You’re an unfunded early-stage startup and your sole venture backer sends you a check for millions of dollars. Unfortunately, it’s made out to the wrong company name, so you can’t deposit it. What do you do? You change your name, of course.

That’s how Primary Networks became Acme Packet. The Burlington, MA, maker of Internet switching equipment and software was founded in 2000 and went public in 2006—today you’ll find it on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol APKT. But when it got its first capital infusion from Menlo Ventures in Menlo Park, CA, says co-founder and CEO Andy Ory, it was still so new that it hadn’t even printed business cards.

“We’d been using the name Acme Packet in all our presentations, because we thought it was funny, but [Menlo] actually took the name seriously,” says Ory. “They sent us a $12 million check made out to Acme Packet. We changed our name that day.”

In a way, the company’s whole history is about adapting to change. The Acme part of the name may or may not refer to the fictional company that supplied Wile E. Coyote with the rockets, anvils, and other gear he used to pursue the Road Runner. (Ory won’t say, perhaps out of concern for treading on Warner Bros. trademarks.) But the “packet” part definitely refers to the packets into which all data is divided before it can cross the Internet—and Ory and his co-founder Patrick MeLampy saw early on that if the Internet were ever to become a medium for real-time communications such as voice calls and video conferencing, the way these packets travel would have to be rethought. Their big idea: If Acme could come up with faster, more reliable way to shepherd high-priority packets through the existing Internet, telecom providers would beat a path to their door.

[Editor's Note: Every startup has a "big idea" that it thinks will catapult it to success. With this story, we continue an occasional column highlighting the big ideas---and the resulting challenges---at companies in Xconomy's home cities.]

Traditionally, Ory explains, the thousands of Internet Protocol (IP) packets that may comprise a file such as an e-mail message, a photo, or a spreadsheet are dispersed and sent across the net along unpredictable paths before being reassembled at the destination address. Packets often get lost along the way, meaning replacements have to be sent. Engineers call this approach “best-effort” networking.

Meeting with me at the company’s headquarters last week, Ory held up a piece of paper. “If I dip this document in liquid nitrogen and break it into 10,000 packets and put them into the network like little pachinko balls, it doesn’t matter what order they arrive in—eventually the sequence gets completed, and you’ve got your e-mail. That’s great, and it usually takes less than 500 milliseconds. But now imagine you and I are doing a voice-and-video-over-IP call, and 24 times every second, a visual of me is being dipped in liquid nitrogen and shipped as packets. They can’t arrive out of order, or with more than 200 milliseconds of delay.”

Best-effort networking just isn’t good enough to handle unidirectional communication with that kind of alacrity, let alone bidirectional communications, Ory explains. So if Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony were every to be a reality—and back in 2000, that was still an open question—something new would be needed.

Ory and MeLampy came up with the idea of installing special boxes at the boundaries between the hundreds of privately owned networks that together make up the Internet. These boxes would act as way stations. The packets in a voice or video stream—what Ory calls “signaled media”—could still travel dispersed paths through the cores of the local networks. But at the edges, the way stations would reconstitute them, like regiments of infantry forming up for battle, before handing them off to the next network.

“What emerged was an infrastructure where …Next Page »

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Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the Burlington, MA-based voice technology juggernaut that has already absorbed most of its East Coast competitors, reached west today, announcing that it has acquired Seattle-based Jott.

Jott, founded in 2006 by ex-Microsoft employees, started out as a free voice-to-text service that allowed users to record messages via telephone that were then transcribed into e-mails. Over time, the company transitioned to a paid business model, and expanded the capabilities of its service to let users create text messages, blog posts, appointments, reminders, and notes. The service has proved popular among mobile professionals, gaining hundreds of thousands of users, according to the company.

Nuance’s acquisition of Jott gives it a credible product in the area of phone-based voice-to-text services, where other companies such as Google, with its Google Voice service, and UK-based Spinvox have begun to encroach.

