There must be something in the air this week.

We’re holding our hands up -
SpinVox fell over yesterday, and we’re sorry.

What happened?

Well, at around 4pm yesterday afternoon, a JCB/Digger managed to cut straight through one of our inward telephone number’s major fibre optics while doing some routine work in London.

What did that mean?

Any non-carrier based SpinVox customer in the UK, France or Spain, as well as any UK-based non-carrier service (such as the Ping.fm number for the UK) - experienced problems, errors and at times - complete failures.

What did we do?

Got onto it at once. The supplier of our inward line dispatched a team immediately to commence repair on the severed fibre optic. This resulted in some services being restored in a matter of hours. The full repair job finished a couple of hours ago now but anyone still suffering problems should contact us immediately on service@spinvox.com with details of the issue.

What didn’t we do?

We could’ve have done better at letting you know what was going on. We put the message out over some channels, Twitter and Get Satisfaction being two examples…

But we didn’t put anything up on here, on the blog - which should’ve been the first thing we did.

People were disappointed and upset and we agree, this wasn’t the right move and for that we apologise.

Our customers, our users and our community are all things we take very seriously here at SpinVox and as someone quite rightly pointed out late last night;

“Sometimes things go wrong. That’s when you should *really* be communicating with your customers. Not just the sunny days.”

We learnt a valuable lesson over the past 24hrs folks.
In future we will be better at this.

Fortunately this was a one off freak occurrence, so fingers crossed it won’t be happening again any time soon. I’ve been working here over a year now and I’ve never experienced anything like it - but hey you just never know.

Thank you also for the words of support and emails received. As I mentioned earlier SpinVox is now back up and firing on all cylinders.

If you have any questions about any of the above, please email me directly;

james.whatley@spinvox.com

Thanks

****UPDATE****

Everything is now up and running once again - details on the Ping.fm Blog
Thank you for all your kind words of support!

****UPDATE****

_________________________

The keen eyed out there amongst you may’ve noticed today that our friends at Ping.fm currently have a problem with their website…

In that it currently looks a look a bit like this:

Sean & Adam, the top dudes behind Ping.fm are working tirelessly to get this fixed and dropped me a note this morning to pass onto your goodselves… Sean, Adam?

Over to you:

The Woes of Uncontrollable Downtime

As many of you have noticed, we are currently in a state of technical ridiculousness.  We’ve had some issues regarding some changes and administration with our domain name (http://ping.fm), which has rendered our website unreachable by most of our users.  This is merely a setback caused by some miscommunication and a little bit of technical randomness.

We assure you that we are working around the clock to get this issue resolved.  We have been in direct contact with the big guns of GoDaddy and they ensure us of a quick resolution.  The stipulations with our domain TLDS (.FM) are most to blame for this.  Seeing as the domain has reached the status it has, it takes a little extra effort to get paperwork, policies and/or technicalities turned around.

For those of you wondering if we’re still a service, the answer is YES.  This situation is unfortunate, but is by no way our means to an end.  We are still hard at work improving our service and our users will see and benefit from this very soon.   You can help us out by telling the people feeding the “Ping.fm is no more” rumors that they are absolutely untrue, and in a very short span of time, will be clear to everyone as we bounce back from this.

In the meantime, our bots are up and running as normal in case you still need to get your fix.  If any more substantial delay is to be an issue, we will be looking for some temporary alternatives to get the service back and running full force.

Thanks for everyone’s concern and support as we deal with this and keep on the lookout for a resolution, as it is just around the corner.

Keep on Pingin!

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm

Thanks guys… As they point out it is merely the website that is currently experiencing problems.
The service is working just fine…

Hope that sorts everyone out,

We’ll be back with an update as soon as we have one.

Watch this space.

Whatley out.

Hallo folks - Tomorrow morning I will be here at the Rhein-Main-Hallen, in Wiesebaden, Germany.

