Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

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Microsoft’s blockbuster $8.5 billion deal to acquire Skype dominated headlines far beyond the Puget Sound region last week, raising all kinds of interesting implications for mobile computing, business communications, video games, and more. Many commenters were walloped by the sheer scope of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) products that Skype could be plugged into, but in our initial report, we called out mobile and video as the two broad areas to watch.

Xconomy writers from around the country also weighed in with follow-up reports from different angles. Xconomy Boston’s Greg Huang sat down for an exclusive interview with Microsoft’s Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s online services division. Skype won’t report to Lu, but he praised the power of bringing a big consumer brand under Microsoft’s umbrella. Lu also pointed to “powerful scenarios” in combining Skype with Windows Phone, Xbox Kinect, and the Lync messaging service on the business side.

In San Diego, Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow had this Q&A with Bryan Hertz of Telcentris, a small California-based startup that makes a Skype competitor. Hertz pointed out that some of the initial mixed reaction might have to do with Skype’s upstart profile, including its roots in the music-sharing service Kazaa: “People saw Kazaa and then Skype as a way of ‘beating the system.’ Microsoft IS the system, so it’s easy to assume the worst.”

Here’s the rest of the news making headlines at Xconomy from the past week on the Seattle-area tech scene:

—Speaking of Microsoft, co-founder Bill Gates was on hand for an event from environmental nonprofit Climate Solutions focusing on the future of clean energy. As Luke reported, Gates said he was bullish on the science and business opportunities—but less optimistic about leadership from the government in setting carbon limits and paying for research and development. If Gates’ talk is up your alley, you should definitely check out our next power-packed Xconomy Seattle event, Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels, this Thursday.

—Xconomy San Francisco’s Wade Roush interviewed Dan Reed of Microsoft’s Extreme Computing Group—basically, the guy who’s in charge of figuring out what the future will hold for the world’s largest software company. Reed and Roush chatted about smart radios, data center design, artificial intelligence, and more—and all this was just a preview to today’s Beyond Mobile event in San Francisco, where Reed will join Bill Mark of SRI International, Larry Smarr of Calit2 and others for an in-depth discussion on the next 10 years of computing.

—Lest Microsoft steal all the headlines, we also had a couple of interesting items from the world of gamification—the drive to apply common video game features and experiences to a broader array of consumer life, from shopping to health and beyond. First up was BigDoor Media‘s announcement that it was partnering with Major League Baseball to bring game mechanics to the league’s live game-tracker site. Following that, we got an in-depth interview with Scott Dodson of Bobber Interactive, a Seattle startup that’s bringing game features to children’s finance. Dodson, a leading thinker on gamification, is optimistic about what the future holds—but he’s also worried that too much use of shallow elements could saturate the market and bring the whole thing down.

—Finally, a pair of great guest posts from people in the Seattle-area technology community. First up was Kal Raman of GlobalScholar, who wrote about the opportunity that entrepreneurs in the region have to bring innovation and data-driven solutions to the country’s education system. We also cross-posted this piece from Eric Koester of Zaarly, who recounted his recent trip to Washington, D.C., to speak about on the importance of maintaining a strong ecosystem for startups.

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With its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype this morning, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) appears to be embracing one of the classic digs at Redmond: It’s grown too big to truly innovate.

According to the companies’ announcement, Luxembourg-based Skype, which has offices and investors in Silicon Valley, will be its own division within the Redmond, WA, software behemoth. Skype’s current CEO, Tony Bates, will report directly to Microsoft head honcho Steve Ballmer. If that kind of structure was something Skype fought for, the fact that it got it could be seen as an acknowledgment that swallowing Skype too fully could mess up a good thing.

Much is being made of the zillion different ways that Microsoft products and services could be integrated with Skype, but two of them are the most meaningful: Windows Phone and Kinect. The Windows Phone combination—if done right—gives Microsoft a killer answer to Apple’s FaceTime and Google Voice.

In a really interesting blog post on the deal, Skype investor Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz recounts how both of those products were central threats to Skype’s existence, and how Skype responded by growing its user base. (Horowitz also says the investors who bought Skype from eBay saw that the technical team working on Skype was committed to staying with and expanding the service, no matter who was signing their paychecks.)