“Jott’s voice-to-text offerings have experienced a groundswell of adoption and positive industry recognition since the company’s inception, and we’re thrilled about the opportunity to expand our market reach and our voice services portfolio,” Nuance senior vice president Michael Thompson said in an announcement. “Together we will deliver a range of new services to our mobile operator and enterprise customers.”

Nuance isn’t saying how much it shelled out for Jott. The startup was funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners, and UK-based Atomico Investments; its last publicly divulged funding round, in 2007, amounted to $5.4 million. Jott may have needed a larger partner like Nuance in order to compete in its sector, given that competitor Spinvox, with some $200 million in venture cash, had far outpaced it in fundraising efforts.

Nuance and Jott said that Jott’s services, including Jott Assistant, Jott Voicemail, and Jott for Salesforce, will keep working as usual, with no interruptions in service. But as a result of the acquisition, Jott-like capabilities may come to many more consumers—Nuance says it plans to package Jott Assistant as part of the voice services it provides to wireless operators.

“Our combined expertise will bring innovative and differentiated voice services to a variety of markets with tremendous scale,” Jott co-founder John Pollard said in a statement.

One area where Nuance’s technology may help Jott is in automated speech-to-text software. While the basic user interface that Jott users encounter when they call the service is driven by speech recognition software, users’ recordings are actually transcribed by humans working in large processing centers. Replacing those humans with advanced speech-to-text software, similar to Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking line of dictation software, would be an obvious way to make Jott’s service more efficient and scalable.

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Google Voice, a phone line unification and voice mail transcription service created by Grand Central and being revamped by Google, is gradually being opened up to people on its extensive waiting list, according to Twitter posts this week from the Google Voice team. “Still sending invites, many more today, but the list is long. Thx for your patience,” a post tonight read. Google began sending invitations to people on its reservations list on June 25. Xconomy reviewed Google Voice in March and published reviews from beta users in late June.

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Back in March, I wrote a column about Google Voice, the reincarnated version of a voicemail unification service that Google acquired from Grand Central back in 2007. The free service gives you a single phone number for life that isn’t tied to any particular land line or cellular device—instead, calls ring through to whichever phones you specify. Voicemails get stored online and (if you want) transcribed into text e-mails. In my column, I called Google Voice “the end of the phone as we know it,” since a Google Voice number resembles an e-mail address more than an old-fashioned phone line. It goes with you everywhere, can be managed entirely through the Web, and literally turns your voicemails into e-mails.

Google Voice was, and still is, in a private, invitation-only, beta testing phase. When I checked with Google early last week, employees were still saying the service will be available to the general public “soon”—which is the same thing they were saying back in March. But the big day may be approaching. While rumors circulating last week about the service’s impending launch turned out to be false, Google Voice product manager Craig Walker did state, via his public Twitter stream, that “We’re cranking 24/7 to get there.”

In conjunction with my March column, Google kindly provided 100 Google Voice beta invitations for Xconomy readers—and not surprisingly, all of the invitations were snapped up within an hour after we publicized the offer. So in anticipation of the public launch of Google Voice, I decided to ping the lucky 100 beta account winners last Friday to find out how the service has been working out for them, and whether they’d recommend it to others.

The readers who’ve written back so far have been lavish with their praise—at least, the ones who have actually been using their accounts. Several have admitted that they never signed up, or that they signed up but found that Google Voice wasn’t what they expected, or that, as one reader put it, “I would have liked to [use it] but then work (life?) got in the way.” More about the potentially high barriers to adoption below.

Readers who’ve used Google Voice seem to like the way it lets them give out a single phone number to everyone, rather than separate office, home, and cell numbers. Several readers said they like the (somewhat sneaky) feature that lets users listen to callers as they’re leaving a voicemail, and break in if they want to talk to that person directly. And if there’s one feature everyone loves, it’s the automatic transcription of voicemail messages into e-mails—a Google invention that wasn’t part of the original Grand Central service. While Google’s speech-to-text technology is far from perfect, readers say it’s good enough to get the gist of a message across, and that it saves them from the universally dreaded task of actually listening to all their voicemail. (You can browse readers’ detailed comments below.) Xconomy’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Bob Buderi, has been using Google Voice since March, and he also cites voicemail transcription as his favorite feature.

