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Wireless - Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Vlingo Wins Product and Financial Backing From Yahoo!

The hot heat might be on Yahoo! but that hasn't stopped the company from doing deals with startups. Today Yahoo! announced that it would join a $20M series B round in Cambridge, MA-based mobile voice software maker Vlingo. The round included existing investors Charles River Venturesand Sigma Partners. The funding brings the company's total venture capital raised to $26.5M since it was founded in 2006.

Vlingo was founded by its CTO Michael Phillips who was a research scientist at MIT and also founded a speech company that was bought by Nuance for $220M. Its CEO is Dave Grannan who was GM of Mobile Email at Nokia.

As demonstrated in this video, Vlingo makes voice-enabled applications for cell phones that allow users to activate enabled text fields using only voice prompts, including notes to self, text messaging and e-mail.

At the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas Yahoo! Connected Life announced a new voice-activated version of Yahoo’s oneSearch mobile search engine powered by Vlingo’s speech-recognition technology.
The catch is that it can currently owned by used on the Blackberry. Try it here if you have the right hardware.

We like the application - a lot. It's getting scary trying to key in phone numbers when driving in traffic. It's only a matter of time before it's curtains. So we are looking forward to upgrading to the blackberry and using this.

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