Over at the Dallas Morning News, Victor Godinez wonders whether the combination will allow Microsoft to challenge the cell phone carriers to drop mandatory voice plans, and open up data-only mobile as a real possibility. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft said Skype will continue to develop apps for other companies’ platforms—but anyone who’s tried to use Google Maps on an iPhone, for instance, will tell you to wait and see how aggressively that happens.

The Kinect combination is intriguing as well. The motion-sensing camera is obviously Microsoft’s biggest consumer hit in quite some time, and has been showing all sorts of really off-the-wall potential uses, like manipulating surgery robots. The Skype combo brings a far less outlandish use to the forefront: powerful videoconferencing, especially for business.

As Todd Bishop at GeekWire pointed out last night, Kinect already had a video calling feature. With Skype’s horsepower and Microsoft’s track record of delivering products that big businesses want to use, the little Xbox add-on could become a major feature in boardrooms.

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When you think about it, the experience of talking on the phone hasn’t changed all that much since the world’s first telephone call in 1876 (Alexander Graham Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”). The underlying technology is completely different, of course, and today we can make calls from almost anywhere thanks to wireless networks. But at its root, a phone call is still just a two-way audio transmission.

Now Thrutu, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup in Palo Alto, CA, is trying to shake up that tradition a bit. The company has created a new application for Android phones—soon to be available on iPhones and BlackBerry devices as well—that lets users share data during a voice call without switching between apps. In its first release, the app can handle three types of information: photos, contact details, and the sender’s location on a map. But in future releases, according to the company, users will also be able to share live video, play games, and exchange other data such as social media updates.

“We have this vision that for voice to stay relevant, it has to be much more tightly integrated with other communications experiences,” says Chris Mairs, Thrutu’s chief technology officer. The startup is a subsidiary of Metaswitch, a London, UK-based maker of hardware and software for wireless carriers that Mairs co-founded in 1981. “There has been this barrier between the voice aspects of telephony and the data aspects, and we now have devices that will do both, but they’re still in two halves. We are bringing the two halves together.”

The Thrutu app consists of a small group of buttons that slide onto an Android phone’s screen during a phone call; they look as if they’re layered on top of the phone’s regular dialer app. By clicking the photo button during a call, you can snap a photo with your smartphone’s camera, and the shot will be instantly transmitted to the other caller’s screen and saved in the device’s photo gallery, all without interrupting the voice connection. Sending a saved photo, address-book contact details, or map coordinates works similarly. You could do some of these things via e-mail or SMS on an iPhone, but it would mean bringing up other apps while the person you’re talking to waits.

Both parties on a call need to have the Thrutu app installed and running in the background for the service to work—which gives users a strong reason to recommend the app to their friends. Bump, another app now used by more than 25 million iPhone and Android users to share data between devices, benefited from the same sort of viral distribution. And in fact, Mairs says “Bump is like Thrutu without voice.”

Thrutu obviously isn’t the first mobile app to mix audio with other media in real time. Skype’s apps allow two-way video calls on iPhones and Android phones, as does the FaceTime feature on the iPhone 4 (and, soon, the iPad 2). But the Thrutu experience is different. First off, Thrutu really is the first app that lets users send data while they’re conducting a call over a wireless carrier’s traditional voice network. On GSM-based networks like AT&T’s, the app does this by accessing a 3G data channel; on CDMA-based networks like Verizon’s or Sprint’s, which don’t allow simultaneous voice and data transmissions, users have to be within range of a Wi-Fi network.

In addition, Thrutu is intended for more casual situations than video calling apps. “The contexts where people are really happy doing video calls are few and far between; they’re rarely spontaneous,” says Thrutu vice president Liz Rice, who formerly worked at Skype. “It’s much more of a prepared thing, like a Thursday evening call with the grandkids. People worry about … Next Page »

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Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 of a three-part story that we originally published on January 3, 5, and 6, 2011. We’re highlighting it today because the series was just named by Longform.org as one of its top technology stories of 2011.