Readers report surprisingly few technical glitches or other difficulties using Google Voice. The problems they do cite tend to be ones that are baked into the service’s design. Most people said it’s too much trouble to make outgoing calls through Google Voice, since users must either call their own Google Voice number first, or go to the Google Voice website. Which leads to another frequent complaint—the caller ID problem. Unless you place all your outgoing calls through Google Voice, then the people you call will see the number of the device you’re calling from, rather than your Google Voice number. That means you have to train everyone not to store your device’s number in their contact list, but to call you back on your Google Voice number instead. That’s plain confusing for everyone.

Asked to say whether they’d recommend Google Voice to a friend or a family member, quite a few readers said “Yes, but…” The “but” was that they’d only recommend it to people who are technically adept—”power users,” in one reader’s phrase. As another reader put it: “The person who is going to use [it] needs to be a bit of a techie (not super technical, but my wife who is not technical would get lost in the concept)…[there are] lots of configuration options which I enjoyed learning and setting up.”

How much have Xconomy readers actually used their Google Voice accounts, in the end? That varies. Some say they’ve made their Google Voice number into their main phone number, and that they use the service extensively every day. Others say …Next Page »

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[Update 12:00 pm 3/20/09: We were swamped with hundreds of e-mails in response to our offer of 100 free Google Voice beta accounts this morning. Thanks everyone! We'll be in touch with the winners as soon as possible with details about their new accounts.]

Brace for impact, again. Google is about to change the way you think about telephones.

The information giant has a pattern of setting its sights on an existing technology, moving in with overwhelming software-engineering force, and upending all of our old expectations. We didn’t know we needed ads alongside our search results, and Google turned keyword-based advertising into a multi-billion-dollar industry. We all thought e-mail was something we could only access and manage using desktop programs like Outlook, then along came Gmail. We thought we had to go to libraries to find out-of-print books, then Google went and created Google Book Search. We imagined cell phone platforms would always be controlled by a few elite carriers and handset makers, then Google started Android.

To be clear about it, Google didn’t invent keyword-based advertising, Web mail, book scanning, or open-source software. It just figured out how to apply such technologies more cleverly and pervasively than anyone else. And that’s what it has done once more with Google Voice—the renovated version of Grand Central, the phone-number-unification service it bought in 2007.

Grand Central was a startup that allowed users to sign up for a single phone number for life. A call to that number would automatically ring through to any or all of the other phones the user designated, meaning they no longer had to give their acquaintances separate home, office, and mobile numbers. Google paid somewhere north of $50 million for the technology, then spent more than a year and a half rebuilding it to work with its own infrastructure. Starting March 12, Google upgraded old Grand Central’s existing users to Google Voice accounts, and started inviting in a few beta testers. It plans to open up the free service to anyone in the U.S. starting “soon“—in a few weeks, by all accounts.

I’ve been testing Google Voice for the last couple of days, and I’m impressed. I think the service will mark a kind of tipping point in public perceptions of telephony. Before this, it was still possible to think of the phone system as something predating the Internet and therefore distinct from it, surrounded by its own set of customs and usage patterns. After this, we’ll think of phone calls more as if they were audio e-mails—finding their way through the uber-network to their intended recipients wherever those recipients may be located, and leaving a digital record that can be stored, searched, and manipulated on the Web.

There are a lot of features to Google Voice, which makes the overall concept a bit hard to explain, as I’ve realized over the past couple of days as I’ve talked with friends and colleagues about it. So I’ll try to simplify things. You start by signing up for a new phone number in your area code of choice. Google provides a search page where you can look for numbers that spell out mnemonics like “617-IM2-COOL.” In practice, there aren’t that many numbers available, so you might have to search for a while before you find one that spells out something that appeals to you, and that won’t embarrass you five or 10 years from now. (Google could do a better job explaining the number selection process—and it wouldn’t hurt if they showed a picture of a phone keyboard, to remind you of what letters go with what numbers.)

