When I walked in to SpinVox’s plush Buckinghamshire offices this morning, flanked by the Register’s Andrew Orlowski and Ben Smith and Dan Lane from The Really Mobile Project, the tension in the building was obvious. There were nervously exchanged glances and bad jokes from senior staff. A smartly-dressed James Whatley eyed me reproachfully. But the guys managed to hold it together for long enough to usher us in to a conference room and ply us with pastries.
We were not asked to sign an NDA, but we were asked not to record anything that happened in the room. Ironic, really – and the reason that Ewan MacLeod from Mobile Industry Review declined the invitation.
CIO Rob Wheatley took us through a technical explanation that, while honest about the existence of human agents in the process, didn’t give away as many secrets as he made out (between the four of us, there wasn’t much we didn’t already know), before leaping to what we all came for: the demo.
The big technical question surrounding SpinVox – the one they refuse to answer (as they did again today) – is what proportion of the messages they process are seen by a human being. It’s the one sticking point that has fascinated journalists and customers alike. But SpinVox are staying quiet: all they’ll say is the proportion varies from country to country and from carrier to carrier.
So what happened in the demo, and what can we infer from it about those proportions?
The demo was performed in a standalone test environment, which had only four processing cores – as opposed to the main system’s 800 or so – and was not connected to the wider network. I saw no evidence that what we saw was “a set-up” or “prioritised” demo and I have no reason to think it was (you’ll see why in a minute).
We began with a short, simple message, read by Rob Wheatley himself and called in from his own BlackBerry. The system spat out a perfect text version in a few seconds. Next Wheatley left something a little more complex. A few sentences this time. Again, a perfect and speedy result. But then, both messages were straightforward and they were left in a loud, clear voice at a leisurely pace in a quiet room. You’d have been worried if the system hadn’t got them right.
It was then my turn to try. I left a message, at a brisk speed, that included my full name, the word “TechCrunch” and an invitation for the “recipient” to call me back. I believe that the message was a reasonable and realistic approximation of a real-world message, albeit with a few strange words in it. The SpinVox system failed to convert the whole message – ok, so most humans can’t spell Yiannopoulos – and passed it to a human “agent” (who was sitting in the room with us).
Here’s where it got ugly. From observing the “tenzing” process in action, it was clear to us that the system had failed to pick up a single word in the message correctly. The agent in the room had to listen to and manually type the entire message, from beginning to end. SpinVox has previously claimed that agents do not get to hear entire voicemail messages; only enough to give context and enable transcription. That’s not what I saw this morning.
Spinvox’s people were quick to point out that British English is actually SpinVox’s worst performing language. According to them the system is much better at US English and Spanish.
But if all we have to go on is today’s demo (given SpinVox’s refusal to give any indication of how many transcriptions involve human agents), then it’s hard to escape this implication: that the vast majority of messages left in real-world conditions (like beside roads and in cafes) and containing more than “Hi Jim, can you call me back? Cheers, Bye” are processed to some extent by a human being.
The aim of the day had been to show us how the technology works. First of all: it didn’t, beyond transcribing a simple message in a quiet room. But secondly, and more importantly, that’s not actually what people want to know about any more: since SpinVox refuses to go on the record about the level of human involvement, the media will be left having to continue to speculate about that number, and no doubt investigating it as well.
The sorts of question we did want to ask included:
- “Do you have a Chief Financial Officer?” They don’t, and – astonishingly – haven’t had one for eight months. This is a company with hundreds of millions in venture backing.
- “Are your investors comfortable with your CEO being paid over half a million pounds a year when the company doesn’t even break even yet?”
- “Does the fact that you just accepted another cash injection of £15million mean – given the date of your previous round of investment – you’re burning through £3million a month?”
In fact, that last question was asked by Orlowski during a brief but fiery cameo appearance by CEO Christina Domecq, during which she revealed the new cash injection (again, I wish we’d not been prevented from recording video). Domecq obviously didn’t appreciate the question, and retorted angrily that SpinVox is spending “much, much less” than that per month. She added that the company expects to break even this month and become cash-flow positive very shortly after that.