Already, it’s hard for anyone with a computer to get through a day without encountering Google, whether that means doing a traditional Web search, visiting your Gmail inbox, calling up a Google map, or just noticing an ad served up by Google Adsense. And as time goes on, it’s going to get a lot harder.

That’s in part because the Mountain View, CA-based search and advertising giant has spent years building and acquiring technologies that extend its understanding beyond Web pages to other genres of information. I’m not just talking about the obvious, high-profile Google product areas such as browsers and operating systems (Chrome, Android), video (YouTube and the nascent Google TV), books (Google Book Search, Google eBooks), maps (Google Maps and Google Earth), images (Google Images, Picasa, Picnik), and cloud utilities (Google Docs). One layer below all of that, Google has also been pouring resources into fundamental technologies that make meaning more machine-tractable—including software that recognizes human speech, translates written text from one language to another, and identifies objects in images. Taken together, these new capabilities promise to make all of Google’s other products more powerful.

The other reason Google will become harder to avoid is that many of the company’s newest capabilities are now being introduced and perfected first on mobile devices rather than the desktop Web. Already, our mobile gadgets are usually closest at hand when we need to find something out. And their ubiquity will only increase: it’s believed that 2011 will be the year when sales of smartphones and tablet devices finally surpass sales of PCs, with many of those new devices running Android.

That means you’ll be able to tap Google’s services in many more situations, from the streets of a foreign city, where Google might keep you oriented and feed you a stream of factoids about the surrounding landmarks, to the restaurant you pick for lunch, where your phone might translate your menu (or even your waiter’s remarks) into English.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company has adopted a “mobile first” strategy. And indeed, many Googlers seem to think of mobile devices and the cameras, microphones, touchscreens, and sensors they carry as extensions of our own awareness. “We like to say a phone has eyes, ears, skin, and a sense of location,” says Katie Watson, head of Google’s communications team for mobile technologies. “It’s always with you in your pocket or purse. It’s next to you when you’re sleeping. We really want to leverage that.”

This is no small vision, no tactical marketing ploy—it’s becoming a key part of Google’s picture of the future. In a speech last September at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, Schmidt talked about “the age of augmented humanity,” a time when computers remember things for us, when they save us from getting lost, lonely, or bored, and when “you really do have all the world’s information at your fingertips in any language”—finally fulfilling Bill Gates’ famous 1990 forecast. This future, Schmidt says, will soon be accessible to everyone who can afford a smartphone—one billion people now, and as many as four billion by 2020, in his view.

It’s not that phones themselves are all that powerful, at least compared to laptop or desktop machines. But more and more of them are backed up by broadband networks that, in turn, connect to massively distributed computing clouds (some of which, of course, are operated by Google). “It’s like having a supercomputer in your pocket,” Schmidt said in Berlin. “When we do … Next Page »

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Mountain View, CA-based Victrio, which helps companies reduce telephone credit-card fraud by comparing callers’ voices to a database of known fraudsters’ voiceprints, has raised $5 million in new equity-based financing, according to a regulatory filing. The investors aren’t identified, but the filing lists U.S. Venture Partners principal Rick Lewis and individual investor Steve Tran as board members.

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[Updated, see below] Proving that he has the power to move markets with an odd aside, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sparked rumors this week that Apple is buying Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the giant Burlington, MA-based maker of speech recognition software.

The source of the speculation is a passing remark in a video interview about the future of the Apple iPhone between Wozniak and TVDeck.com founder Romil Patel (see below, at about the 0:45 mark). “I think voice recognition is going to become more and more a big part of these machines,” Wozniak says in the video. “Apple is probably thinking the same way. They recently bought the company Nuance, that does a lot of really great voice recognition for that program I just described, Siri Assistant.”

That was enough to set off the blog 9to5Mac headline “Whoa! Did Apple buy Voice Recognition company Nuance?,” a meme which quickly spread to mocoNews, MobileBeat, and TechCrunch.

Neither Nuance nor Apple have issued official statements about the rumors, and Nuance makes no mention of acquisition discussions with Apple in its quarterly report, issued yesterday. However, Mass High Tech is reporting today that it received e-mail from Nuance spokesman Richard Mack calling Wozniak’s statement “speculation.”