In the same way that an e-mail address doesn’t correspond to a single computer, your Google Voice number doesn’t correspond to any single phone. Indeed, that’s the beauty of the whole system. So once you’ve picked your number, the first thing to decide is which actual phones should ring when someone calls it. You can tell Google Voice to route calls to your office phone, your home land line, your mobile phone, your vacation rental, your Aunt Minnie’s house where you’re staying for the weekend, or all of the above.

The next big decision is about how Google Voice should handle voicemail messages, for those times you can’t answer or don’t want to. As soon as someone leaves a message, it goes into your Google Voice inbox, which you can access by calling the service or by directing the browser on your computer or your mobile phone to the Google Voice website.

If you like, you can simply let messages pile up in your inbox, and check them once in a while by calling in or visiting on the Web. Or you if you want to know about new messages right away, you can set Google Voice to notify you via e-mail or SMS text message.

Now here’s the really cool part. Rather than just notifying you that you got a voicemail the way your cell phone does, Google Voice can—if you choose—send you a text transcription of the message itself. Transcriptions are created automatically using speech recognition software, so they aren’t as accurate as one might like, but they …Next Page »

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Seattle and San Francisco-based Twilio, a software startup focused on telephone applications, closed its first institutional round of funding today, according to co-founder Jeff Lawson. The investment was led by San Francisco-based venture firm Founders Fund (which includes founders of PayPal, Facebook, and Napster) and computer industry pioneer Mitchell Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The amount was not disclosed, but it’s enough for the firm to think about expanding its four-person team and its services, says Lawson, who is based in Seattle.

Twilio rolled out its product in late November—a cloud-based tool for Web developers to build phone applications for businesses, such as letting customers call in and get shipping information, record audio as an MP3 and send it as a phone message to friends, blog by phone, or just connect callers to specific cell phones or land lines.

There are plenty of existing tools for building voice applications, of course. But most require upfront payment for software or hardware, or take a while to get started. With its fast setup and pay-as-you-go service, Twilio has quickly amassed a customer base of more than 1,500 developers, who have built applications for businesses and large companies. Its top customers include Sony Music, Earth911, and Tumblr.com.

Lawson says he met his investors through the usual networking channels—events, colleagues, and other contacts. “They bring stellar backgrounds. They’re all coming from entrepreneurial backgrounds,” says Lawson, who notes that he has more connections with investors in Silicon Valley than Seattle. (He moved to the Northwest in 2004 to work on Web services for Amazon.) That is at least partly because there are many more investors in Silicon Valley. “We had great conversations with Seattle investors, but we just had more contacts there,” he says.

As for how the funds will be used, Lawson says, “We want to be able to expand our core offering of telephony operations in the cloud.” He added that the company has gotten some early traction in enterprise software, but wouldn’t say much specifically about what other markets he has his eye on. Twilio will also be growing its team, which is currently split between San Francisco (where co-founders John Wolthuis and Evan Cooke are) and Seattle, where Lawson remains.

“The Twilio team has merged the worlds of cloud computing, Web services, and telecom in unprecedented ways,” said Kapor, in a statement. “I’m excited to help Twilio grow, and explore the range of opportunities in this exciting intersection.”

Twilio plans to introduce a bunch of new features this year. “We listen to our customers a lot,” Lawson says. “There is a very active community on our site.” For example, a number of customers have been asking Twilio to provide services to international numbers—so far, it’s only been within the United States. “For us, it’s less of a technological issue than a pricing and business issue,” says Lawson. For U.S. phone numbers, the pricing is very simple: Twilio charges 3 cents a minute, or 5 cents a minute for toll-free numbers.

In the end, that’s probably the key to getting funded in the current climate. As Lawson emphasizes, “We are generating revenue.”

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Marlborough, MA-based ThinkEngine Networks, a telecommunications company whose media servers unify traditional circuit-switched and Internet-based voice signals, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in U.S. bankruptcy court in Worcester, MA, according to reports today in the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Herald. The American Stock Exchange delisted the company last March due to underperformance.

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If nothing else, Michael Robertson gets credit for stickin’ it to the establishment. Maybe it’s because he was born in 1967, amid America’s flaring protests. Maybe it’s just a result of his penchant for libertarian views.