Why am I going to be there tomorrow? Well aside from taking in some of the quite frankly BEAUTIFUL European, neo-gothic architecture that’s dotted around these parts… (really - it’s amazing)

…I’m also going to be attending the Voicedays Conference!

I say ‘Attending’ - what I actually mean is ‘Speaking’- Oh Yes!

Kinda apt is it not? World leaders in voice-to-text, at a voice conference… Speaking. Brilliant.

Anywhoo - look - there I am:

The swell guys from Voicedays invited me over months ago, well before the Summer in fact, shortly after I did a telephone interview with them about the power of turning voice into content. At the time I was all about blogging with my voice - having used it a number of times on my personal blog and having seeded the premise out to a number of my friends online (there’s a whole other post to be had on this one) the Voicedays folk were keen to get my input.

Things have changed since then mind… Social Media, Voice as Content, Messaging as Content, Content as Messaging… and then of course there’s the whole Hierarchy of Communication stuff too…

All of these thoughts are percolating around in my head nicely and well… I think I’ve put together a nice presentation for them. You wanna see?

OK. I’ll share it with you… The original thoughts and ideas were written down on post-it notes on my desk. What you’re about to see is the finished article… Have a look over it and let me know what you think.

It *might* lose a little without anyone to talk you through it - BUT - I promise to do a full write up of the experience before the end of the week… Deal?

Deal.
(would love your feedback)

Cheers

While Charlie Engle continues his trek across the US (last known location, Nebraska), back here in Blighty, Sir Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham starts his own marathon walk across the UK!

Beefy’s Great British Walk - Against Childhood Leukaemia

This year Sir Ian is walking across our great isle to raise funds for Leukaemia Research - passing through great British towns like Taunton, Windsor, Tunbridge Wells, Bury St Edmunds, Stratford-upon-Avon, Llandudno, Harrogate, Milngavie and Durham… aaaaaaaaand SpinVox’s own Gary Martin joined ‘Beefy’ on the Windsor stretch!

(That’s Gary up there on the left - with our Mobsters and of course, Sir Ian himself)

Nice one.

You can follow Sir Ian’s story over on his blog - where, funnily enough, he and his walking party have been live blogging through SpinVox… Nip over and check it out.

Me on the other hand? Well I’ve found myself trying to work out how many miles all these crazy people have been walking…

I mean, I’d hazard a guess that you could walk 51.5022 miles in a day, right? Which means…
Oh I don’t know. If I minus the nought, point one… carry the two, add the seven, divide by one and take the three.. er.. seven. Nope. Can’t do it. Rubbish.

Never mind.

Seriously though - Good luck to Sir Ian and his team and well done to Gary for taking part in the fund raising activities.

You make us proud dude!

Hey there ‘Voxers…

(yeah - I just said that)

How goes it? Good weekend? Work hard? Play hard? Good. Glad to hear it…
Me? I chilled out, relaxed had fun… But hey, that’s not why I’m here! Well, I *am* here to have fun, but I’m not here to tell you about my weekend. I’m here to tell you about Ping.fm

Here at SpinVox HQ, we’re a big fan of “Speaking Freely”, (you may’ve noticed), and with Ping.fm (say it), allowing you to update like, a MILLION places in one go… Speaking Freely TO EVERYONE kinda resonates nicely, (should that be ‘Ping Freely’ ? - Heh).

Taking that thought and expanding upon it, wouldn’t it be just a little bit cool if you could Ping… through SpinVox?

Well, now you can. If you’re a Ping.fm user already get yourself along to the SpinVox page, add your details, dial the number.. and start saying it with Ping through SpinVox!

…if you’re NOT a Ping.fm user, what are you doing!? Sign up now!

BTW - For the more cynically minded of you out there, you’re probably wondering where this leaves our current Social Networks through SpinVox service…
Y’know, surely setting up this Ping.fm integration means we’re kinda in competition with ourselves right?

WRONG.

SpinVox converts Voice into Text. It’s what we do. Enabling this for Ping.fm users just makes sense.