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.

SpinVox Hot Spinning

Super-hyped and hyper-funded UK voice-to-text firm Spinvox has taken a lot of fire in the last couple of weeks. First, mocoNews reported last Monday that the company was trying to pay employees in stock as a cost savings measure....which can't be a good sign (even in this dire economy) for a company that's received ~$200mil from Goldman Sachs and others...half in the last 18 months. Then mocoNews/Paid Content ran an extensive 2-part interview with CEO Christina Domecq which raised allegations of company excesses, non-payment of salaries/expenses & slow-boating vendor payments... which Domecq dismissively attributed to the economy & disgruntled ex (or soon to be ex) employees. Then today, a BBC investigation revealed (and this was touched upon in the Moco interview) that many of the messages the company claimed to be automatically processing through their hot-shot "D2" algorithm were actually being listened to and manually transcribed by call center staff in South Africa & the Philippines (low-tech). After the release of the BBC story SpinVox got its spin on and retorted with a post on the company's blog addressing (re-addressing in some cases) issues raised by the Beeb & Moco. Their publicity department must be asleep at the wheel, because absolutely nothing good can come from the company entering into a war of posts with the media (in which the company portrays itself as a victim). This is only going to subject SpinVox to further scrutiny of its technology & financial condition. I've gotta say, it feels to me like another shoe is about to drop on the SpinVox story...if it does, hopefully it doesn't completely crush a firm that ostensibly offers a cool/useful product with lots of potential to scale.

Mobile Content Mezze Platter

There's a bunch of stuff going on...but no over-riding theme that's struck my fancy yet this week. So, in the meantime here's a list of stories from around the mobile content blogosphere for y'all to snack on...

• Verizon Wireless jumps on the smartphone app store bandwagon (GigaOM)
• Apple now claims 1.5bil App downloads...and implies it's unbeatable (Mobile Entertainment)
• EA creates 99cent iPhone game studio called 8lb Gorilla...which will further hasten price erosion on Apple & every other mobile platform (touchArcade)
• Could Nokia's weakness in the US mean that it may become the GM of handset manufacturers? (Wired)
• GAMEVIL's Baseball Superstars mobile game franchise surpasses 10mil downloads! (Wireless Gaming World)
• With King.com launching on iPhone, does that mean that skill-based game wagering is coming to that platform? (IGN.com)
• It can't be a good sign when heavily-funded UK voice-to-text company SpinVox is trying save costs by paying employees with stock (mocoNews.net)