When I saw an announcement earlier this week from Robertson about GizmoCall, his new browser-based calling service, my first thought was, “This looks like another one of Michael Robertson’s guerilla campaigns.”

When I bounced that off Robertson in a call Wednesday while he was finishing lunch, he replied, “Right. That’s where the money is. Whether it’s telephone companies, or music companies, [or Microsoft---let's not forget Microsoft], it’s where disruptive technologies can add value.”

That’s the way many entrepreneurs think. But where other entrepreneurs approach technology disruption as a delicate matter, akin to tickling a dragon’s tail, Robertson seems to relish a more direct provocation.

As the founder of MP3.com, Robertson was at the center of a legal firestorm that pitted his dot-com startup against major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America. Of course, he had become an overnight sensation as San Diego’s most-prominent dot-com millionaire in 1999, when MP3.com raised more than $370 million in its IPO.

As MP3.com’s largest shareholder, Robertson pocketed an estimated $103 million when he sold his company to French media conglomerate Vivendi in 2001 for $372 million. Since then, he has self-funded most of his new ventures.

Later in 2001, Robertson started a new business around technology for a Linux-based operating system intended to compete against Microsoft Windows. He provocatively called his startup Lindows, unleashing a predictable flurry of trademark lawsuits from Microsoft. The software giant, which apparently feared losing its Windows trademark, later paid $20 million …Next Page »

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Westford, MA-based Sonus Networks (NASDAQ: SONS), which makes servers, switches, and software for Internet-based residential and business telephony, said yesterday that it will lay off 50 employees, or roughly 5 percent of its global workforce, as part of a cost-management plan. The company did not say how many of the affected employees worked from the Westford headquarters. We’ve updated our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker accordingly.

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Back in July I wrote two somewhat skeptical stories about Slydial, the free service that lets you leave voicemail messages for cell-phone users without causing their phones to ring. My problem wasn’t with the technology itself, but with the misanthropic way that MobileSphere, the Boston company that created Slydial, was marketing it. They were promoting it as the perfect solution for those times when you have to call someone, but you don’t really want to talk with them. In the company’s own words: “Slydial provides the illusion of communication without the hassle of engaging in a time-consuming conversation.”

Well, it turns out that a lot of people are misanthropes. Either that, or Slydial has stumbled upon an unexpectedly useful new variation on the old technology of telephony. Since Slydial’s July launch, users have sent just over a million Slydial messages via its free, ad-supported service at 1-267-SLY-DIAL, the company announced Monday. That growth has come exclusively through word of mouth and public relations: the company hasn’t spent a dime on advertising, according to Gavin Macomber, MobileSphere’s executive vice president for marketing and business development.

The company believes that it’s hit a nerve with the service. “Just based on the response from our customers in the last three months, we think voice messaging is going to be huge,” Macomber told me this morning. “When we spoke back in July, there was a lot of ‘Hey, this is a great way to break up with your girlfriend’ going around, and sure, the name of the service is Slydial. But it’s also become a really practical and efficient way to communicate with somebody.” For example, many users have told MobileSphere that they turn to Slydial in situations where it would be difficult or dangerous to send a text message, such as when they’re driving, Macomber says.

To make sending “sly” messages even easier, MobileSphere also announced this week that it has created three dedicated Slydial applications—one each for the Apple iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry line, and Windows Mobile phones. The applications let users initiate Slydial calls just by clicking on a name in their phones’ built-in contact lists—so they don’t have to remember the recipient’s phone number.

“All of those first one million calls were made by people using the 267-SLY-DIAL number, then, at the prompts, manually entering the recipients’ mobile number,” says Macomber. “But at the end of the day, it’s a slightly cumbersome process. That’s what the mobile apps are meant to address. If you’re a Windows Mobile, iPhone, or Blackberry user you can go into your address book in one simple step and voice-message somebody.”