Several commentators conclude that Wozniak’s remark is a misstatement born of confusion over the Siri iPhone app, a voice-driven personal assistant that can make restaurant reservations, book concert tickets, look up weather forecasts, and the like. Apple did acquire Siri, the maker of app, in April 2010. And the voice recognition software used in the app is licensed from Nuance.

Nuance is valued at about $5.3 billion, so Apple, which has more than $51 billion in the bank, could easily afford to snap up the company if it wanted to. But such an acquisition would be unusual for Apple, particularly given that Nuance’s speech recognition products are in such widespread use within businesses and on Windows computers, markets that Apple has traditionally shunned.

Nuance shares were up as much as 12 percent on the rumors today, the stock’s largest intraday gain since April 2009, according to Bloomberg News. As this article went to press, Nuance was trading at $18.16, up about 6 percent.

Update, 6:25 pm PST 11/23/10: Reuters is reporting that Wozniak has acknowledged that he misspoke. “I thought I’d read about it but obviously got it all wrong,” Wozniak told the news service in an e-mail.

Here’s the video that started the whole hullabaloo:

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San Francisco-based Twilio, a two-year-old startup offering developers easier ways to create interactive voice software for call centers and click-to-call Web apps, said this week that it has raised $12 million in Series B venture funding. Bessemer Venture Partners, a new backer, led the round, which also included Union Square Ventures, 500 Startups, and individual investors. Twilio, formerly based in Seattle, raised $3.7 million in Series A funding from Union Square and other investors last December. The new funding was first reported by TechCrunch.

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Ford Motor Company’s wireless division announced today that AppLink, a downloadable application for its Sync in-car communications and “infotainment” system, will allow drivers to use voice commands to control certain apps on their mobile phones. Available first on the 2011 model Ford Fiesta, Applink will work initially with Android and BlackBerry devices, and will allow users to control apps such as Internet radio services Pandora and Stitcher and Orangatame’s OpenBeak twitter app. AppLink will work on all Sync-equipped vehicles starting next year, and will also be upgraded to work with Apple’s iPhone. Ford also said it is readying a website for mobile app developers who want to adapt their software to work with the Sync system.

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Vivox, the Natick, MA, startup best known for voice software that allows inhabitants of virtual worlds such as Second Life, EVE Online, and EverQuest to talk with each other over the Internet, has completed a third round of venture funding totaling $6.8 million. New investor IDG Ventures SF of San Francisco led the round, with existing investors Benchmark Capital, Canaan Partners, and GrandBanks Capital pitching in.

The 35-employee startup, founded in 2005, has now raised roughly $21 million in its effort to adapt Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to virtual environments and social networks. Co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver says the company has “seen fantastic growth and acceleration” since the last time Xconomy featured the company (in a September 2009 profile). Command and Conquer 4, an Electronic Arts title heavily anticipated by gamers, went into open beta testing this month with voice services from Vivox, and Global Agenda, a voice-enabled combat game for PCs from Alpharetta, GA-based Hi-Rez Studios, went live just yesterday.

Altogether, the gaming and social networking communities using Vivox’s voice services have 20 million members, up from 11 million in September. And their users spend about 3 billion minutes chatting per month—a figure that has increased by 50 percent just in the last 45 days, according to Seaver.

“The financing round came together because we’ve seen this explosive growth and we’re getting great traction, but we are barely scratching the surface,” Seaver says. “We estimate that there are 2.5 billion active accounts in online games and social networks globally. People are spending more and more time engaged with other real people in social experiences, and as humans the way we want to socialize is by talking to each other. So we raised the capital in order to capitalize on that opportunity.”

The bulk of the new money will go toward business development efforts to “broaden the reach” of the Vivox platform, Seaver says. “The platform is scalable and efficient, so the investments needed to support growth there are not major. The big thing is to get our service into more online games, and then use that as a stepping stone to other shared activities.”

Those activities could eventually include mobile games such as iPhone or iPad games or shared media environments where remote users could communicate by voice while watching a movie or TV show together, according to Monty Sharma, Vivox’s co-founder and vice president of product management and marketing.