What else did we learn today? For one, that SpinVox is taking security very seriously these days. ”As we’ve matured as a business,” said CIO Rob Wheatley, “Our relationships have matured. Our QC houses [the third-party processing centres contracted to process SpinVox's messages] are very professional environments in areas where it’s seen as a very good job to have. Our agents are very proud of what they do.”
Proud, perhaps, but apparently not proud enough to be trusted with the Web: we were told that agents’ computers have no web browser (in fact they have no software installed besides the tenzing application and an anti-virus package) or USB ports; agents cannot take cameras or phones into the office; they have to wear ID and uniform at all times and there are background checks into all recruits.
Ok, that’s reassuring. After all, they’re listening to our voicemails all the time so you’d hope they couldn’t just email their friends the contents or post them online.
But it’s clear: Although the Spinvox denies it’s in trouble and says it is poised to break even, it’s still burning masses of cash, hence the latest injection. And it must surely be clear now that vast majority of messages are seen by human eyes.
So what does that suggest? It suggests that after five years of operation, after processing 130 million voicemails, Spinvox can only handle relatively simple messages spoken in quiet rooms.
And they have not reduced their call centre operation in the last 5 years as the system got “smarter”. If anything they’ve scaled up their call centre operation to deal with the contracts they’ve signed with carriers.
If they were a normal call centre business, a cash business, then that would be fine. But this is a company that effectively claims that at some point, as their voice recognition gets better, the human element will be substantially reduced and the VCs will be rewarded with a business which scales massively. That was not what was suggested by today’s demonstration, which ultimately calls into question the entire Spinvox model.
Shame that they had a week + (?) to prepare from sending you the invitiation and still couldnt pull off a meticulous demo even in the santised environment of their conference room.
$200m of investment is nuts.
Was the latest $15m cash injection up/down on their previous valuation?
A difficult situation for Spinvox, certainly one that needs further explaining. Questions need to be answered, and soon. As an investor I would certainly be looking for a satisfactory – and detailed – overview of what’s going on within the company. A high technology business of this nature is a promising investment. A call centre-operation has questionable growth potential.
That said, the behavior of TechCrunch over the last few weeks has been pretty appalling. You acted like cheap tabloid hacks over the Twitter expose and now you’re taking the high ground over this story. This after hiring a complete twit of a troll that the Telegraph saw fit to drop. A man who, just a few days into the job, ‘accidentally’ published a scandalous and untrue post on a universally respected member of the Spinvox team. Whatever you gain through controversy, traffic to the site and talkability around stories you are rapidly losing in credibility and respect from the technology and investment community.
Mike Butcher’s renowned abrasiveness is one thing, but at least he has a modicum of decency and a healthy respect for the UK tech industry. Yiannopoulos might have an acerbic wit and eloquent literacy about him, but the vast majority of people on the London tech circuit would be glad to see the back of this jester. Respect has to be earned!
Damn. That’s a hard post to follow.
“renowned abrasiveness”? Wow, really? Like, er, who said that?
Yeah, in fairness, I heard that too. On the upside, with Messrs Yiannopoulos and Carr in tow, you’re coming across as downright statesmanlike.
I’ve only really come across Milo’s posts in the last week or so and, based on that, I don’t have a problem with him at all. I was very pleased to read his analysis. Thanks for going down there Milo.
I disagree – really informative article, thank you for going into the details in this and other posts.
I don’t know what they are claiming (I’m in U.S.) but given people’s accents & mispronounciation, I’d be surprised if human beings weren’t involved in transcribing voicemail messages. Hell, I can’t understand some of the messages people leave me given the speed with which people talk.
So, I can’t figure out why the use of human beings is so shocking. Is it because this contradicts Spinvox’s claims or because people really have worries about privacy?
“So what does that suggest? [...] Spinvox can only handle relatively simple messages spoken in quiet rooms.”
And that is in line with the actual state of the art in voice recognition. Outdoor cellphone calls will have no more than 20% match on known words. So it will always be a labour-intensive operation.
Which in itself is not a bad thing and you can still build a huge business around it. But this means you can only make a buck if you are going after rich consumers in North America and Europe for which the marginal cost of Spinvox will be negligible.
