Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

Tag: SpinVox

  • SpinVox carcass laid bare in final accounts

    by

    Andrew Orlowski

    –

    “Dragon’s Den TV star Julie Meyer described SpinVox as “the first major technology success story out of Europe”, but the company’s final accounts show a business running at a huge loss, spending heavily to acquire customers, and with interest payments alone exceeding income.”

    Read more at The Register…… Read More

    Continue reading »

  • SpinVox: it’s up for sale. Official

    by

    Andrew Orlowski

    –

    A minor SpinVox investor says the beleaguered voice-to-text services company is up for sale. Invesco Perpetual says it’s cashing out, and it’s written down its investment by 90 per cent.

    In a financial statement this week, Invesco disclosed:

    More disappointingly amongst the unquoted investments, since the year end, the Company’s holding in SpinVox, the voicemail to text messaging business, was written down in value after the Company chose not to invest in a further funding round, which was dilutive to

    … Read More

    Continue reading »

  • “And you shall know us by the trail of our debt…”

    by

    Andrew Orlowski

    –

    spinvox

    SpinVox has four months to repay a £30m loan to hedge fund Tisbury. SpinVox put up the company as collateral; the fund’s director John Botts is now SpinVox chairman; Tisbury has already acquired some SpinVox intellectual property. The disclosure that America’s highest flying businesswoman (2005-2008) Patricia Russo came and left was another Reg scoop this week.

    Read more at The Register: Russo and Tisbury.… Read More

    Continue reading »

  • SpinVox: veni, vedi, descripi

    by

    Andrew Orlowski

    –

    Yesterday’s technology demonstration by SpinVox at its Marlow HQ reminded everyone just how hard it is to do voice to text machine translation, and how far away anyone is from automating the bulk of the voicemail translation in the real world.

    All of the messages supplied by our small group of visitors tripped through to a human operator. The event was unnecessary and humiliating for all concerned. SpinVox shouldn’t have had to lift its skirts; we didn’t need to be … Read More

    Continue reading »

  • SpinVox

    by

    Andrew Orlowski

    –

    Position of the human operator in the Mechanical Turk

    The Register has built up a picture of the company that makes believing SpinVox’s revised claims extremely difficult. Sources suggest SpinVox, a privately held company, is employing a far larger number of transcribers than it publicly states, even today. These sources also point to extreme difficulties in maintaining its operations as the company scaled, winning new carrier contracts in new markets. And an investigation into the company’s much-vaunted intellectual property holdings indicates that it holds no machine translation patents.

    The … Read More

    Continue reading »

  • SpinVox: Why I Quit

    by

    Andrew Orlowski

    –

    “The worst kept secret in the mobile industry is out: disgruntled Spinvox call centre staff have been telling the BBC that they’re not actually robots, or even highly advanced man-machine cyborg hybrids.”
    … Read More

    Continue reading »