overdue monetization
I was out to dinner last night with someone who just recently switched from his Treo (which he loved) to an iPhone (which he loves). He’s not gadget-obsessed, but he’s young enough that technology is just a part of life like cookies or sneakers.
His biggest complaint about the iPhone is that he can’t one-hand type anymore. He got very used to being able to feel his way around the keyboard on the Treo and type without looking. This has its upsides and down - typing while driving is bad, no matter how you slice it. Now with the iPhone, there are no “keys”, so you really have to pay attention to where you’re poking on the screen. On his way to meet me, I texted him, and he was forced (lol) to call me back and let me know he was 5 mins away.
He said it would be great if there were a functional voice-to-txt function on the phone, or a service like voice dial for texts. I knew I’d heard of one, and when I got home, I quickly looked it up. The first one I found, and where I stopped was Jott .
I figured they’d got funding and purchased some xerox-developed voice recognition technology or something that allows them to convert from voice to text. They don’t. It says something like “it’ll take a few minutes, our operators have to transcribe the message to send it.”
Operators?? I thought the advantage of working on the web was to *reduce* human interaction with end users, so as to decrease overhead and increase profit margins. I’m guessing their operators work from home and stuff, but how can this scale easily?
On top of all this… they still don’t charge for it!
This makes me think a bit about Mahdad and my venture, the people required, and what it’ll take for us to get it done with little-to-no financing and without charging in the initial term. Sigh. The first million is indeed the hardest.