Liz – It’s because a) Spinvox says its essentially a tech company and makes great play of the fact it’s model scales as a result (so gradually needing less humans to process. And b) There were allegations entire voicemails were being listened to by humans, not machines – this appears to be the case.
I’ve been waiting for your perspective Milo and I wasn’t disappointed. Excellent and revealing post.
Agreed – very interesting post
Its an exciting idea, but the level of technology needed for this to be massively scaleable would be astounding I imagine.
For starters think of all the regional accents in the UK from Cockney to Brumy to Geordie etc.. then you have slang to take into account, slang itself varies from town to town.. hell even friendship groups use different slang and nicknames. I suppose they could use something similar to Google language translation where by you anaylyse the phrases not simply just the words in themselves and try to make sense of if. However that I assume would be insanely difficult.
So the question lies then in whether or not they can nail down these three areas to make the business profitable:
1. Tweak and fine tune the software to get a high enough percentage correct
2. Maximize the efficiency of the human involvement in the remaining untranslated voicemails
3. Charge a high enough premium per voicemail .
A premium which will provide enough margin against the cost of running 1/2 to be profitable!
Lets hope that they have nailed those 3 things down so they really are reaching breakeven!
Its a cool concept and I would love to see it succeed.
Neville Hobson’s AudioBoo note on Milo’s post:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/51632
As a user the service is amazing – really has made a massive difference being able to get voicemails sent immediately as an SMS for me.
£500k does seem a bit much to be paying a CEO in a pre-breakeven startup though – and how are they raising more money with no FD in place?
Hope they manage to sort things out as it really is a brilliant service that makes you much more productive.
Milo, you say you really wanted to ask questions like “Are your investors comfortable with your CEO being paid over half a million pounds a year?” but don’t explain why you didn’t. If you don’t ask the question it seems unfair to expect Spinvox to answer it. In fact, the way you’ve written this it seems to infer that they stopped you asking such a question, when I doubt that’s the case.
Also, you’ve stated more than once that Spinvox refuse to go into the extent of human involvement in transcribing messages, but you haven’t reported James Whatley’s repeated justification for that nondisclosure i.e. it would benefit their competitors. Whether that’s a viable excuse or not, you should at least mention it within the context of this article.
It’s not that they “stopped” us asking questions about the business; rather, there was no one in the room either qualified or willing to answer. We did ask a couple – for example, about investment and cash burn – but when Domecq left as quickly as she arrived it was obvious the remaining staff in the room weren’t going to go near them.
And that’s precisely what I meant when I wrote that this demo didn’t answer the big questions: it was a technical demo of the product, rather than a press conference about the business.
What I find interesting is that through out all this One Voice Technologies has been repeatedly bashed against the “Wall Street Rocks” In spite of having signed contracts with Telmex & MTNL and ongoign projects with Intel, Motorola,…
http://blog.onev.com/
Check out this link and click the Voice Search link on the left and the story gets even more interesting..
“We began with a short, simple message, read by Rob Wheatley himself and called in from his own BlackBerry. The system spat out a perfect text version in a few seconds. Next Wheatley left something a little more complex. A few sentences this time. Again, a perfect and speedy result.”
You must be joking. He is the guy who set up the demonstration, and he obvoiusly know the text in advance and so he could have easily cooked the demo in advance to spit out the correct words. Dah! Am I missing something?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
Domecq must be laughing all the way to the bank. She’s really pulled off a job here. And who were these investors stupid enough to fork out another 15 million after the first 100 million went down the drain? The mind boggles….
This is the sort of thing that can happen when you have no CFO and a well-paid CEO sitting on investor money:
http://gigaom.com/2009/06/24/the-strange-tale-of-wi-fi-startup-whisher/
Lets hope is not the case…
Well, that explains one thing I’ve always wondered about … why Telstra charges $14.95 / month in Australia for their “Speech2Text” service.
Funnily enough I have a different service with Telstra where a REAL PERSON answers my messages and sends me them as an SMS AND an E-mail. LOL
If some of the comments about human involvement from the Techcrunch Spingate (Facebook debacle) are true, they don’t deserve one more penny.
