VoiceCorp help Dow Jones to reach out!

Dow Jones have really understood what speech enabling is about. It is not just something you do to help people with various disabilities. It is so much more than that. This is true “design for all” where the people with different difficulties are the biggest winner. And on top of that, they use it as a competative advantage. That’s the spirit Dow Jones!

See Dow Jones press release below. / Niclas

Dow Jones Factiva Listen Capability Transforms the Way Users Consume News

Time-Saving Tool Enables Users to Perform Other Tasks While Listening to Relevant News 

NEW YORK, (March 5, 2008) – Dow Jones & Company introduced a new “text-to-speech” capability in Dow Jones Factiva that allows users to listen to the news that drives their business. With one click, users can now listen to a news article rather than read it, freeing them to do other things and multitask as the pace of business today requires. 

Currently available in beta format, a “Listen to Article” link appears at the top of any full-text article with fewer than 4,000 words. The listen capability is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages and automatically defaults to reading in the interface language previously selected by the user.

“Dow Jones Factiva continues to set itself apart from the competition by being the first to offer text-to-speech technology in the current awareness, news and research market,” said Dennis Cahill, senior vice president and chief product officer of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. “This new capability builds on our commitment to provide customers with relevant news when, where and how they need it and to reinforce our No. 1 position in the marketplace.” 

The listen capability is a Web-based service provided by VoiceCorp (www.voice-corp.com) that converts text into speech on the fly. It is made available wherever full-text articles are found, including alerts, search results and newsletters. Once the link is clicked, the listen capability uses a Flash player to read the article.  

The addition of text-to-speech further builds on Dow Jones’s goal of integrating various forms of multimedia content into Dow Jones Factiva. In August 2007, Dow Jones Factiva added highly relevant video and audio information including business news, CEO interviews, executive speeches, shareholders meetings, product reviews and other meaningful business content. Dow Jones Factiva searches across more than 14,000 authoritative sources, including the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires.

Design contest that rocks!

We needed a new fresh and intuitive logo for our upcoming rSpeak range of products. Non of us here at the company are really a designer and we do not (yet) have an agency for these things. So what to do?

The answer is this; http://99designs.com

Neat! You submit what you need (like a logo or a design of any kind) and some preferences and a price tag. Then people all over the world are getting to work on it. Only after 2 days we had more then 50 nice designed logos to choose from. Now, after a week, the number has grown to over 150. It is getting more and more difficult to choose the right one.

The good thing is that you can see how many times a designer have won before, and also look at some of their previous work. The best part is also that you will get some help on the way choosing the right one. They are getting rated by visitors and other designers. So, if you know “almost” what you want, it is a great support to see what contribution others think is good. And that is definitely worth something. And hey, it is a real time saver. However, you are recommended to give some feedback to the designers, since that would probably result in them submitting new version that are even better.

So, a piece of advice. If you want a nice design, and you do not really know who can help you out. Try 99designs.

I will post the winner in just a couple of days here on the blog.

From servers to blades

Since we started with our speaking web services about 9 years ago we have grown quite a bit. Growing from a lonely Sun Ultra 5 back in 2000 to about 50 high capacity servers of various kinds today. That’s a whole lot of servers…

Managing that number of servers is not the easiest task, and wow how much space they take.

We have now designed a brand new infrastructure for our future needs based on Linux clusters based on IBM blade centres. We have also invested in a real powerful SAN (Storage Area Network) over the iScsi protocol. A very competitive priced solution compared to Fibre Channel based SAN’s. Almost the same result for only a fraction of the cost. Anyway, going from “normal” rack servers to something like a Blade Centre was not just start working with another server. With our “normal” servers, we are used to configure, plug in network cables, plug in power cord and off you go!

When our brand new 14 slot Blade centre arrived the other day, we noted that it was not just to plug in the power cords. Instead of a usual one, it was a (very large) plug completely unknown to us. But wait! There are some good old fashion power cables! almost… After a call to IBM they kindly advised us to invest in a 1300€ PDU (Power distribution Unit) that was to be connected to 3 phase electricity. To that we could easily plug this “almost normal” power cables to. We understood that this is not just another server; this was a whole new level of computer infrastructure.

Anyway, the new Infrastructure is now up and running and I must say; if you currently have 10+ servers and you plan to grow quite a bit. Invest in blade centres!

And it´s better for the environment too! They are not consuming by far as much electricity (per server) compared to rack ones. Also they does not require as much cooling either. From a management point of view it is brand new world. And EVERYTHING is redundant! I fell like a happy kid. Pretty much the same feeling I experienced the day when my mom upgraded my first computer (the C64) to the brand new Amiga 1000  

A new Blog is born!

Ok, I have finally decided to start a blog.

It will be about my passions.

That being; Entrepreneurship, software as a service (SaaS), text-to-speech (TTS), web accessibility and the world of web business.  I have been in the industry since 1999 and have founded a number of companies and technologies on my way towards the future. In 1999 I together with some friends founded Phoneticom AB, a small (only me) company that was going to explore what audio in general and speech in particular could add to the user experience on websites. After only one year we launched the first ever server based web service for Text-To-Speech. ReadSpeaker was born. After a few years of setting up companies to sell the ReadSpeaker services, sell consultancy in web accessibility, creating new innovations etc I think I have finally landed in my new company VoiceCorp. 

My philosophies about;

SaaS
It is better to let one person make a proper job installing the software on a server to let other people just use it.

Web accessibility
This is broad. It’s not about making the web working for people with disabilities, it is way to reach out to a maximum number of people, nondependent of device used, technology skills or abilities.

Entrepreneurship
Either you are or you’re not, or maybe you are but you just haven’t found out just yet.

TTS
Using text-to-speech technology is a way to free text from letters and words. It is just great for all occasions where reading is just not a good option. The quality of the speech is more about how bad you need it rather then how good it really speaks.