Have Your Voice Heard by G20 Leaders

This week sees leaders from all over the world convene in London for this year’s G20 Summit.
The G20, for those of you that don’t know, is laid out as an informal forum that promotes open and constructive discussion between industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability.

By contributing to the strengthening of the international financial architecture and providing opportunities for dialogue on national policies, international co-operation, and international financial institutions, the G20 aims to help support growth and development across the globe.

Topics high on the agenda for this year’s summt are tackling the worldwide recession that is affecting us all and of course, the more long term problem of climate change.

It goes without that these leaders will be locked away in their own meeting room, away from the public eye and behind a veritable fortress of security; so making sure your voice is heard will prove no easy task.

Fortunately…

SpinVox has teamed up with our friends at Moblog to help support the G20Voice project.
Fr this next part, I think I’ll hand over to Alfie Dennen, co-founder of Moblog and G20Voice supporter:

“The G20Voice project represents an amazing opportunity to give people around the world a voice that can be heard at the G20 Summit, and that’s where Moblog and our voice partner SpinVox come in.

Through the Spinvox voice to text service and Moblog’s mobile blogging platform, we are able to provide a service enabling people all over the world to simply call a local number to ask a world leader attending the summit a question. The technology converts the speech to text, and posts it along with the audio to the G20Voice moblog. All of the questions asked will be collated and the best of them will be asked directly of the world leaders to whom they are posed….”

There are 50 bloggers that have been chosen to attend the summit and they will be your voice. To ask the question that matters most to you, simply call the relevant number below and speak to the G20Voice directly:

• Canada:+15199629984
• France:+33177682327
• Germany: +49211237020865
• Italy:+390662207397
• Spain:+34951247227
• UK:+441613696823
• USA:+18314989119

Your message will be converted to text and, along with the audio, posted directly to the web for everyone to hear at the G20Voice website If you are accessing the site on a mobile device simply visit
http://m.moblog.net/voice

If you are in the following Latin American countries, your posts will be made to our Latin American partner site Bligoo, call the relevant number below to ask your question:

• Mexico:+525585256238
• ARGENTINA:+541150773167
• Brazil:+552140639557
• CHILE:+5626563916

The G20Voice project has already achieved so much; being able to bring 50 bloggers from around the world to the summit with press accreditation is a landmark event. People who would otherwise never be heard at the G20 Summit now have a voice, and for that SpinVox and Moblog are honoured to be a part of the G20Voice project…

Last week saw the 3rd annual ICA Figures of Speech Gala in association with SpinVox

The event saw several high-profile speakers take to the stage and spend five minutes (no more, no less) talking about the one thing that they could not live without, i.e.:

If your house was on fire and your family were safe, what would be the one thing you would run in and save?

The roll-call on the night included such luminaries as musician and campaigner Bob Geldof, journalist and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter and comedian and broadcaster Rory Bremner, along with musician, artist and writer Billy Childish; Inspirational Kids Company founder Camilla Batmanghelidj and contemporary artist du jour Ryan Gander.

And to celebrate the event I put the same question to my Twitter followers:

The answers came back thick and fast, mainly concentrating in and around tech – laptops, hard drives etc… but there were some really quite interesting ones in there too…

Take a look –

I’ve asked some of the guests who joined me on the evening of the event to write theirs up too…

What about you dear reader? Have a good, long think…
What one thing would you run in and save if your house was burning down?

What is the one thing that you cannot live without?

Answers in a blog post please

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Sunday just gone, I was sipping a cup of cocoa and half listening to the interwebz (as you do at the tail end of your weekend), when this came flying in over Twitter:

Friend and follower of SpinVox, Pat Phelan never checks his voicemail. Worse than that, he doesn’t even have use SpinVox Voicemail. Now, I’m pretty sure Pat has used SpinVox Voicemail in the past, but for some reason he doesn’t have it switched on right now.

This is not good.

See with SpinVox, your voicemails are converted into text and delivered by email & SMS directly to you, meaning thT you never have to worry about missing an important message ever again.