You can download the Windows Mobile and Blackberry versions of the software after signing up for a “MySlydial” account here. The Slydial iPhone app isn’t available from the iTunes App Store yet (which is a saga unto itself—see below), but I was able to get the app directly from MobileSphere and test it out. It works exactly as advertised. I was able to use the app to leave messages for several people in my iPhone’s address book.

But as with the regular Slydial service, you still have to listen to a 10-second audio advertisement before your call is put through. And the system isn’t foolproof: if you really don’t want to interrupt someone, or if you don’t want them to know that you called until they notice that they have gotten voicemail, you should be aware that calling someone via Slydial sometimes causes their phone to ring once, depending on which cellular network they use.

Every time I used the iPhone Slydial app to call Rebecca’s T-mobile phone, for example, her phone rang briefly—too quickly for her to answer it, but giving me away nonetheless. [Editor's note: Dude, knock it off!] But when I called Bob’s Verizon phone, my call went directly to his voicemail, without making his phone ring.

Those differences result from the fact that the major wireless operators all use different voicemail technologies. (Even within networks, systems vary from region to region. That’s why a Verizon subscriber in Boston can forward a voice-mail message to another Verizon user in Boston, but not to a Verizon user in New York.) But these incompatibilities are exactly what …Next Page »

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Updated Nov. 5, 4 pm PST: See below for details on funding

TelCentris, a new San Diego company, says it has released a beta version of its free consumer service called VoxOx, which combines Voice-over-Internet telephony and other types of communications into a single screen on a computer desktop. The company says its universal communicator service is the first in a coming generation of consumer software products that combine voice, video, instant messaging, text, e-mail, fax, and social networks into a single screen on a desktop.

While competitors such as Skype offer VoIP and rival Digsby aggregates messaging, social networking and e-mail onto a single screen, the company says that VoxOx combines all these features into a single product—with an iPhone-like graphical user interface. The name VoxOx is a play on “voice over X,” meaning the system can send voice over any type of network.

TelCentris says it has targeted communications-overloaded GenXers and “Millenials,” those born between 1980 and 2000. That’s a different tack than rivals that have been trying to get corporate customers to commit to their hardware and software for Voice-over-Internet telephony. It might be an easier sell, but Voice-over-Internet telephony is rapidly becoming a commodity, meaning the competition is getting fiercer and players are looking for ways to break out of the pack.

TelCentris was founded by CEO Bryan Hertz, his brother, Kevin, who is chief technical officer, and father Bob, chief information officer. The CFO is Michael Faught, who has 25 years experience in finance, management, and technology commercialization, according to the company’s Web site.

A spokeswoman for TelCentris says the founders bankrolled the company themselves, with some additional angel investment. She added that TelCentris has been generating revenue by powering small telephone companies with its Unified Communications Service Delivery Platform, as well as providing Hosted PBX service to dozens of small-to-medium businesses.

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Billerica, MA-based NextPoint Networks, the telecommunications equipment maker just formed last December from the merger of Billerica’s Reef Point Systems and Gaithersburg, MD-based NexTone Communications, has been acquired by Plano, TX-based GenBand, the company announced yesterday. GenBand, which is paying an undisclosed sum for NextPoint, makes devices called session border controllers (SBCs) that are used to set up calls in voice-over-Internet networks; as an article in Mass High Tech explains, the acquisition puts GenBand into more direct competition with other Boston-area SBC makers such as Acme Packet and Starent Networks.

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After I published my piece this morning on Slydial—the new service that lets you leave voicemail messages for mobile phone users without making their phone ring—I had a chance to talk briefly with Gavin Macomber, executive vice president of marketing and business development at MobileSphere, the Boston-based startup behind the service. I’m pretty incredulous about MobileSphere’s marketing strategy around Slydial, and I was very interested to hear Macomber’s take.

Slydial (at 267-SLY-DIAL) strikes me as a potentially useful tool; it’s sort of like sending an audio e-mail, without having to sit down at a computer. But surprisingly, and a bit disturbingly, MobileSphere is pitching the product as a way to sidestep actual human-to-human communication. The company’s own publicity materials boast that by allowing you to leave a message without the risk of actually having to talk to someone, Slydial provides “the illusion of communication.”