The service is cool, no doubt!
However, at what cost?
If some of the comments about human involvement from the Techcrunch Spingate (Facebook debacle) are true, they don’t deserve one more penny.
The service is cool, no doubt about that!
However, at what cost? If I have to ask myself, every time I receive a message, if the agent who transcribed it just got fired or missed another payday for some minor error, I’d rather listen to my voicemails…
Great article Milo – it clarified a lot of things for me
Dis. Aster.
Denny Craine!
Great post!
There’s clearly something wrong at SpinVox. CEO making $500k in a start up that needs to raise an additional $15Mon top of the $170M already raised. Please!
I smell fraud
Eric, here is a more better example of what can happen when you have no CFO and a well-paid CEO sitting on investor money:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS237962+18-Dec-2007+PRN20071218
Sound familiar?
Well, it sure beats me as to how anybody could invest more money with Domecq. And maybe that is the wrong angle to be looking from in this story or maybe it is the right angle? I don’t know.
We already know that Domecq is a fraud. She presented herself in England as a sucessful business woman from the States. The revelation of the Bankruptcy in White Plains NY, the stiffing of all the employees and vendors in NY, et al is enough to show that as a fact.
Now we have D2, The Brain, that is pretty much a flop. No Artificial Intelligence. No Voice Recognition of Billions of different people with thousands of different dialects.
Just people working in high tech sweat shops being bled to death for their labor and screwing them over as to pay, benefits, etc. all based on some reports that SpinVox refuses to certify or prove out. And if they complain too much, they shut them off.
Wonder where she is really getting this money? Since I have regularly posted every chance I could get against Domecq whenever her name appeared on any blog since 2002, I was at one point contacted by somebody looking for Michael Domecq’s hidden assets.
Feeling that was and is totally unfair to Christina to be painted with the *Sins of her Father*, and not knowing Mr. Domecq, there wasn’t much I could tell that person. . . .but now I wonder if they weren’t on to something.
Or she has pictures of some rich people with hippos. …or maybe she has recorded conversations of them from SpinVox?
There is no logic what-so-ever in anybody giving more money to SpinVox.
Love ya, Denny
Shirley Schmidt
Yiannopoulos: Are you familiar with the CMU SPHINX project? A project from Carnegie Melon University that supplies the core technology via GPL, but the engine has to be trained (sourceforge has the source).
Do you use Google Voice? I imagine they are using the same core tech. and it isn’t very good (my friends with southern accents are very poorly transcribed). TellMe and Nuance are chasing the same opportunity (Nuance recently acquired Jott, fyi).
There is some reasonable expectation that they would not publicly speak to the number or percent of calls that get handled by humans. That number (if there technology is any good) should drop considerably as they improve, and old numbers have a habit of sticking around.
At the same time Milo, you’ve done a very good job of introducing the ‘issues’ with the technology, and the info on the new funding round.
Was the new financing the reason for the demo? or was there something new they were trying to announce? Who raises a 15Million in this market when you are a month from break-even and near profitability? Unless they have HUGE plans for that 15 million in the next few months.
Milo, If Christina came into the room.. why didn’t you ask her about the salary question?
Without going and having a look, did you find this info from companies house returns?
Interesting piece though, thanks for sharing
Google Voice is going to make this roadkill.
I’ve always really respected TechCrunch but the way this story is being pursued on this site is making me question my judgement.
It seems Spinvox has taken the trouble to show you the way its system works, which anyone in the speech industry knows they have always been completely transparent about – it’s the key to the accuracy they deliver that no one else can achieve currently. Ron’s idea that Google Voice will make SpinVox `road kill` is ridiculous -it’ll have to make carriers globally road kill too and it’ll have to vastly improve its accuracy. I use both and Google Voice doesn’t come close. It too uses humans – all speech systems do – but not in the way Spinvox does, which they seem to have been happy to show you.