It’s simple; you set it, then forget it.

You want a case study? Easy.

With SpinVox, the voicemail left by the makers of Prime Time would have been delivered to Pat minutes after being left, and I have no doubt that it would’ve probably looked something like this:

Quick. Easy. Simple.

In fact, I wrote about this exact same thing back in July last year. I could have missed a speaking opportunity at a digital conference, but I didn’t.

Thanks to SpinVox.

This time around, Pat missed out on his chance to be on Prime Time. Hopefully he won’t again.
But I think he knows that already

Remember kids, use SpinVox, it could get you on TV

A week ago today, our friends at Porter Novelli invited yours truly along to its ‘Everything Twitter’ day to speak on behalf of SpinVox and explain how & why we use Twitter on a day to day basis.

The title we were given to work to was:

“Extending customer service and the Social Media perspective.”
- James Whatley, SpinVox

Freelance Journalist Guy Clapperton, ITV Web Editor Gary Andrews and a couple of Porter Novelli representatives (Matt Morrison and Nick Scargill), also spoke on the day, the former couple bringing their own take on using Twitter for business and the latter explaining the why, the what, the where and of course – the how… (although it must be said that both of SpinVox’s favourite Twitter tools – Ping.fm and Dabr – were scandalously overlooked)

Anyway, the overall aim of which was to aid and assist the attendees in understanding Twitter, what it can be used for and the pitfalls to look out for when taking your first early steps, something which I personally think was achieved fantastically well by all parties involved.

Covering everything from hashtags to hash-jobs, you can read more about the day itself, (as well as download a free copy of their official guide – pictured above) via PN’s very own write up which can be found on their blog.

In the meantime however, here’s the SpinVox presentation in glorious technicolor for your delectation:

Rife with imagery, the presentation itself tells you very little. So I recommend jumping over to the Slideshare page itself where you can view the above, but this time with notes (which makes the whole thing much more easier to digest).

Hope you find it useful and hey, if you get a moment – why not leave a comment and let us know how do you use Twitter?

For business purposes or otherwise…

As of 10am today (UK time) Skype users ALL OVER THE WORLD can have their voicemails converted into text via the magical wonder of SpinVox

WOOP WOOP!

So if you’ve got Skype, (and if you haven’t, why the hell not?)

Why not get Get SpinVox Voicemail too?!

I’ve just been handed a copy of the global press release so, if you’d like some of the more finer details, read on…

“SpinVox, the global leader in voice to content messaging and Skype, announces the availability of voicemail to text conversion for all Skype Voicemail users today. SpinVox conveniently converts voice messages to text in English, Spanish, French and German. The messages are then sent by Skype as an SMS text directly to a designated mobile phone for users to read.

Skype users can now benefit from instant ‘visible voicemail’, and never miss those important calls from friends or colleagues when they are away from Skype. Recipients of converted voicemail messages can listen to the full voice message by either signing into Skype or by calling their Skype To Go number . As well as being able to receive voicemail as text via SpinVox, Skype users may choose instead to receive voicemail notification via SMS or for free by email.

It’s easy for Skype users to set up voicemail to text from their account page, by simply registering a mobile phone number. Each voicemail to text conversion will cost €0.20/£0.17/$0.25 plus the cost of sending an SMS at standard low Skype rates. Additional SMS charges – a maximum of 3 – may apply depending on the length of the voicemail message.

All payments are made fuss-free through Skype Credit. Users have a choice to set a limit on the number of voicemail conversions received per day and to receive messages from people only in their contact list to help them manage their Skype credit. An email notification will be sent if that limit is exceeded. For more information please visit http://www.skype.com/go/voicemail-to-text.”

Awesomeness!

We’ve been working on this deal with Skype for some time now and it’s great to finally help bring SpinVox Voicemail to the masses upon masses of Skype users all over the world!

Skype have just hit publish on their blog too…  So, as I said at the start…

Skype Me Up Baby!