IDG Ventures SF was an ideal choice to lead the new funding round, Seaver says, because of its focus on social media ventures. “The IDG group overall has its finger on the pulse of technology and social media globally, and between their consulting business at IDC, their various publishing businesses, and all their touch points with online games and the gaming industry, they make a fantastic partner for us.”

Phil Sanderson, managing director of IDG Ventures San Francisco, returned the compliment. “Voice is the key ingredient missing from a huge range of online experiences, and Vivox has proven itself able to provide mission-critical voice and exceptional service to leading companies around the world,” said Sanderson, who has joined Vivox’s board, in a statement. “I look forward to working closely with the team at Vivox to seize this tremendous opportunity.”

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Natick, MA-based Vivox said today that it’s opening its new “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” service to all Facebook members. The application—which allows Facebook users to set up free voice chat rooms and invite their friends to participate from within Facebook—is one of the first creations of Vivox Labs, a new R&D arm of the company, and had been in closed beta testing for the last few months. Vivox, which we profiled last month, is known mainly as a provider of voice communication services for massive virtual worlds and game worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online.

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Vlingo, the Cambridge, MA-based startup that makes a suite of speech-to-text applications used by millions of iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia mobile device owners, is about to get a brain transplant of sorts. It said today that it will largely abandon a core speech-recognition engine developed by IBM and maintained by Nuance Communications in favor of a system from AT&T Labs in New Jersey.

As part of the shift, says Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan, Vlingo and AT&T have agreed to a long-term strategic alliance. Vlingo’s speech scientists will be able to modify and improve the source code for the AT&T technology, called Watson, while AT&T will take a minority ownership stake in Vlingo. All of Vlingo’s applications will be running on top of the AT&T speech-recognition system by the first quarter of 2010, Grannan says.

Vlingo’s own speech scientists have developed software that exploits information collected from users—the way a Bostonian’s pronunciation of a dictated phrase like “I parked my car” might differ from a New Yorker’s, for example—to build statistical models that help improve speech-recogition accuracy over time. These models provide supplemental input that helps to guide a core speech-recognition engine as it transforms speech sounds into text. Vlingo didn’t build its own core engine—it has long licensed that part of its system from IBM.

The switch from IBM’s engine to AT&T’s is a “best of all worlds” situation for Vlingo, in Grannan’s words. For one thing, he says, the Watson technology simply works better than the IBM recognizer. “Watson is superior on speed and base-level accuracy,” he says. Once the transition is complete, users of Vlingo’s iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia apps should notice fewer wrong guesses in the transcriptions of their utterances. Grannan says they’ll also see a few new features, such as automatic punctuation, that Vlingo can now add because it will be able to tinker with Watson’s innards.

But just as important, the switch will help Vlingo disentangle itself from its strained relationship with Nuance.

Burlington, MA-based Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is one of the Boston area’s biggest high-tech firms, and it is the world’s largest specialized provider of speech-related technologies. It offers software for mobile speech recognition that competes directly with Vlingo’s. In June 2008, after losing out to Vlingo on a contract to supply Yahoo with speech-recognition technology for its oneSearch service, Nuance hit Vlingo with a lawsuit alleging that … Next Page »

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For a long time, Second Life was stuck in the cyber equivalent of the silent-movie era: people communicated by typing, and their words showed up in little thought bubbles above their avatars’ heads. All of that changed drastically around 2007, when Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, hired an obscure outfit called Vivox to equip its 3-D virtual world with a voice communication system. Now any Second Life citizen who has a headset connected to their computer can simply speak, and everyone whose avatar is standing nearby will hear them in living stereo.

For the Gloria Swansons of Second Life, like myself, the changeover from typing to talking was a bit traumatic—and indeed, 20 percent of Second Life citizens still abstain from voice communication. But the other 80 percent gab for a billion minutes every month, which is a rather convincing demonstration that most people inside 3-D computer environments prefer talking to texting.

And now Vivox, a four-year-old startup based in Natick, MA, is about to introduce its technology to three new communities that could vastly increase its user base. The company announced this morning that it has formed a partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s largest entertainment software company, to add its voice services to several online EA games. First up is Command & Conquer 4, a continuation of EA’s hugely popular real-time strategy game that’s expected to launch early next year.