Milo’s right to be curious about how much human involvement is involved in any conversion but it’s the company’s key ratio which their competitors would love to know so why would they give that away? That’s business and I’m sure virtually every other company covered by TechCrunch have commercial secrets they don’t want to give away – have you asked Spotify to show you their code in case they have banks of people selecting your playlist? The fact is that they are supplying voice to text transcription right around the world though carriers and no one else is.
If readers really want to understand the issues around Spinvox they should read the thoughts of guys in the States who really know the speech industry, guys like Bill Meisel at Speech Strategy News, for instance or the industry analysts who follow speech.
And please stop with the personal slights in the editorial – it’s tedious and doesn’t tell me anything I need to know. It doesn’t seem to happen on the US site – is this a Brit thing?
I’ve always really respected TechCrunch but the way this story is being pursued on this site is making me question my judgement.
It seems Spinvox has taken the trouble to show you the way its system works, which anyone in the speech industry knows they have always been completely transparent about – it’s the key to the accuracy they deliver that no one else can achieve currently. Ron’s idea that Google Voice will make SpinVox `road kill` is ridiculous -it’ll have to make carriers globally road kill too and it’ll have to vastly improve its accuracy. I use both and Google Voice doesn’t come close. It too uses humans – all speech systems do – but not in the way Spinvox does, which they seem to have been happy to show you.
Milo’s right to be curious about how much human involvement is involved in any conversion but it’s the company’s key ratio which their competitors would love to know so why would they give that away? That’s business and I’m sure virtually every other company covered by TechCrunch have commercial secrets they don’t want to give away – have you asked Spotify to show you their code in case they have banks of people selecting your playlist? The fact is that they are supplying voice to text transcription right around the world though carriers and no one else is.
If readers really want to understand the issues around Spinvox they should read the thoughts of guys in the States who really know the speech industry, guys like Bill Meisel at Speech Strategy News ,for instance or the industry analysts who follow speech.
And please stop with the personal slights in the editorial – it’s tedious and doesn’t tell me anything I need to know. It doesn’t seem to happen on the US site – is this a Brit thing?
I think readers ought to know that when a CEO is asked why they are pulling a $846,000 salary in a pre-revenue company they react by bursting into a fit of rage. This is actually instructive to the story.
Where’s the bit about that though Mike ?
It does kind of seem like there’s way more inference and innuendo in this article than I’d have expected given they actually invited you guys in to meet them.
I support what I think this whole episode is trying to do – inject a bit of investigative journalism into proceedings. But this highlights the fundamental issue that blogs have never been particularly good at this, partly because just asking questions is a lot easier than actually getting the answers. And without those, it all gets a bit boring after a while.
I agree that they’re probably exaggerating the capabilities of their automated systems. But it’s not *that* much of a surprise. Short of sending Milo to Egypt to get a job in one of the call centers with a hidden camera (an awesome idea for which I want full credit), I can’t see there’s much more to be said.
Brilliant – he’s on a plane now. Expect a live Qik stream from Cairo shortly.
“It seems Spinvox has taken the trouble to show you the way its system works, which anyone in the speech industry knows they have always been completely transparent about – it’s the key to the accuracy they deliver that no one else can achieve currently.”
Um, no – they haven’t. I think that’s one of the points being teased out with all this media hullabulloo (well, until the last week or so).
If anything, they have gone out of their way to claim “full automation”, “it’s fully automated” and “humans only analyse extracts from the audio – single words or phrases the system can’t understand”. If you ever approached anyone from SpinVox at their stand (as I did, openly) or attended one of their presentations – that’s what you heard as the official line.
I’m all for marketing chutzpah and bravado – it goes with the territory. And God knows they have Marketing to DIE FOR!! (jealous? me? yes!!)
But this is the point – maybe they stretched the story on the speech rec side beyond credibility, and I think this is why there’s some focus on same in recent weeks. It’s been a reactive stance on this up to the time of the demos they did this week. I actually think those demos were ok – the problem is that they’re set against the context of what was said before, leaving people with the niggles.
Cheers, Sean (Dial2Do)
Milo, what happened with the other calls your fellow journalists put through the demo?
The same results as yours i.e zilch automatically translated to text?
What was Rob Wheatley’s explanation for this?
