has been on the board & an investor in SpinVox since 2006). The company claims through it's PR firm that it's "comfortable with (their) position," but it smells like crisis to me. I think a comment on Techcruch's UK site sums it up best, "This is a train wreck in slow motion." Speaking of Techcrunch UK, they ran a great piece this morning rebutting a BBC Blog post from Monday which suggested that if SpinVox fails it would be a blow to the reputation of British technology and startups. TC's Mike Butcher took exception to that position and suggest that "its extinction wouldn't matter" because SpinVox is basically a relic of 1999 style dot com investing...whereby big "dumb money" chases surface level tech hotness in the interest of a quick, lucrative exit. Absolutely!...and by the way, there are more than a handful of similar dinosaurs roaming the mobile landscape on both sides of the Atlantic.