We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
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A report to be released from Goldman Sachs today will not only disclose some details about how the secretive firm operates and plans to change their operations in the future — as required by the Business Standards Committee established by CEO Lloyd Blankfein in response to the SEC lawsuit against the them — it "will disclose more about how it makes money," according to Bloomberg News. Of course, it will likely contain only a little bit of information to this effect, seeing as it is only 63 pages, most of which will likely be self-justifying defenses of their existing business model, and because Goldman doesn't give anything away that easily, especially not to "mollify their critics," per the Journal. If you really want to find out how Goldman makes money, you're going to have to look closely.
First, you're going to have to identify and decipher the secret code hidden within the paper, which will lead you to a map located underneath the floorboards of an out-of-the-way cabin, which will lead you to a musty castle in the basement of which sits a nervous owl with a capsule on its foot. The capsule, if you are lucky enough to soothe the owl long enough to remove it, will contain a password to a trap door, which, will lead you to an old but powerful woman who will ask you a series of questions, such as: "If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?" After that, you must pass through an area of extreme heat, an area of extreme cold, and swim 40 lengths through a pool full of Mischievously Tickling Goldfish. Only then you will find the secret, which will be some variation of the fact that the company buys stuff cheap and sells it for more money.
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