The system in English has had around four years to “learn” from the millions of calls supposedly put through it – did he talk on that subject?
From a 2008 interview of Domecq:
We went to our board and we asked to execute a land-grab strategy,’ she says. ‘What we proposed violated all VC type models as they prescribe organic growth. The view is that if you prove you can do it once and do it well, then you receive additional funding.
‘From our point of view, we had the absolute firm belief that voicemail to text as a singular product was simple and clear enough a proposition for mass appeal, and that we had the ability both technically and operationally to deploy it globally. To achieve our ambition, we knew we had to execute a land-grab strategy.’
http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/channels/entrepreneurs/business-leaders/327351/christina-domecq-seriously-connected.thtml
Absolutely legitimate pursuit of a story. Nothing wrong with the tone… what on earth are all the commenters bleating about?
The only surprise is that Spinvox seem to insist on making things worse with their partial transparency. If they aren’t going to be ’straight-up’ then maybe they should get Alistair Campbell on board to help manage the message.
The demonstration was a joke.
1. The demo did not support the CORE SpinVox claim that messages are “completely anonymised” to satisfy EU laws and address privacy concerns. SpinVox claims human operators never hear or see whole messages, but the demo showed the opposite.
2. The only messages that were automatically converted at the demo, according to your report, where messages that the CIO read into the system. Obvioiusly, to fake the demo, the system could have been trained to recognized his voice (and could have used Dragon software to do it) or the system could have been trained to recognized the specific words he was reading, or the entire demo could have simply been programmed to spit out the words that he was reading.
The text might be: “The little foxes destroy the vineyard”
Hey! Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?
Spinvox lawyers!
aaaaargh!
Thanks for the article and ensuing discussion TC. I’ve been wondering a lot about these guys because if the thing actually worked it could be fantastic for real time data flow into enterprise, and I was thinking about calling them to discuss bolting their service onto something I’m working on.
So I’ve been asking myself, ‘Are they actually building something real that is expensive but will crack it in the end, or are they just spunking money and poncing around?’
2 things came out of reading the article and comments. Firstly, ‘…. after five years of operation, after processing 130 million voicemails’, should have been answered straight up by someone saying something like ‘we know it’s taken 5 years to get where we are now, and it’s going to take another 5 years before we’re happy with the system’s performance’, or something like that. In a company of that size someone must have a handle on the development roadmap, and if not then they’ll have to be incredibly lucky to get there.
Secondly, when I read ‘….when a CEO is asked why they are pulling a $846,000 salary in a pre-revenue company they react by bursting into a fit of rage’, well that really tells the story about a founder who doesn’t give a crap about her company, and again that indicates they’ll have to be really lucky to succeed.
Well, at least you saved me a waste of time phone call…cheers
Shirley Schmidt-ho
Whispering in your ear
“Dennnnnyyyy Crrrrrrrane”
“Denny, please behave.”
Love,
Shirley
cf. Michael Maher’s comment above that “It [Google Voice] too uses humans – all speech systems do – but not in the way Spinvox does”
Really? Does Google Voice really use human agents for transcription or quality control (QC in SpinVox’s parlance)? I can’t believe that, and neither do others, e.g.
http://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/2693018398
Using humans is so… anti-Google. Google is such an automated/algorithmic company, which thinks about scalability at its very core, it is – to my mind – unthinkable that they would “do a SpinVox” here.
Two questions. First, couldn’t anybody do the Rob Wheatley demo using Dragon Naturally Speaking software on their PC? Second, this Wheatley dude, is he related to Whatley?
Christina Domecq is known for her fireyness – ask any headhunter/recruitment firm that has to deal with the staff churn!
Her salary does seem high, but that is none of my business. It is a matter for the Spinvox shareholders who can voice their opinion through the board.
I would also regard the percentage of machine translations a trade secret and none of my business. But I would reasonably expect Spinvox to be transparent about this in the Ts&Cs. Most of their business is B2B via MNOs – as a user I buy the service from the network, not Spinvox. It will be the network that is liable for breach of privacy etc.
I bet their account management team is racking up the air miles meeting with concerned operator customers!