So my basic question for Macomber was: why would a company in the mobile communications business want to help people avoid talking to each other? Here’s the interview.

Xconomy: So, if you’ve read my piece, you already know my take on Slydial.

Gavin Macomber: Yes, and some of the points you’re making there are exactly the direction we wanted to take this product. MobileSphere is a mobile communications technology company. We’ve been around since 2003, and we’ve launched eight products in the last five years, and many of them, as you alluded to, have to do with businesses and universities. They are fairly straight-laced and streamlined. When we launched our SMS service in 2006 we came up with a funnier name in Joopz. And when we started working on the Slydial concept over a year ago, we discussed it internally as our “VMS 2.0″ technology and we referred to it as “Direct to Voicemail” for a long time. But we decided that we needed a catchy, edgy name to really get it out there.

Our goal here with this product is a little bit of a different tactic than we’ve taken before. Most of our products before were very niche products; our goal here is to make it very mainstream. As you point out, there are a lot of business use cases for this type of solution, but it’s also for people out there who are using this in a social setting, whether it is dating, keeping in touch with friends or family, et cetera.

X: So, how seriously do you want people to take your marketing campaign? To what extent is it supposed to be tongue-in-cheek?

GM: To answer the question you posed in your piece—is this campaign serious or is it sassy?—the answer is it’s “seriously sassy,” to use your own words.

Let me give you two seconds on our philosophy here about mobile communications. One of the advantages of modern communications is that we can be reached at any time today, whether you are on a mobile phone, a laptop, or a Blackberry. But the disadvantage is that often you’re a slave to that device. In a way, we’re combating technology with technology. That’s the way I look at it.

Have you ever called somebody and wanted to talk, but they deliberately sent that call to voicemail? We’re doing the reverse of that. The carriers give you the ability to send any call to voicemail. What we’re doing is giving consumer the ability—just as they can choose when and where they can take a phone call—to decide when and where they want to talk to somebody or leave them a voice mail.

At the end of the day, its’ a fun product. I agree that it’s an edgy name. But it’s a catchy name. And I will tell you that we spent a lot of time with consumers before we launched this service. We had a four-month alpha period with 5,000 users, and my marketing manager will attest that the response to the overall service was exceptional, including the name. We especially asked ‘Do you like the name Slydial?” and over 80 percent said yes, they got it. So it’s a tactic that resonates with people.

I understand that some people may say, “Wait, I don’t want to be considered too sly.” But at the same time, you’ll note also in our press release that we have highlighted all of the other uses for this type of service—and there are lots of them. I use the service every day for business reasons. If I am working on a deal and I want to call somebody and share some information but not take the chance of interrupting them on a busy day, I will leave a voicemail.

X: But whether you’re trying to be edgy or not, I think the way you’ve chosen to spin the service can be seen as encouraging the general erosion of genuine human interaction in the age of high-tech communications.

GM: I agree, but as I was saying earlier, I think that mobile technology has made us all slaves to our devices. You’re on vacation and you have to respond to that e-mail because your Blackberry is chirping at you. Or you’re on your PC and you feel obligated to respond to a blog post at 2 in the morning. It’s the dissemination of information that I think has led to exactly what you’re talking about, and services like ours help people manage that very phenomenon. That’s the way I look at it. And we’re also saying, let’s add a bit of a sense of humor.

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Chelmsford, MA-based Aspect Software, which makes call center equipment and software, said yesterday that it has bought most of the assets of BlueNote Networks, a Tewksbury, MA, company with technology that helps companies integrate Internet-based communications into their existing business software. Aspect CEO Jim Foy said the acquisition would help Aspect’s customers treat their call centers as part of an overall “unified communications” strategy—industry slang for the new generation of Internet-based communications techniques such as Voice over IP and instant messaging. Aspect didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.