At the same time, Vivox is announcing the launch of Vivox Labs, an incubator-within-a-startup where the company is trying out different ways of delivering its voice services over the Web. And the first two Vivox Labs experiments are aimed at big targets: Facebook, where the lab’s “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” application will allow members to invite their friends to instant Web voice conferences; and World of Warcraft subscribers, who will be able to use a new Vivox-powered website called Puggable to assemble teams of players for in-world campaigns. Both the Facebook and Puggable applications are in private beta testing and are expected to go public by January.

“We started the company about four years ago with the goal of making voice a seamless, natural part of every online experience,” Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver told me when I visited the company last week. “Our view at the time was that more and more human interaction would take place online, and the richest form of communication we have is talking to each other. So we thought there would be an opportunity to turn the Web from this silent, barren place into one filled with the warm sounds of human voices.”

That’s exactly what could happen if even more gaming, virtual-world, and social networking communities turn to Vivox’s services. Not bad for a company that started out as a wacky idea from Jeff Pulver, the founder of the company that became Internet phone service provider Vonage.

You’ve probably heard of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP; it’s the technology behind Vonage and Skype, and the one that has turned the telecom industry upside down by transforming phone calls into digital data packets and routing them over the open Internet. Vivox’s system works on similar principles, except that … Next Page »

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[Updated 9/3/09, 3:00 pm. See below.] Bellevue, WA-based VoiceBox Technologies, a developer of speech recognition systems for use in cars and mobile applications, has raised about $13 million from corporate investors in Asia over the past year. The investors include AutoNavi, Inventec, MiTAC, and the Morningside investment fund.

[An earlier version of this story cited a regulatory filing stating that VoiceBox had raised $7.4 million in equity and options out of an $18.6 million offering, and said the investors were not disclosed---Eds.]

Chief strategy officer Victor Melfi of VoiceBox says the company has raised a total of about $21 million to date, including investments from friends and family, and InfoSpace. He adds that VoiceBox is now looking to raise an additional $15 million from institutional investors, for which it has signed on Seattle investment bank Cascadia Capital. Melfi says VoiceBox is sensitive to customers in Europe and Asia—particularly China—and that it is developing technology for nine different languages. [This paragraph was added at 3:00 pm after speaking with Melfi---Eds.]

VoiceBox is developing what it calls “conversational voice search” software that lets you search, navigate, and discover content and services using natural spoken language. An example would be telling your car to give you directions to a particular location, pick a song to play, and adjust the temperature—all while you’re driving. Or telling your smartphone to search for a stock quote or other information online while you’re on the go.

Technologically, it’s a very hard problem. That’s because of ambient noise, differences between people’s accents and the way they make requests, and, fundamentally, the challenge of correctly understanding the meaning of what they’re asking for. Voicebox has partnerships with a number of companies including IBM, Toyota, and XM Satellite Radio to refine its software. The company also has an iPhone app for voice dialing.

VoiceBox was incorporated in 2001, and is led by its co-founder, chairman, and CEO Mike Kennewick, a former manager at Digital Equipment Corporation and then Microsoft. Kennewick previously founded Saros, a document management software company that was bought by FileNet in 1996. As of January 2008, VoiceBox had not taken any venture funding, but was considering taking a round, according to VentureBeat.

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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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The human voice is making a comeback. For a while, it looked like e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, RSS, and all of the Internet’s other texty goodness might permanently eclipse the old-fashioned phone call and other voice-driven forms of communication. Even the spread of cell phones hasn’t halted the tide of text—more than a third of mobile phone owners use their phones primarily to send SMS text messages rather than making actual calls, according to research from Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo.

But a stream of new mobile-device applications designed for voice input might be restoring the balance. This month I’m excited about two examples in particular: the new Voice Memo app that showed up with Apple’s iPhone 3.0 operating system, and AudioBoo, a nifty audio recording app for the iPhone with a surprising origin: Channel 4, Britain’s publicly funded alternative television network. Along with several other programs, these apps are turning the iPhone into a handy platform for “personal podcasting,” an emerging genre of amateur digital publishing that’s as convenient and spontaneous as Twitter but, because it’s actually a person talking, feels more human.

