Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category

Competition Time!

July 29th, 2008

Yes - that’s right, you heard me - and it’s as simple as making a phone call!

Basically all you have to do is call 0151 266 8283 (UK only) and tell us which accents you love (or hate) the most and why. Your message will then be posted directly to the brand new (and quite sexy) Moblog site -

We Love Your Accent

The best caller will win a brand-spanking new Nokia N82!
ROCK!

To be honest - that alone is a pretty awesome prize -but wait there’s more…

We’re also throwing in a year’s free subscription to both SpinVox and Moblog!

Yep. That’s right… MORE FREE STUFF!

What?! What’s that?
You want MORE?!

OK OK OK!

How about we chuck in 250 Moo cards too huh? Would that suit?!
Yeah?!

YEAH!

Awesomeness - Great prizes for a GREAT Competition - How’s that for a slice of fried gold? :)

That’s pretty much all you need -  but just in case - I grabbed the press release for you too - have a look see…

______________________________________________________________________________

Speech is one of humanity’s greatest gifts – but it has now been revealed that almost three quarters (73 per cent) of people in Britain don’t like the sound of their own voices.

Given the chance to change the way they talk, most Brits would prefer to sound like the Queen, whilst only one in twenty would like to speak Cockney.

The problem is at its worst in Birmingham. Brum, made famous world-wide by foul mouthed Ozzy Ozbourne, not only tops the league of regions where people dislike their own accents, it is also bottom of the league of voices other Brits would like to exchange for their own. Only one per cent of Brits would choose to speak like a Brummy.

Said Tony Robinson, SpinVox linguistic expert: “It seems Britain is being gripped by an epidemic of Accent Envy and Accent Self Loathing. After decades where dialect diversity has been celebrated, the majority of Brits now aspire to Received Pronunciation (RP) and to share the sound of their voice not only with The Queen but with celebs like Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.”

A poll* of more than 2,000 people around Great Britain, by voice-to-content company SpinVox, found that after the Queen’s accent, most Brits would choose an Irish accent, followed by Scottish.

When it comes to who actually does like the sound of their own voice, the Scots, Geordies and Welsh take the podium positions.

Overall the Queen’s English is the most popular accent in Great Britain.

Tony Robinson continued: “Accents are intricately tied into our own sense of identity. It’s interesting that those with distinct cultural or class identities are more satisfied with the way they speak and it’s precisely those accents that the rest of us want to acquire. The fact is that English as spoken in the UK is incredibly dynamic, precisely because of the regional variations in the way we speak - we are still seeing new words being added to our D2 system’s dictionary at the rate of thousands a week 70% of those words are not even contained in published English Dictionaries.”

Tell us your favourite accent and win!
We’d love to know what your favourite accent is and why, just call 01512668283 and tell us in under 2 minutes and our favourite call-in wins a Nokia N82, a years free subscription to Moblog, a one year free trial of the Spinvox voicemail service, and 250 free Moo cards of their choice!

Visit http://lovetheaccent.com to listen to the nations favourite accents and add your own.

http://lovetheaccent.com is powered by the mobile blogging site Moblog. Moblog lets you easily upload and share images and videos you record on your mobile phone, and even keep a voice blog using SpinVox.

`Voice-to-Content`, the process of automatically converting the spoken word into the written word is one of the fastest-growing telecommunications trends of 2008. In less than two years, SpinVox has converted over 50 million voice messages in four languages and on four continents, delivering them as SMS texts, emails, blogs or posts on social network walls and spaces.

GET CALLING!

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

Nom Nom Nom - What’s it all about then?!

May 20th, 2008

This past Sunday, May 18th, SpinVox sponsored the first ever Food 2.0 event -

Codename - “Nom Nom Nom

(we like that)

The Food 2.0 “Nom Nom Nom” event was the first ever Masterchef-esque event for the digital world.

Featuring 24 bloggers who like to cook food, review food, bake food, blog food, fry food, grill food, mix food, photo food… Nom Nom Nom was the place to be.

Basically anyone who had a passion for all things foodie and digi (digi-food?) came together to cook a three course meal, for four people, in just under (more like just over - ahem) two and a half hours!

And boy were they competitive! Yours truly was on hand that day and I can tell you, even though there was an overall feeling of camaraderie throughout the day you could almost cut the competitive air with a knife…

…see what I did there? “Cut it with a knife?” - And it’s a cooking event?! HA! Love it!

Blogging through SpinVox was definitely the ‘order of the day’ for me too

“This is my shopping list so I can read it later. Vine tomatoes, whole juicy cucumber, iceberg lettuce, two lemons, lots of fresh mince, need some red peppers, some kidney beans, some vegetarian mince I think. And some herbs. Some eggs.” - Spoken through SpinVox

…or maybe I should get it re-named to ‘Shopping List through SpinVox’, what do you think?

Nah. Doesn’t scan so well. Maybe not - :)

Anyway -
The competition for Food 2.0 is far from over.

The contestants now get judged on their overall content from the day.
So that’s foody photos, videos, blog posts… Everything!

All entries to be up by May 28th.

And hey, it’s all for a good cause too!