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As frustrating as it is to call a customer-support line, navigate the automated voice-response system, then wait on hold for 15 minutes to speak with an actual human, the call-center experience can be even harder for the people on the other end of the line. A number of trends are making life more harried for call-center reps and their supervisors, including ever-growing call volumes, the pressure to work through the queue faster by spending less time on each call, and the countervailing pressure to spend more time placating angry customers (since it’s so expensive to acquire a new ones). But to make even small changes that might lighten the load—for example, rerouting some calls from overloaded call-center agents to idle front-office workers—call center managers usually have to get help from IT staff.

Can more technology provide the answers to problems that technology created? Rex Doricott, CEO of Exony, thinks so. The nine-year-old company, which has offices in Boston and Newbury, outside of London, makes software for managing “virtual call centers,” large customer-service operations where agents themselves are scattered across several facilities. The latest version of Exony’s software, launched last week, gives call center managers direct control over call routing changes and other operations that used to require technical staff. It also gives them what Exony calls “customer interaction intelligence”—data on the performance call center workers who may be located in corporate offices spread across many time zones, or may even be working from their homes. The so-called Virtualized Interaction Manager (VIM) software automatically produces reports that help managers figure out which agents are productive, which ones need help, and which ones need to be disconnected.

“Our system is about empowering people with management tools,” says Doricott. The old metrics used by call-center managers were rigid and counterproductive, he explains: for example, it was common to penalize agents for being on the phone with a customer longer than five minutes. “So agents used to put the phone down at 4 minutes 50 seconds, even if the call wasn’t finished,” Doricott says. “Now you can track that, and be more fair and flexible in the way you manage people. It’s unfair to penalize someone for spending 6 minutes on an important customer-retention call if they haven’t handled that type of call in a month.”

Exony’s VIM sits on top of and interfaces with the voice-over-Internet-Protocol software from companies like Cisco Systems and Genesys that typically handles the nuts and bolts of call switching in modern call centers. It’s used widely by financial-services companies, especially European firms like HSBC, BNP Paribas, Lloyds TSB, Alliance Leicester, and Yorkshire Bank—businesses where “there’s a good service culture,” in Doricott’s words. Prudential UK, a pension administrator, recently adopted Exony’s system to manage 1,800 agents in contact centers around the world. “The financial services industry is extremely competitive and our customers rightly demand a high level of service,” Al Jeffrey, a planning account manager at Prudential, said in Exony’s announcement of the sale. “The Exony VIM system enables us to manage this expectation more effectively.”

Doricott and three colleagues started Exony in 1999; all four, and another six who joined the startup later on, were defectors from the software R&D wing of Sony’s professional broadcasting technology division. (In fact, the name Exony is short for “ex-Sony.”) The switch from a television technology lab, where Doricott and his coworkers were building systems that put digitally recorded TV programs into the right time slots in broadcast lineups, to a company that makes call center software might sound like a stretch. But according to Doricott, “the technology skill set around the infrastructure—for example, the role of databases—is almost 100 percent overlapping.” But such a radical change of business domains did involve “a bigger learning curve,” Doricott admits.

Exony set up its Boston office recently to sell the Virtualized Interaction Manager and the company’s other services to more North American users. Landing Microsoft, which bought seat licenses for 12,000 employees in 65 call centers around the world, was one big success. The company’s has engineered its expansion on a relatively tiny amount of capital: Kennet, a venture firm with offices in London and Silicon Valley, gave Exony $5 million in 2003 and then another $2 million a couple of years later, Doricott says.

Exony faces serious competition: Aspect Software in Chelmsford, MA, for example, sells “unified communications” software that includes workforce monitoring and management tools, and just this week Aspect formed an alliance with Microsoft that will integrate its software with Office Communications Server, the system many companies use to manage the information systems that call center agents use to look up answers while they’re talking with customers. (Apparently Microsoft still needs Exony’s interaction intelligence software to keep tabs on its call center agents.)

But Doricott believes the overall market for call center management technology is still expanding. “Total interaction volume is going up,” he says. And while company websites offer more customer-support options these days, such as forums, FAQS, and chat-based help, “You can’t beat the customer satisfaction of talking with a human,” Doricott says. “If they want to buy something, if they just want to shout at you, you have to take the call. Losing customers is very expensive—so if you can convert someone ’round to being happy, it’s much, much better.”

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