[You can click here or skip to page 3 to hear an AudioBoo version of this article.]

No apologies, by the way, to non-iPhone owners. With iPhone 3G now priced at $99 and the 3GS starting at $199, there are fewer and fewer excuses for not trying out Apple’s marvelously powerful uber-gadget.

First, a word about Voice Memo on the iPhone. Many mobile phones come with a voice recording function these days, so it wasn’t a surprise to see Apple add one when it updated the iPhone operating system last month. It’s fairly basic: it lets you make new audio notes and review your old notes, all of which get copied to your iTunes library whenever you sync. There’s also a basic editing feature that lets you trim a voice memo by lopping time off the beginning or the end. Best of all, there’s a “share” button that lets you send out copies of voice memos via e-mail.

I really like the sharing feature, which is great for sending people quick voice messages, and has two advantages over conventional voicemail. First, the sound quality is far superior. Voice memos are monaural, but they don’t get compressed the way your voice does when you’re leaving a message for someone over a cellular voice network (compression that’s redoubled if the recipient is retrieving their voicemail from their own cell phone). Second, e-mailing a voice memo is a non-sneaky substitute for voicemail for those times when you want to leave a voice message but you don’t want to risk actually talking to the person. (Slydial offers a similar capability by connecting you directly to someone’s voicemail—but it’s not foolproof, as it sometimes makes their phone ring anyway.)

In a pinch, you can also use the iPhone Voice Memo app to record audio for publication on the Web. It clearly wasn’t designed for this purpose, as the app records memos using the relatively voluminous .m4a audio format, and doesn’t allow you to transfer memos over a certain size by e-mail. (I’m not sure what the limit is, but I was unable to send a 5-minute, 12-megabyte file.) Also, it buries the synchronized copies of your voice memos deep in the iTunes folder of your computer, where it’s difficult to find them. But as a test, I located one memo—a few thoughts that I recorded on a drizzly afternoon at the Japanese Garden at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts—and used iTunes to convert it from .m4a to the more compact .mp3 format, which made it small enough to post on my personal blog at Tumblr.

But if you really want to use your iPhone as a tool for audio publishing, there are much simpler options.

For a long time, my favorite iPhone audio recording app was iTalk, the coolest feature of which is that … Next Page »

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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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It was a relatively busy week for deals in the Northwest, with plenty of action in software, biotech, and alternative energy.

—Seattle and San Francisco-based Twilio, a startup that provides cloud-based tools for building voice applications over the phone, raised its first institutional round of funding from Founders Fund and computing pioneer Mitchell Kapor. The amount was not disclosed. Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson talked with me about the deal and how it will help the company expand its services.

—Seattle’s Principle Power, a wind energy startup, is in the process of raising $20 million to develop the world’s first floating wind farm in the deep waters off the coasts of Oregon and Portugal. Principle Power’s CEO, Alla Weinstein, wouldn’t say who the company’s strategic investors are, but she did say that no VC firms or Seattle investors are involved. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of this year.

—Luke broke the exclusive story of Merck’s Stephen Friend raising $5 million in anonymous donations to pursue the vision of open-source drug development at a new Seattle nonprofit called Sage. The idea is to provide an open database of patients’ genomic profiles that researchers, doctors, and drug companies can access in order to make better drugs.

—Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners led a $10 million investment in Zenprise, a mobile-management software startup in Fremont, CA. Existing investors Bay Partners, Mayfield, and Shasta Ventures also participated in the round. Zenprise makes automated software to help businesses fix IT problems with smartphones.

—Seattle-based Arzeda, a University of Washington startup that designs custom-built enzymes, has secured commitments from OVP Venture Partners and WRF Capital to anchor its $12 million … Next Page »

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Bedford, MA-based vCentrix, which hosts voice-over-Internet services for businesses, is becoming part of Momentum, a provider of white-label digital voice services based in Birmingham, AL, according to an announcement from Momentum today. “In such a fragmented market, both companies feel that hosted voice applications are entering a period of consolidation, and Momentum is well-equipped to be a leader in this coming shakeout,” Momentum CEO Alan Creighton said in the announcement. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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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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