CD took not just £500k but also had a Director salary look in Companies House. Is interesting that accounts are not filed for 2008.
Also has anybody asked who owns the QC houses? She owned one at least in Ireland. How much did that make.
Sounds like they are just clinging on to market share until their technology catches up…….. Sounds expensive! That CEO salary is crazy!
There is no need to do any investigative journalism, just ask a speech tech researcher :
1) How many public evaluations organized by NIST has SpinVox participated ? (None)
2) Follow up on DARPA GALE project and you know it is still far from having a fluent speech reco. Is SpinVox anywhere near the list of participants ?
3) They recruited Phil Woodland from Cambridge machine intelligence group. He hasn’t contributed significantly/breaktrhough in speech reco. Just marginal improvements.
4) I have closely watched another world-reputed professor from CMU faking the demo. I had to “adapt” the system to his speeches to the extent of making computer remember all his sentences. There is no research nor development.
5) As someone mentioned, most of the speech reco systems are using humans to transcribe and then train their systems on more data as there is a saying “no data like more data” in speech & language research.
yeah, those jokers from Cambridge Phil Woodland and Tony Robinson are in deep shit right now
Not even talking about Spinvox CEO – she is just following her wealthy father who was recently jailed for tax fraud in US
This time we are talking investor fraud…
But those institutional investors like GS and VC firms are fraudsters too – they wasted other people’s money on this gimmick without doing even minimal due diligence research into the subject
They get what they deserve
I can’t speal for the tech, but I went through tortuous interview process for spinvox about a year ago.
We’re not talking about a long, structured Google-like process, but rather 4 changes of job description (global -> Europe -> EMEA, back to global), 3 changes of hiring manager, and a company clearly riddled with middle management politics.
Nice offices though…
Enough guff about the burn rate, and the management style. It’s nice to see that the crunch hasn’t left everyone unable to throw good money after bad.
The questions I am interested in are these:
Have they broken UK Data protection law by passing personal data outside of the EU without consent?
If so, how have they been able to do this?
What is our Information Commissioner in government going to do about it?
There is a mountain of evidence that Spinvox is sending messages to locations like Egypt and Pakistan to be converted, and sending enough of the message for an understanding of its context and sender to be understood by the processor.
They shouldn’t be able to dodge these fundamental legal questions with cookies and cream blog entries – ’shucks, i’d like to kinda tell ya, but it’s secret’. If I was the Information Commissioner, i’d be seeking an injunction in the High Court to get these facts.
Hard to agree that “management style and burn” are not relevant regarding this tech hoax.
Domecq’s annual salary…over $850,000!!!! Are you kidding me?
How about a quick press analysis regarding how this compares to the salaries of other VC-backed, tech (or not so much tech) start ups in both the UK and US….love to see where the “media savvy, tremendously talented and experienced 31 year old”, Christina Domecq compares to other VC-funded tech savants!
Also it would be great to know what Doulton pulls in annually….I am sure it is on the upside of $500,000.
Additional questions:
1) What is the value of their “other” benefits…cars, staff (i.e. drivers, trainers, chefs, etc…), vacations/excursions, et al.
2) Who makes up the “compensation committee”? Obviously the CFO contribution is absent but who are the narcoleptic board members signing off on this thievery?
3) Has there ever been an independent audit of the Spinvox financials to ensure compliancy…at least with tax reporting laws at a bare minimum?
This is a WORLD CLASS fleecing, predicated upon the D2 technology, of investors (who have only themselves to blame), employees, vendors, probably the tax authorities and at some point customers…DO NOT let up on this sham…there might be shards of value within the company but the exec mgt team needs to be thrown out now!
I wonder if execs from Gizmondo are advising?
What the heck is D2 anyway ?
Is it Daniel Doulton or Domecq -Doulton ?
How come a pottery heir and paragliding salesman is now the chief and sole inventor of the VC-backed high-tech startup ?
Where are all the PhDs from Cambridge and MIT ?
Weird, to say the least….
With so many people being made redundant thisyear, did SpinVox follow the collective redeundancy process required by law when more than 20 people are at risk of redundancy during any 90 day period?