By Nick Patience
Free voice messaging over the internet is the claim being made by California start-up RocketTalk Inc and it says it has already amassed 20,000 users in 45 countries in just three months of operation. The company offers the ability to send voice messages as email attachments, recorded using a microphone attached to a PC. Users need the RocketTalk client to record messages, but they can be read from any email package, including web-based email.
Company founder and president Jeff Weiner says he will never charge for the product as it will be supported purely by advertising, mainly on the client software, but also on the web site and through co-branded versions of the product.
RocketTalk has developed a small piece of software that records the message and compresses at a ratio of 8:1. It gets sent to the data center, a RocketTalk player gets bundled with a player if it is being sent to a non-RocketTalk member and is sent on. Messages can be sent to either regular email address or RocketTalk IDs. The system talks constantly to RocketTalk’s data center server in Irvine, California constantly, so users do not have to check for messages.
Weiner claims that the company can offer advertisers a much more targeted ad environment than banner ads as it knows exactly who is using the service when they are online and so on. However, he emphasizes that it will not be selling its user database to anybody. It will also employ viral marketing techniques by selling tag-line space at the bottom of messages.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of RocketTalk’s business model are the co-branded offerings. Weiner says RocketTalk could offer IP telephony companies, voicemail providers and ISPs the ability to offer voice emails as a value-added service as the cost of phone calls decreases to a point where value-added services become more important than price. The company will also pitch the product to manufacturers of PBXs and other telecom equipment manufacturers. The company is talking to a variety of telcos and carriers about co-branded offerings, and announcements are expected with a couple of months.
Aside from the obvious consumer applications, Weiner believes there are also genuine corporate applications for this service. Many top executives, he says, prefer to use the phone than email, but this service will enable them to address employees or business associates more directly, while also being able to ‘speak’ to many of them simultaneously. Customer support is the other area where Weiner says RocketTalk could be useful, as support staff could provide a more personal service through voice than through email alone.
The RocketPlayer client software is evolving constantly and there are plans afoot for an integrated client that includes both regular emails and RocketTalk messages. Video will also be added and the development of that is well underway. An expanded client later on the year is likely to include chat capabilities. The current version is 1.2. After developing a prototype of the software towards the end of last year, RocketTalk managed to secure around $5m from Menlo Ventures in December 1998, which also funded HotMail, Infoseek and UUNet, among others. The total funding, including seed and money from the executives is about $10m so far. http://www.rockettalk.com