Keep an eye on The Official Nom Nom Nom Website for updates. More to follow here soon.

In the meantime…

Why not head over to the flickr page and feast your eyes…

(enough with the puns now please?)

…on some of the culinary treats that were made that day.

Also, keep your eye out for a very special, extremely limited…

SpinVox Speech Mobster: Chef Edition

———————–>

;)

Bon appetite!

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

SpinVox @ CTIA - A Video Round Up

April 16th, 2008

So I had this super duper, uber-fantastic CTIA blog post that I was just about to hit ‘Publish’ on…

…when all of a sudden this video lands on my desk.

Brilliant.

SpinVox @ CTIA - c/o our friends at Heist Projects - Cheers!

Tony Carter, it’s over to you…

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

Breaking news just in, SpinVox is…

April 14th, 2008

’nuff said.

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

SpinVox: “Rather Useful” says The Gadget Show

April 9th, 2008

Still recovering from the madness that was CTIA in Las Vegas, (more pics and stuff to come later today), can you imagine how happy I was to wake up this morning to an email from friend of SpinVox and all round nice chap, Neil Bird, from iGadgetlife.com:

Dude! Gadget Show! SpinVox! AWESOMENESS!

Well - something like that anyway… ;)

Anywhoo, Neil (the absolute star!) not only recorded the whole thing on his Sky+ (it’s the UK version of TiVo) but also uploaded it to the web for the whole world to behold!

Cheers Neil… And of course, HUGE thanks to The Gadget Show!

I don’t know - last week Radio, this week Television… Next week: The Internet!…no, wait!

;)

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

Friday Fun - Chinposin

March 14th, 2008

Happy Friday Folks… It’s Chinposin time!

Not sure what the hell I’m on about? Read the Chinposin blog!

It’s a Friday thing in the name of avatar rejuvenation…

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

SpinVox - LIVE DEMO!

March 13th, 2008

You MAY have noticed that aside from actually working for SpinVox and blogging for SpinVox and generally just being employed by SpinVox I am actually also a FAN of SpinVox!
Why?

Well - aside from it being just a BIT cool - it is also quite refreshing to have one of those services that just WORKS.

I know it’s a bit of an obvious one and all that but a lot people tend to ignore this one feature a lot of the time..

Anywhoo - the other day I was challenged to demonstrate the amazing power of SpinVox LIVE…

So I did.

And, thanks to our friends at Qik - here’s the results:

And if you can’t see the screen at the end - here’s a screenshot for you that makes it a bit clearer…

Screenshot Demo

I thenkyou!

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

The Latest Fashion Accessory

March 3rd, 2008

A SpinVox Speech Mobster… as modelled by Elle ‘The Body’ Macpherson ;)

Image c/o www.socialitelife.com

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

And we are back!

February 21st, 2008

Back from Mobile World Congress and back from Barcelona and back to the day to day business of turning voice, into text.

And WHY has it taken so long to update this here blog of ours?
Well… I can tell you. You MAY have noticed from the pictures that we had JUST A FEW little men - aka “Speech Mobsters” - on the SpinVox stand.

Two thousand of them in fact!

And behind those two thousand we had a further five hundred. Packed away all secretly like and ONLY given away to those folk who we REALLY liked ;)
Thing is - we kinda underestimated how popular this little piece of ’schwag’ would be and the poor little blighters disappeared in no time!
So as it turns out - word has got around that owning a genuine ‘Speech Mobster’ is cooler than a snowman’s cool bits - and my email inbox has literally been flooded with requests…

First they started out with the normal kind of thing - Where can I get one?
Then the demands of Whatley, you owe me Sonny Jim! You HAVE to get me one!
Finally to the scary I’ll swap you my Gran and a week’s worth of biscuits…

I’m sorry to disappoint folks. There are NONE left! Even the one that I had in my keeping got stolen from desk whilst I was in Barcelona last week, (nice huh?).
So listen, if you’re reading this and you got one of these:

You are one of the lucky ones.
Guard it well

If you *didn’t* get one of these but still consider yourself a friend of SpinVox - i.e.: You REALLY want a Mobster! - then I might have a way to get you one.
Basically I’m currently trying to pull every string possible to get another one into my hands.

Watch this space - when I do, I’ll make sure that the readers have this blog get a chance to win their very own Speech Mobster…

Until next time,

J

PS - Have you seen Mobby?

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

SpinVox @ Mobile World Congress!

February 12th, 2008

HALLO! …and HOLA!

(again)

From all of us at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona!

It’s been “GO GO GO!” since we started yesterday (hence the lack of updates - TOO BUSY!) but the SpinVox stand.. and everyone working in and around it, has been going fantastically well..

The best stand at the congress… I heard one person say.

And our Speech Mobsters are like gold dust - you only get one if you’re VERY special… ;)

I’ve been taking some photos around the stand and I thought I’d put them on here to share with you!

All comments welcome :)

If you’re at MWC - Why not come say Hi?

If you’re NOT at MWC - you can still get your message through by calling me, James Whatley on +447825798998…

Leave a voicemail and I’ll send the converted text message to the board in the pictures..

Now how’s THAT for a slice of fried gold?!

CALL NOW!

:)

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList